Beer Island

I'm currently sitting in an internet cafe above the train station in ZZ waiting to catch my train to Qingdao, home of China's most famous brewery. The city is also home to some supposedly nice beaches and colonial architecture from when it was part of the German concession. Mostly I'm going to get away from the college for a long weekend. Some incomplete thoughts I've been having recently, in many cases influenced by a book G and G sent me on the moral concequences of economic development.

I tend to agree with the book's basic premise that people tend to be much happier to liberalize society when they seem to be getting ahead. In fact, as the author, who's name I can't currently recall, points out that people's attitudes tend to be much more affected by the changes in their economic status than its level as such. This seems to bear out quite well. He points out that when people are more likely to look at what they have compared to what they used to have or what they have compared to their neightbors than they are to simply look at what they have when assessing their prosperity. This has some good concequences, it also has some negative ones. I think most of these are fairly obvious. One thing that I have noticed in China, which was also pointed out in the book, is that people's "neighbor's" is a loose concept which is growing to encompass much more than the peopel that live next door. In fact, people increasingly judge their wealth relative to people in other parts of the country, or even in other parts of the world. This phenomenon creates some really interesting nonsense in China in that the middle class here, and often the wealthy as well, do not consider themselves middle class. Why not? Because to them middle class does not imply the people around the median income for China, it means the middle class that they see in America. So they are not middle class until they have a 3-bedroom house and two cars, which in China is in fact rediculously wealthy. This strikes me as a problem.

Pursuit of economic growth does seem to me to be a worthy goal in general. In particular, this has taken a form in my mind that implies technological progress. I have developed a bit of a fetish for technological progress recently because increasingly I think that advancing, rather than voluntarily scaling back, technology will better solve environmental problems. Oil, in particular, is a big environmental and political problem that can be greatly reduced or eliminated if the right advances are made in science and technology. Alternative fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen cells, alternative fibers (to replace plastic), alternative sources of heat and electricity are all somewhere in the development pipeline. Clearly further focus on technological development in general, and especially a focus on these will be of great environmental benifit in addition to boosting the economy and (according to Moral Concequences) further the liberlization of society. Am I wrong in viewing this as such a panacea?

One thing that China has made me much more scheptical of, however, is the converse of Moral Concequences thesis, the somewhat more frequently stated concept that economic progress and functional capitalism is imposible without a liberal democratic government. It remains to be seen weather China can emerge as a real economic power beyond just a big producer and market for cheap things, but thus far the government is certainly not becoming any more liberal than it needs to be based on the largely political demands of its trading partners; changes in its politics have yet to be spurred very much by economic demands.

As a final teaser, I'd like to advance my theory that people's political stance is based as much on their sense of aesthetics as it is on any consistant moral or economic position.