Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [146]
CQ: Yeah, but crisis recovery isn’t profitable, so what’s your point?
PC: My point is there’s an immense amount of capital, looking to invest in new production! Because capital accumulation really works, at least at first, but it works so well it fulfills every necessity for a target population, and then every desire, and so it stops growing so fast, and without maximum growth you can’t get maximum profits. So you need to find new markets. And so, this has been what has been going on for the last few hundred years, capital moving from product to product but also from place to place, and what we’ve got now as a result is hugely uneven development. Some places were developed centuries ago, and some of those have since been abandoned, as in the rust belts. Some places are newly developed and cranking, others are being developed and are in transition. And then there are places that have never been developed, even if their resources were extracted, and they’re pretty much still in the Middle Ages. And this is what globalization has been so far—capital moving on to new zones of maximized return. Some national government will be willing to waive taxes, or pay for the start-up costs, and certainly to give away land. And there’s usually also a very willing labor force—not completely destitute or uneducated, but, you know—hungry. So capital comes in and that feeds more investment because there are synergies that help everyone. And so the take-off region develops like crazy, growth is in double digits for like a generation or so. China is doing that now, that’s what’s killing them. And so pretty soon the new area gets fully developed too! People have their basic needs, and they’ve created local capital that competes for profits. Now they’re another labor force with raised expectations. The profit margin therefore goes down. It’s time to move on, baby! So they look around to see where they might alight next, and then they take off and leave.
CQ: The World Bank, in other words. That’s what I told them. I lost my mind. I took off my shoe and beat on their table.
PC: That’s right, that meeting was reported to me, and I wish I had been there to see it. First you laugh in the president’s face, and then you scream at the World Bank in a fury. That was probably backwards, but never mind. I’m glad you did it. I think the decapitation is going rather well over there. The midlevel was stuffed with idealistic young people who went there to change it from within, and now they’re getting the chance.
CQ: I hope you don’t tape these conversations.
PC: Why not? It makes it a lot easier to put them in my blog.
CQ: Come on, Phil. Do you want me to talk or not?
PC: You can be the judge of that, but right now I am enjoying laying out for us the latest from geographic economics. The theory of uneven development, have you read these guys?
CQ: No.
PC: You should. As they describe, capital finds a likely place to develop next, and boom off they go, see? Place to place. The people left behind either adjust to being on their own, or fall into a recession, or even fall into a full-on rust-belt collapse. Whatever happens to them, global investment capital will no longer be interested. That’s the point at which you begin to see people theorizing bioregionalism, as they figure out what the local region can provide on its own. They’re making a virtue out of necessity, because they’ve been developed and are no longer the best profit. And somewhere else the process has started all over.
CQ: So soon the whole planet will be developed and modernized and we’ll all be happy! Except for the fact that it would take eight Earths to support every human living at modern levels of consumption! So we’re screwed!
JQ: Dad.
PC: No, that’s right. That’s what we’re seeing. The climate change and environmental collapse are the start of us hitting the limits. We’re in the process