Today’s New York Times had an amazing slate of stories that made it clear that there are worse places to live:
- China is in the midst of a program to resettle millions of rural peasants to cities where there are no jobs.
- There are currently an estimated 1,500 epidemics in India.
- The Times looks closely at the diminished lives of a household of two doctors in Syria since the civil war began.
- The headline of this story says it all, City in Russia Unable to Kick Asbestos Habit.
The International section of the paper is always somewhat grim, but this selection stood out.
July 17, 2013 at 7:13 pm
The forced-urban-resettlement program is such a bizarre piece of social mega-engineering. I understand the logic, such as it is – rural subsistence farmers get in the way of mechanized, industrialized agriculture while not consuming or producing very much for anyone else – and there are strong arguments that similar push-outs of subsistence farmers that happened as a result of the mechanization of agriculture led to industrialization and subsequent rapid economic growth in Europe and the US…. but…. those were traumatic events at the time, and the aftereffects of those continue to rebound in terms of inequality, so one would expect the same in China.
China is basically recapitulating the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries all at the same time in various overlapping waves. It’s incredible to watch, but also terrifying when you look at the amount of pollution caused, the inequality produced, the malinvestment, and the contempt for individual rights along the way. It’ll be interesting to see if India’s slower but rather more democratic and respectful path will turn out better in the end.