Working Draft

Comments on Bruce Koppel’s "Fixing the Other Asia," Foreign Affairs, 1-2/1998

From the attention paid to it, infection by the Y2K bug might seem to be humanity’s most important failure in preparing for a smooth transition to the next millennium. Far from it. Indeed, the most important failures are actually those most masked by a Y2K Weltanschauung. Perhaps the most shameful infection we are perpetuating is what we might call, after Koppel, the "other bug," the Y2B, the two billion people who will enter the millennium in what can only be called abject poverty.

Personally, I still find it difficult to take a thousand-year perspective but do find it useful to examine how we and our parents and grandparents have handled the last 100 years. What credits and deficits did we inherit from the last century? Which credits have we preserved and enhanced? Which deficits have we failed to handle or deepened? For what new deficits and credits are we responsible? All in all, what is our net bequest to the next century?

It is clear that we have some bequests about which we can be modestly proud. A much larger fraction of the world’s governments operate reasonably democratically, for example. For another, we seem to have put the world on a course that will bring population stability next century, although sooner would have been better. We have also created and apparently solved major problems within the century, the threat of global thermonuclear war being most prominent. Although the full threat seems, miraculously, to have truly ended, we do bequeath some dangerous and dirty remnants. We have made other major mistakes (Versailles) and learned from them (post-WWII reconstruction of Axis powers).

Some deficits we bequeath are ones we inherited. The ethnic strife appearing worldwide is probably no greater than ever existed, and, arguably confined to a smaller number of people than in 1900. Its continued vehemence and our failure to have institutions in place to deal with it effectively, however, highlight a true deficit.

Our environmental bequests are mixed. Knowledge and awareness of humanity’s impact and dependence on Earth’s natural systems has burgeoned. Success at conceiving and implementing needed constraints on activities and changes in values lags considerably, however.

Koppel notes that some observers point to our record on poverty as representing progress because the abject poor are a smaller fraction of the world’s population now than before. Humans, however, are not ants or neurons living as indistinguishable integrated components of a greater whole in which the morbidity of millions is acceptable as long as the percentage is low. Secular humanist and religious traditions teach something much different--worth and salvation are accounted at the individual level. On a more practical level, it is difficult to see how the suffering and tragedy of a desperately poor family is lessened if there become two instead of one other non-poor family somewhere in the world. Indeed, one might argue that individual suffering and its public shame actually increase with an increase in numbers of those not so burdened.

From this perspective, we are not only failing to reduce the debit bequeathed to us but are passing on a larger one. There will be more abject poor in the world on Dec. 31 1999 than existed at the start of the century, or indeed at any other time in human history. Koppel’s "Other Asia" makes up the majority of all the "Others" that together are the Y2B. The Y2K bug may cause a few temporary discomforts for the non-poor, but the ongoing discomforts and worse experienced by the Y2B will largely remain unaffected.

As Koppel argues, the primary cause of failure to decrease the Y2B has been widespread neglect to develop social capital, i.e. to invest in health and education. The statistics document our disgrace, for example in educating women in South Asia. At the end of the millennium, after half a century of independence, India will still have been unable to bring more than one-quarter of its rural women to the stage of primary literacy. What a scandal in the world’s largest democracy.

Even more egregious perhaps is our record on childhood vaccination, a cheap and effective remedy with few if any special interests lined up against it. Although progress has been made in many regions, we are going backwards in others. It seems astonishing that we will probably enter the next century with nearly 5% of global ill-health still accounted to failure to vaccinate. This is larger than the burden from AIDS, TB, malaria, tobacco, heart disease, or cancer, for example. With these latter diseases, we at least have some excuse--knowledge of effective widespread prevention measures is somewhat limited. Not so with vaccination against the common childhood diseases, where all we seem to lack is the will.

The end of the millennium has engendered in some quarters a discussion of our responsibility to the future. Should we not, it is said, resist standard decision making techniques with their inherent discounting of future costs and benefits? Zero or even negative discount rates may be needed, for example, to deal effectively with such long-term threats as climate change.

Valuable as critical discussions of discounting the future might be, like the Y2K bug they tend to draw attention away from a more severe problem--the even stronger discounting we routinely accept in space. Temporal discount rates above a few percent per year tend to make events even only 50 years hence disappear nearly completely from consideration. In space, however, we live with huge discounts by comparison. Using the difference between Mexican and US government per capita funding for health and education as the measure, for example, we effectively discount the plight of the Mexican poor at a rate of about 1% per 10 km. It does not take too many kilometers to put them out of mind entirely.

Put another way, even under the most extreme failure to consider the future, the people of the US could not find themselves in fifty years in the situation of the people coexisting in Sudan today. We may have a "defective telescopic facility" for looking into the future, but it is clear and long-sighted compared to the one we use to look next door.

Koppel rightly points out that it is a serious disconnect that the growth of literacy in some Asian countries is far less than the growth in the economy. By its definition, literacy grows only by including new groups, i.e. by extension in social space. The economy, however, can, and too often does, grow by intensifying in those already well off. The "other Asia" is not participating.

Koppel makes a compelling case that the lessons learned about how to achieve economic growth with equity, participation, and balance in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia seem to have been lost in the Southeast Asian (Visa) gold rush. He argues that the recent economic crash was not only due to corruption and lack of regulation, but also to systematic failure to create the conditions such that all in society could participate. He tells us that in order to look forward with confidence we must look around with compassion.

Which is just what he has been eloquently and persuasively showing us how to do in this paper as well as in his other writings for the last quarter of the century. I hope we can learn to take this corpus to heart before another quarter century ends to find Y2B still with us.

"Kirk R. Smith" <krksmith@uclink4.berkeley.edu>