Apr. 9th, 2011

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Part I. All people are equal but some are more equal

Biological essence of the human population of the world manifests itself in its capability for constant self-regeneration in the course of continuous compositional changes due to births and deaths. This process depends on a multitude of factors, including social, political, economic, genetic, geographical, and others. Demography studies the impact of those factors on the distribution of the human population.

The importance of demography as a complex science that studies the regularities in the regeneration of the human population can hardly be overestimated. In the modern society, demography has become a platform for planning in labor resources and migration politics, assessing the volumes of humanitarian aid needed for distressed countries, evaluation of results of relief assistance, etc. In other words, the results of demographic analysis of situations in particular countries and in the world begin to actively influence the global politics. Nowadays, demographic studies attract more and more intellectual minds and more and more funding.
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He shows, for example, how after the WWII, the USA was leading, Japan was catching up, Brazil was way far behind, Iran was getting a little richer from the oil but still had short life expectancy, and the Asian giants -- China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia -- were poor and sick. "But look what is about to happen", says Prof. Rosling, "In my life time, former colonies gained independence and then finally they started to get healthier and healthier and healthier! And in the 1970's the countries of Asia and Latin America started to catch up with the Western countries, they became the emerging economies!"

It clearly follows from the data presented by Prof. Rosling that the overall tendency towards higher income and higher life expectancy has impacted all of the countries of the world. Both higher income and higher life expectancy are directly connected with scientific and technological progress, innovations in industrial and agricultural technologies, as well as with advances in medicine which would be impossible without constant development of human knowledge in physics, chemistry and biology. Making that kind of progress and advances takes more than simply diligence and hard work. It involves a special drive that makes a society and its individuals strive for continuous improvement of the quality of life.

Having said that, it cannot be denied that different countries and nations demonstrate different levels of effort in improving the welfare of their population, hence the global population. Most of the achievements of civilization which have contributed to the overall progress in the world were made by the populations of a few countries, and it was not always due to financial or military superiority, although the latter, as a rule, is a result of the population's high intelligence level.

Based on the the statistical data demonstrated by Prof. H. Rosling, it is not hard to make a conclusion that while some countries achieve progress due their population's hard work and perseverance, effective government policies, rational law-making, eradication of corruption, effective education system, etc., other countries are only willy-nilly beneficiaries of the progress achieved by the developed countries.

Technologies for increasing crop yield, cost-saving technologies in manufacturing clothes and footwear, new technologies in retail sale, banking, packaging, shipping and transportation, communication and computer technologies, and many, many other advances and innovations have been directly or indirectly improving the standard of living in the world including the countries that have never been practically involved in development of such technologies. One can imagine, for instance, what a great contribution to the overall literacy in the world was made by the invention of the ballpoint pen which had involved the efforts by Americans (only in the US, a total of 350 patents were issued to inventors of ballpoint pens), Hungarians, Argentinians, and French.

Chinese people are known for their hard work, perseverance and diligence. Nowadays, China has become a global factory of consumer goods. The process of intensive technological modernization started in China quite recently by historical standards, and it has been catching up by actively appropriating Western technologies. Recently, China started an industrial level production of a copy of a Russian jet fighter. War-fighting capabilities of China's J-10 are said to be comparable with those of F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. Certainly, the technology used in designing the Chinese aircraft was not entirely the product of the work of Chinese technical minds (http://www.newser.com/story/110361/chinas-new-fighter-ripped-off-downed-us-jet.html).

Another big user of Western technologies is Russia. Russia, to put it mildly, is and has always been copying everything that is being created in the West, especially anything related to military technologies, as well as oil and gas technologies, by using intricate ways of attracting foreign investors, and more unscrupulous methods, such as espionage.

In a popular joke of the Soviet times, a Civil War veteran who had fought for the Tsar was asking an old Bolshevik veteran selling jeans at a flea market, "So you guys overthrew the Tsar because he wouldn't let you sell jeans?". One cannot attribute the lagging in science and technology in such countries as China, Russia, India and some others only to the fact that it took them a long time to become free market economies or to gain independence. Neither Mao Zedong in China, nor Lenin or Stalin in the USSR, nor ayatollahs in Iran were enemies of inventions and new technologies.

Along with the countries that use Western technologies as a trampoline for their industrial development, there is a lot of countries whose population has never displayed any noticeable interest in fundamentally improving their lives and thus contributing, even minimally, to the increase of income and life expectancy of the global population as a whole. Those countries are only the recipients of the benefits provided by the global progress in science and technology. In most cases, one cannot say about these countries that evil imperialists were impeding, by cunning methods, the intellectual development of the population.

Compare, for example, Southern Rhodesia, which was providing the south of Africa with food and was exporting marbled beef, wines, fruit, etc. to Europe and America, and Zimbabwe, a country that after gaining the independence has a record level of inflation at 231 million percent and whose army sends its soldiers home for dinner as the government is unable to feed its army.

In 2008, Saudi Arabia exported $310 billion worth of commodities (oil and gas) and purchased $108 billion worth of merchandise, most of which are products of advanced technologies, including military technologies. Without Western technologies and specialists, Saudi Arabia would not be able to do oil and gas exploration and recovery. Its 27 million population includes 5.6 million of temporary foreign residents who provide for the country's needs in technological expertise and skilled labor.

Saudi Arabia can hardly be attributed to the countries that participate in the development of modern science and technology. For instance, with the level of GPD per capita being about the same in Saudi Arabia and Israel, Israel's contribution to the global technological progress is simply beyond comparison. Both economically and technologically, Israel is one of the most developed Western Asia countries. With its four times lesser population, a hundred times smaller territory, and a lack of natural resources, Israel leaves behind all of its neighbor Arabic countries collectively by the number of inventions, patents, research papers and books, number of personal computers per person, advances in medical science, quality of health care and medical practice, number of NASDAQ listed companies, military technologies (Israel is the world leader in design and construction of drone aircrafts, for instance), crop production technologies, as well as by many other parameters.

At any rate, there is no doubt that Israel's contribution to the improvement of the standard of living of the world population by far exceeds that of Saudi Arabia, which, in case of Saudi Arabia, certainly has nothing to do with the factor of late independence. For the past hundred years, Saudi Arabs have been living a life of stability and independence, especially so after enormous reserves of oil and gas were discovered in 1938.

In terms of stability and independence, it is rather Israel that has a problem as it is forced to spend most of its population's physical and intellectual resources to offset threats from the surrounding Arabic states whose leaders are by no means interested in having an oasis of modern civilization right across their borders. In Saudi Arabia, of all countries, public executions are done, on average, more than twice a week. At 9 a.m. any given day of the week, on the Square of Justice in Riyadh, across from the city's main mosque, beheadings take place as a public spectacle. Theft is punished by cutting off hands. Extramarital sex is punishable by public whipping.

At the same time, the leaders of Saudi Arabia can hardly be viewed as opponents of progress. Saudi Arabia offers free public education to its citizens. The country has 8 universities, over 24,000 schools, lots of colleges and technical and vocational schools. More than a quarter of the state annual budget is spent on the education system. In addition to free education, the government pays college students' expenses including the cost of textbooks and even health care. The government also offers scholarships to study in the best universities abroad, mainly in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, etc. Despite all of that, Saudi Arabia is not a country that has contributed to the global scientific and technological progress, hence to improvement of the standard of life of the global population.

Summing up, it is true that the overall standard of life of the world population has been noticeably improving, which manifests itself in the higher life expectancy and income per capita, as was demonstrated by Prof. Rosling in his above-referenced lecture. However, it is also true that the said improvement is mostly due to the efforts of a small group of countries who are the creators of the progress, whereas the rest of the countries of the world are only the recipients of the benefits of the progress.


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Part IIa. The map of civilization thrust
Part I. All people are equal but some are more equal (systemity.livejournal.com/631478.html)

As was earlier noted, the increase of life expectancy and income per capita occurs not only in those countries whose contribution to the global improvement of the standard of living in the world is most noticeable. It seems that the overall improvement of life in the world in the long-term perspective which transpires from the data presented by H. Rosling cannot be fully explained by either humanitarian aid to poor countries or by the diffusion processes caused by population migration. It is also evident that gaining independence does not warrant prosperity, as there are many countries which gained independence a long time ago but whose population's living conditions are far from being decent. The overall standard of living is certainly going up in the world, and this is apparently a consolidated, however, uneven process that has some characteristics of spontaneity.
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