More Pie, Please: Using Growth Poles to Reduce Suffering

Now

It should be everybody’s dream to make the world a better place. A life lived only reacting is a life wasted. Taking charge and moving the world along should be the norm. Alas, it is not. Striving to end global suffering is even a rarity – we only care about our own back yard, about our immediate environment. Those of us in the Western world seem to be generally focused only on ensuring that we will not be personally inconvenienced. Yet, while you read this paragraph, a child somewhere died of starvation, a mother died in childbirth, and a previously healthy person died of a curable disease.

But there is hope. Things can be done. This is a story – not a dry academic text full of citations – about how the beginning of the end of global suffering could be achieved: we have almost all the technology, and we certainly have all the minds and all the funds. What is lacking? The will. Lack of will stems in part from lack of short-term financial profits and in part from unclear long-term gains. Empathy rarely changes this profit-driven behavior. What remains hidden to most is that ethically sound business – like today’s shift towards renewable energy – is financially smart business. At least, given sufficient time. However, profit is not the only thing that motivates people to help others. Curiosity, empathy, and willingness to develop ideas also play a role. It is not often one sees how a single disruptor can lead to massive changes practically overnight – changes that spread much wider than is immediately obvious. For instance, the same research behind electric cars leads to longer-lasting flashlights and batteries for off-grid electricity networks and new highly efficient solar cells make truly wireless security cameras and other wireless electronics readily available.

This ability for change to spread and affect adjacent industries is an example of the first mechanism that can help save humanity. Such spreading of development is practically inevitable, and it is true geographically as well. This idea is generally referred to as the growth pole phenomenon – a theory developed in the 1950s by Francois Perroux. It says, very basically, that development doesn’t occur equally everywhere at once. Future development usually takes place close to previous development. This has been shown over and over again. For example, a modern subway system was built in Ethiopia and shortly afterwards, Ethiopian Airlines was one of the first customers for Boeing’s new Dreamliner. Cause and effect? Causality might be difficult to prove, but fully unrelated they are not.

The second mechanism is significantly more difficult, but not exactly for the reason you might think. We must empower the whole population, primarily women. There are strong forces opposing this. Primitive thought, stemming mostly from religion, finds it somehow threatening to stop treating women as second-class citizens. Women without hope seem to fit perfectly into many religiously based societies. However, when women aren’t empowered in a society, that society is effectively using only half of its resources (in this case, people), which does not seem to be a winning concept.

The core idea presented within this book is to select a suitable region, fabricate a growth pole quickly, and simultaneously empower women. Through these mechanisms, along with smart planning and even smarter execution, the selected region will quite likely see drastic, even life-altering, improvements. Some of these changes will be immediate, while some will start slow but grow immense with time!

I realize that some parts of my plan are naive, and I do assume a lot. On the other hand, much of this can be done today, and some effects are better than none. A mobile water purification plant and some diesel fuel deployed today could save lives! (That is a literal statement. With a machine that already exists and readily available fuel, people currently dying of thirst or giving birth without clean water will survive. Today. Now.) In fact, money enough for hundreds of such water purification systems is already being spent on things like a trip to Mars and devastating wars in developing countries. Opening a commercial route to Mars is noble and may in the end be necessary for the survival of our species – but spending billions on inter-planetary travel is a bit hard to swallow when several million children under five die yearly of diseases for which we found the cure ages ago and of imminently solvable problems like starvation and thirst.

One of the major challenges facing this plan, as with most efforts to change the status quo, will be the potential for violence wherever we decide to try it. Many of Earth’s poorest regions are also the most war-torn. In many areas, the only technically sophisticated machines that are widely available are designed to kill human beings. As I see it, this can be tackled in one of two very different ways: we can rent the French Foreign Legion and make certain they always fire first, saving humanity with fear, as it were. Or, infinitely more likely, we can enter the area chosen for this experiment completely unarmed. We would begin by speaking to tribal elders, locals, and even leaders of opposing military factions. We would explain in detail exactly what will be done, and where, and hear and incorporate their opinions. Local inclusion in all planning is critical. Then, perhaps we begin with a low-risk campaign of kindness through which we soften up the population with some weeks of daily air drops of food and water and basic hygiene equipment like soap and toothbrushes. Shock and awe, but in reverse.

A second major challenge is the different ways people experience and expect fairness. First, we cannot claim that this or any