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-----Original Message----- Sanders Research Associates
Issues & Answers
-Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine It may have been James Gleick who said we don’t just measure
patterns, we have to map them. I want, in a small way, to do just that by
comparing the data between 20 differently representative countries to construct
a tentative hypothesis that follows Hornborg’s assertions above. Hornborg
is particularly concerned with the environment – as we’d all better
be before it’s too late – but I’d also like to think about
mapping energy, money, and the military against a number of other social
indices, and even attempt a few creative calculations to stimulate the
development of predictive models in the areas of class and gender mapped onto
the world system. Source: BP Statistical Review A more encompassing theoretical
framework Robert Biel, Malcolm Caldwell, and other social critics have argued
that systemic crisis has an impact on culture, ideology, financial exchange,
social production, social re-production
(emphasized by the left-feminist critique), and physical
“resources”. All have argued that former empirical categories of
study conceal more than they expose about social reality. What is needed is the
merging of several social theories into a more complete socio-ecological
theoretic framework. It is clear that the underlying demand for energy is the basis for our
current global and imperial conundrum – perfidiously called the war on
terror. Our leaders seem to lack the interpretive tools to understand its rapid
acceleration. That is why maps such as the one above can be so valuable. They
help us visualize. This gives us a strong impression of the actual
‘metabolic’ flows of the current world system. The interplay of forces Economic evolution has forced systemic changes. We need only look back
to the post-WWII era to see them broadly. Keynesianism predominated after the
war in the core states. When social forces undermined Keynesianism, a period of
crisis and stagnation ensued followed by the development of new elite
strategies that came to be known as neo-liberalism. The warning bells went off
with the 1998 Asian meltdown and the subsequent dotcom bust which demonstrated
the instability of financial speculation. The absence of bipolarity in the
aftermath of the Cold War created a single dominant core nation that has come
to openly resist the multilateralism of the former system, which it perceives
as constraining its ability to act unilaterally.
Ecological crisis In step with development, ‘resource’ depletion is creating
an incipient crisis that will likely trump other crises decisively within the
next generation. This is not solely about energy depletion but embraces the
destruction of fisheries, soil depletion and salinization, deforestation, the
draining of fresh-water aquifers, carbonization of the atmosphere and resultant
climate change. But the apparent cause of many of these problems, the use of
fossil fuels, is absolutely central to the operation of the global economy as presently
organized. This is an excellent example of physical power appropriating space
and time in a specific way to advance an agenda that is necessarily parochial
in its objectives. As Hornborg points out, there is an entropic dimension to
all this. In fact, “entropy is profitable,” as Robert Biel has
noted.1 It’s
just that not everybody profits.
Minorities in the African
In addition to these disparities is the grossly unequal incarceration
rate for blacks.[3] Even in the Source: US Census Bureau So in a real sense, the old American Communist Party thesis about a
black nation in the Black Belt, which is clearly depicted in the former
plantation areas between Native First Nations (American Indian) populations, on the other hand, as
shown below, reflect both the generalized destruction of these nations that
formerly populated the continent and the official drive to contain and shrink
their living spaces. Source: US Census Bureau Hispano-Latinas Hispano-Latinas, while not monolithic, are shown to be both the
populations that remained after the If one then looks at a Source: US Census Bureau New indices to create a framework for
analysis This digression into the internal core-periphery dynamic of the Sources The following data was derived from the 2004 CIA World Factbook, and from the Earth Trends
Searchable Database. At the very beginning, it is important to note that many
of the economic figures are based on arbitrary and sometimes misleading
criteria. For example, unemployment figures in the With that caveat, this data is presented as a first step in mapping the
spatial economic patterns suggested by Hornborg in my opening quote. Some
listings combine two criteria, and some are mathematical manipulations of data
that, while not achieving or pretending to a high degree of scientific rigor,
nonetheless are very suggestive.[4] Selected countries The twenty countries selected for this sample are arbitrary and
intended to represent a variety of geographical, economic, and political
circumstances.[5] Table 1 Population (2004 - figures rounded to nearest 100,000)
Energy consumption per capita These data are listed in metric tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) but
represent all forms of primary energy consumption. The following map shows oil
export flows as a means of reinforcing the global north-south divide in
patterns of consumption. This per capita energy consumption index may be the
closest thing we have to determining actual material benefits accruing to or
being lost by nations in the world system. Having said that, it is important to
note that there are a range of variables that skew these results such as
heating required in colder climates; dependence on personal automobiles (as in
the US); fragmentation of industrial production; and mechanized agriculture.[6] As with all nationally aggregated data, these averages cannot account
for disparities of consumption, income, etc., or the varying severity of class
stratification; nor does it account for how much energy is consumed personally
as opposed to industrially. This last point is particularly significant in Table 2 Per capita primary energy consumption (MTOE)
Note, now, the export flows of oil as the predominant primary energy,
and we begin to see how mapping clarifies the disparities of world consumption. Per capita GDP of sample The correspondence between per capital GDP and infant mortality is
particularly striking. While there is a loose but consistent relation between
higher per capita GDP figures and lower infant mortality, the reverse is
startlingly true for one country: The other anomaly, not quite as glaring until one realizes that the Table 3 Per capita GDP of sample
*Infant Mortality (per 1,000 live
births) The Goff Index “Poverty lines” are politically fraught constructs,
frequently established by criteria well below actual incomes required for basic
necessities. They also vary from country to country. Given the wide variances
in the costs from one society to another, no figure will be exact. Nonetheless,
bearing these limitations in mind, these figures retain some residual value.
Let us combine the per capita GDP (that reflects the degree of economic stress
on a nation’s working class) with the public debt as percentage of
national GDP. By multiplying the two we arrive at what I immodestly call
the Goff Index.[7] It is a suggestive index only, and one
that tries to highlight where disparities of wealth will become sharper. Table 4 The Goff Index
The Abner Index As long as I am attempting a new index, I will throw in the Abner
Index, using another family name since this is a family matter. That is, the
family or domestic economy is connected to but in many ways distinct from the
financial, production, and exchange economies.
When greater levels of unemployment are combined with systemically low
per capita GDP, we can reasonably expect the burdens placed on women to be more
onerous. Imagine the Haitian housewife. She has no washing machine. She has no
electricity, nor, for that matter, running water. The ability of people in a
society to survive on as little as two dollars a day (unimaginable in the US of
A) is based directly on this lack of development. This goes a long way toward
explaining the connection between underdevelopment and the throw-away price of
labor that corporations seek in the third world. The Abner Index requires two steps. First, I have reverse ranked per
capita GDP to assign a higher value to lower PC-GDP. In other words, a PC-GDP
of $1,000 or less gets a value of 40, $9,001-10,000 gets 31, all the way up to
$40,000, which gets a value of 1.
This corrects for the inversity of higher PC-GDP as indicative of
social privilege and higher unemployment figures indicating social
disadvantage. I then multiplied the assigned PC-GDP value by the actual
unemployment rate to get the Abner Index number. A higher AI number should
theoretically correspond to a higher proportion of social stress being borne by
the women in a given country. This calculation will be sharply skewed in some
respects by the customary gender division of labor in each society and by the
legal status of women. Table 5 Abner Index
Moving from the reproductive to the productive stratum, we can look at
industrial production growth rates for each country. To spot the anomalies, we
need to look at the financial stratum as well, before returning to energy
consumption patterns, current accounts, and military spending. The first
comparison in Table 6 below is between the industrial production growth rates
for 2004[9]
and the external debt of each country. This is followed by external debt per
capita and finally the per capita external debt as percent of per capita GDP.
The last figure is an app roximation of the individual burden of each
country’s citizen. Table 6 The citizens' debt burden
Debt and military spending The Christian Science Monitor
estimates that the actual military spending tab for US citizens is
approximately $800 billion a year and rising. So on the military spending
numbers below, I will include two figures for the
The columns in table 7 represent the following:
We might note that military spending that breaks the 3% threshold of
p/c military spending as % of p/c GDP is a red flag for the militarization of a
society. Whether this is a core over-developed or peripheral under-developed
state will generally determine whether that militarization is intended for
foreign operations or internal population control, civil war, etc. Also note
that low numbers in the last category that correspond to a high Goff Index
might indicate a higher probability for the success of social rebellions in the
event of an economic-political crisis. Table SEQ Table \* ARABIC 7 The real costs of military spending
With the exception of the Another note is that countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia, who
largely export petroleum, have been given a current account bump by high oil
prices in 2004 – and conversely, those high energy consumers are facing
the greatest threats of economic disruption and stagflation from energy price
spikes and interruptions. I will close with the suggestion that we think about how to combine the
view of the world economic system as an unequal appropriation of time and space
with “standpoint theory” where we assume a different standpoint
within the system to view relations of power. These heterodox ways of
‘seeing’ might shed light on questions which have hitherto enjoyed
immunity from mainstream scrutiny. Robert Biel suggests, for example, a case
study of the Enron debacle where derivatives trading, physical energy,
international relations, and political economy came together in a kind of train
wreck. This article is merely an invitation to enter into a discussion on
these questions that beg our collaboration.[10] [1]See [2]It is important to note here that the inter-national
mapping indices below do not account for internal contradictions for each
country, and in particular they fail to account for the core-periphery dynamic inside the [3]According to Human Rights Watch: The disproportionate representation
of black Americans in the [4]The author hopes that others will consider
ways of refining these data and indices to move them from the realm of
suggestion into the realm of evidence. [5]Census figures are variable in reliability
because in the more underdeveloped nations scientific census is not possible.
Similarly, in the [6]What is not represented here, and further
distorts the data is a factor like food consumption, which does not show up as primary energy. Energy inputs into Mexican
agriculture, for example, will be counted in [7] While I fully acknowledge that some readers
will see this as an absolutely arbitrary exercise, please accept that I
propose this as a tentative first step in finding a way to measure regressive
tax burdens on national working classes. [8]See Hartsock: Marxian
theory holds that accounts of power based as the level of circulation or
exchange provide inadequate accounts of systematic domination and inequality.
In contrast, Marx argues that the social relations of capitalism generate two
epistemological systems, the one at the level of appearance, and rooted in the
activity of exchange, the other at the level of real social relations, and
rooted in the activity of production. Yet if the institutional structure of
human activity generates an ontology and epistemology, and if the activity of
women differs systematically from that of men, we must ask whether epistemology
is structured by gender as well as class. If the reality of systematic class
domination only becomes apparent at the epistemological level of production,
what epistemological level can allow us to understand the systematic domination
of women?I argue that the domination of one gender by another can only be made
visible at a still deeper level, an epistemological level defined by
reproduction. Thus, rather than argue, with Marx, that reality must be
understood as bi-leveled, I am suggesting that it must be understood as
three-tiered. And if at the level of production, as Marx argues, one can only
see the real relations between human beings but also understand why theories at
higher levels of abstraction fail, then at the level of reproduction we should
expect to develop not only a more comprehensive account of the totality of
social relations but as well understand why it is that neither the level of
exchange nor the level of production provides an adequate and complete
epistemological ground for the theorization of power. Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 1985. Money, Sex, and Power. Northeastern
University Press, 7-8. See also Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy
and Accumulation on a World Scale. Zed Books, 35. For the
impact on women in the underdeveloped world, [9]Note
that these are transient and do not perfectly reflect long term trends in
industrial growth. [10]Here are the links to the country overviews
in the 2004 CIA World Factbook. I
include with each the life expectancies in each country as a final index of
global disparity: Life
Expectancy Japan
81.04 http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ja.html United
States
77.43 http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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