Posted on 01/19/2004 6:32:53 AM PST by Dr. Marten
Peter Zhang
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 19 January 2004
Some Westerners, specially those with a distinct greenish hue, just cannot abide the thought of China raising its living standards to Western levels. They claim that Chinese growth will accelerate deforestation, degrade the environment and deplete natural resources. These are the same people who claim "people are a plague", when they really mean there are too many yellow, brown and black people for comfort their comfort.
Ross Gittins, economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, is one of those economists who thinks that the "attack on economic growth on the primacy of ever-increasing production and consumption of goods and services is an attack on materialism" (It's silly, dangerous and coming to a head, June 30, 2003).
No, Mr Gittins, it is not an attack on materialism, whatever you mean by that: it is an attack on the aspirations of the poor and their welfare. And claiming, as you do, that growth is "chewing up natural resources," cannot conceal that wretched fact.
Gittins asks us whether "we really believe the environment could withstand 2.3 billion Chinese and Indians attaining a material standard of living even remotely approaching that of the West?" The answer is an obvious yes, at least to those who know what they are talking about.
Sanitation, land degradation and air and water pollution are the usual targets of what Brookes' economics editor scathingly calls the green Herrenvolk. I am not suggesting that there is no pollution in China or even that it is under control, only that there is no need to panic and there never will be so long as genuine growth prevails. It is time to remind people that compared with the West, China is starting from a very low base and therefore needs time to catch up.
To us, the greatest pollution problem facing China is mass poverty. When rich Western environmentalists like Clive Hamilton, director of the Australia Institute, and their fellow travellers in the media urge Third-World peasants to forgo the benefits of growth that these Westerners take for granted, they are actually trying to impose sacrifices on those who can least afford make to them. And I find that despicable.
Countries that have not accumulated enough capital to raise most of their peoples above the subsistence level have not sufficient capital for abundant clean water, or modern sanitation. To try and impose Western level environmental standards on them, for instance, is an act of green callousness masquerading as environmental concern.
Capital is particularly scarce in this part of the world and huge amounts of it would be necessary clean up the environment. But what escapes many people is the obvious realisation that the environment is a consumption good, just as food or clothing is. But hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants do not have the luxury that Westerners enjoy of being able to choose between a cleaner environment and a marginal reduction in the production of consumer goods.
Such a choice can only come into existence when a society has accumulated sufficient capital so that the flow of consumer goods will reach the point where they will significantly raise the relative value of the environment so that more of the latter will be demanded.
I am not suggesting that Chinese pollution should go unchecked, only that it should be put in its proper historic, economic and social perspective. People should be given the choice of deciding on how much pollution they are prepared to initially accept in exchange for an increase in real incomes.
As the economy accumulates more capital and real incomes consequently rise, people will be able to afford a reduction in the rate of flow of tangible consumer goods in exchange for improving their local environment.
Regardless of what some people have claimed, growth does not mean ravishing the environment. But what good does it do people to have, by affluent Western standards, a cleaner environment when they cannot even afford sanitation, decent housing, adequate food or medicines? Most Westerners do not realise that their own societies went through a similar phase of heavy pollution during their nineteenth-century "take off" phase. I have to thank my economics editor for being good enough to draw my attention to Chateaubriand's impression of London as he approached it from Blackheath in 1822:
"...I saw before me the immense skullcap of smoke which covers the city of London. Plunging into the gulf of black mist, as if into one of the mouths of Tartarus, and crossing the whole town, whose streets I recognised, I arrived at the [French] embassy in Portland Place".
Shanghai and Shen Zhan, for all their faults, are sparkling examples of environmental purity compared with nineteenth-century London the capital of the world's then-richest country and most powerful country. Yet today London is one of the world's cleanest cities with a far bigger and vastly richer population then it had in the time of Chateaubriand.
Sustained economic growth made this possible, and just as it succeeded for London and other Western cities and towns it will eventually succeed for China's cities and towns.
Gittins claimed that China is chewing up resources is just plain wrong. Our economics editor has pointed out that not only is economic growth a resource-generating process, natural resources are, from a human perspective, inexhaustible, just as energy is. What is really scarce is capital and entrepreneurship.
I have to thank Gerry Jackson, Brookes' economics editor, for causing me to focus on the vital role of capital as the material means of production, and entrepreneurship as the driving force of a progressive economy.
Growth, greens and living standards
Green economic blueprint is a recipe for tyranny
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Give me taxes without representation
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Instead of everything else.
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