Books
Global Trends, Global Futures:
Living with Declining Living Standards
by Thayer Scudder
Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010
304 pages, $40.00
When Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he could never have imagined what would be done with the phrase “invisible hand,” which appears but once in the entire work. A professor of moral philosophy, he retained an acute sense of the human costs of what that phrase symbolized. Nor did he hesitate to propose measures for ameliorating those costs.
Now, 234 years later, a book has arrived that could serve as a companion volume to Smith’s Principia of political economy. If Smith explained how to most efficiently generate material wealth—a process today gone global—Caltech’s Thayer Scudder, in Global Threat, Global Futures: Living with Declining Living Standards, provides a handbook not only for human survival, but for human flourishing in the face of threats that globalization either doesn’t address, or that themselves are consequences of globalization.
Scudder, like Smith, brings to his analysis a deep knowledge of the human condition. A professor of anthropology, now emeritus, he has spent over half a century engaged in research and fieldwork, particularly studying poverty-stricken and displaced communities for extended periods of time. It is within the context of this experience that he examines issues of growth, sustainability, development, and quality of life.
A self-described “optimistic pessimist,” Scudder believes that a worldwide decline in living standards is inevitable “not just in poor societies but in all societies and nations.” Nonetheless, he believes that transformations are possible that could slow the rate and magnitude of such a decline.
The book’s first three chapters detail the threats about which Scudder knows the most: poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor, fundamentalism of every stripe, and global environmental degradation. (By the end of the book he has also touched on population increase, urbanization, unsustainable levels of consumption, nuclear weapons, and global climate change.) He confesses himself “fascinated”—one senses appalled might be a more suitable word—that so few experts anticipated the current financial and economic crisis and that national and international leaders have proven so incapable of cooperating to address it.
In the next three chapters, Scudder undertakes case studies of the United States as a high-income nation, China as a middle-income one, and Zambia as low-income. Particularly disturbing is his list of U.S. economic, cultural, and educational weaknesses that “make America look increasingly like an inept third world country.”
Key to the chapter on China is a study of the village Kaihsiengkung, “one of the longest long-term studies in anthropology,” begun by Chinese anthropologist Fei Hsiaotung in 1936. The chapter on Zambia is grounded in Scudder’s own work, principally his decades-long fieldwork with the Gwembe Tonga ethnic group.
Scudder takes great pains throughout the book to distinguish between living standards and quality of life and, analogously, between growth and development. It’s not that he denigrates living standards and growth; rather, he feels they represent only part of the two broader concepts with which they are paired. Thus he defines development to include “access to a wider range of non-material attributes such as those available to people in every viable society and culture”—security, self-sufficiency, and self-respect, for example.
Especially in his case studies, Scudder illuminates the distinction between development and simple quantitative growth. In China, for example, a shift in the 1990s from a decentralized “household responsibility system”—which permitted private enterprise at the village level—to a more centralized emphasis on heavy industry and urbanization had the result that “personal income grew faster than GDP in the 1980s and slower than GDP in the 1990s.”
An issue Scudder examines closely is that of defining poverty. He points out that, even with relatively little income, it’s possible to have a satisfying life “based on dense networks of social relations and viable and resilient cultures that are only loosely attached to the market economy.” He suggests that such communities may provide models for a future in which declining living standards will be an issue.
Equally important is the question of categorizing poverty. Scudder discusses relative and new poverty—the former tied to the growing gap between rich and poor, the latter resulting from national and international programs that impoverish or displace formerly self-sufficient people. He also examines poverty associated with urbanization, failed states, and environmental degradation. Whatever its roots, poverty is a source of destabilization, disease, migration, and recruits for terrorist organizations. Scudder is particularly concerned with the extent to which policies of the United States and other Western countries and the World Bank have worsened poverty around the world.
When he discusses fundamentalism, Scudder focuses on three examples: Buddhist oppression of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking Hindu minority, the influence of extreme Jewish sects in Israel, and the impact of Christian fundamentalism on the U.S. government. He expands the definition of fundamentalist to include, for example, Western colonialism and the one-size-fits-all view of economies worldwide that currently dominates Washington, at which point his use of the word begins to seem perhaps more rhetorical than descriptive. Regardless, he makes a thorough case that fundamentalism is a force very difficult to control. Yet, in an ironic turn, he admits that a zeal akin to that of fundamentalism may be necessary to bring about the transformations he envisions as necessary.
Most heartfelt are his discussions of environmental degradation and its impact not only on biodiversity but on humanity itself. Scudder, who once considered ornithology as a profession, brings a deeply personal and poignant note to his discussion of bird decline, especially that of songbirds.
In his final chapter, “Transforming Global Societies,” Scudder offers very specific suggestions for dealing with the threats he has cataloged. He emphasizes the empowerment of women (according to the World Bank, “societies that discriminate by gender tend to experience less rapid economic growth and poverty reduction”); the creation of a better balance between small-scale commercial agriculture and agribusiness; and the transformation of education. Regarding the latter, he considers the Children’s Center at Caltech—which emphasizes hands-on learning, and which he and his wife, Eliza, have supported for many years—to be a model for preschools worldwide.
A work of political economy from the perspective of an anthropologist who has made a career of studying poverty and displaced people, Global Threats, Global Futures will prove rewarding reading for anyone concerned with issues of economic development, environmental and cultural degradation, and the causes and solutions of poverty.
Most of all, Thayer Scudder illuminates a path, not only possible but plausible, through a destructive maze of humankind’s own making—if only the political will can be found to tread it. —MF
