I touched on this subject before in my Natural Selection post, but I’d like to elaborate on it a bit more. Note that it is written from a Western perspective, which is what ‘we’ refers to. If you haven’t read that post, what I basically meant was, if Africa somehow became equalised with the rest of the world, only they would go up without us going down, therefore making this very unsustainable. We are not going to sacrifice our way of living for theirs. So, disregard that for now and bear with me. Just imagine that now, Africa is now on par with us.
Note that I haven’t properly researched this. Now, all of a sudden, we have another continent as oil-thirsty as we are, on top of one of the biggest amount of reserves. Since now we suddenly have to pay fair prices, we’ll start off with a nice oil crisis. Driving cars will be so expensive that almost everyone resorts to walking or cycling. This in turn results in a great drop in productivity for us, since we relied on oil to get us where we needed to be. However, this is not the only problem. The population of Africa is reported to be approximately a billion at time of writing, and technological advances mean access to the internet for everyone. This would deplete the amount of IP addresses we have immediately. Without immediately moving to the new technology (IPv6, which would incur great costs) the internet would basically slow to a halt.
But, this all is on the subject of wants, things that are great to have but not absolutely necessary. But what about the basic necessities of life? According to the Pareto principle, 80% of the resources are shared amongst 20% of the people. Assuming Africa makes up most of the remaining 80%, we would need 4 times as much food as we use now, globally. This accounts for shelter as well. While population density in Africa is quite low at the moment, as prosperity increases population does as well. If the continent does modernise, we will need another continent at most to house the people.
In conclusion, the inequality on Earth is necessary. For as long as resources are finite, inequality will always exist.
Tags: Philosophy
Interesting facts. And yes, a developed Africa is a fucked us.