It's the end of the world as we know it...

For people in my age group, that is, those of us born in the 80s, this is the first period of economic pessimism that has affected us. We weren't really cognizant of the stock market troubles in the late 80s, and we were still too young to feel the pain of the dot com burst--we didn't own stock, and gas was still cheap.

But in the past six months, I have watched my mutual funds reduced by 10 percent, and the value of my house has evaporated by a similar figure. When I started high school I remember seeing gas prices at 89 cents per gallon. That was less than ten years ago. A gallon of milk costs twice what it did when I started college, not six years ago. My cost of living raises are not keeping track with what seems to be an accelerating rate of inflation, driven by a growing global demand for our most basic resources.

Yet, to be quite honest, my standard of living has (to this point) been largely unaffected. Because we are fortunate enough to live in an industrialized (first world?) country, our lives are less affected by changes in market-controlled goods. Gas has increased 400 percent in ten years, but gas still only represents about four percent of my budget. Food prices are spiking, but grocery goods only account for fifteen percent of my budget. Non-inflationary items--mortgage and car payments, insurance and student loans--dominate my budget, and this little fact of American life insulates me and most of my neighbors from the worst affects of our current global economic crisis. When I dump $1400 a month into my mortgage, spending $2 instead of 77 cents on a pound of rice won't bankrupt me.

However, what hardly registers on our budgetary radar is causing riots in the third world. Families in less developed countries spend a significant portion of their daily wages on food, and during these rough times the cost of that meager nourishment is rapidly exceeding their income. Men are watching their families suffer from hunger, and out of desperation and dedication they try to get food however they can.

I think that we, as a global community, have passed the point in our history when an undeveloped country could, of its own volition, climb out of the third world and join the ranks of the industrialized nations. This threshold is defined by the availability of natural resources, the ease of exploitation of those resources, and the ability of that nation to control those resources. Though always steep, this hurdle to economic sustainability grows steeper still as we, the industrialized brethren, efficiently consume these resources and as our global markets, whether through hedging, speculation or sheer supply and demand, assign value to these resources that forever put these commodities out of reach of our poor neighbors. Even if an undeveloped nation is rich in resources, this wealth becomes more of a liability as the global community looks to exploit it.

There is very little hope now that those third world nations, scattered across the world but concentrated primarily in Africa and south Asia, will ever rise from their humble condition. A stagnant economic misery will ensure subsequent troubles befall such a country:

The country will become a welfare nation, a global poor box, an eternal goal of missionaries and humanitarians. In line with the "teach a man to fish" analogy, perpetual allotments of charity will remove any vestige of independence from the populace.

Exhiled from legitimate economic pursuits, illicit trade will be accepted, even welcomed by the impoverished. It is exceedingly difficult to preach the immorality of opiates to men who, after seeing their families sick with hunger, elect to grow poppies. Gemstone smuggling, drug trafficking, human trafficking exist and thrive under governments made incompetent by corruption or bankruptcy.

Governments will rise and fall as often as the seasons change. Loyalty is cheaply bartered and many seek the head of state in order to improve the quality of life for their respective sects at the expense of their rival countrymen.

External investment in the country's natural resources will enrich the current government at the expense of its citizens.

A global humanitarian crisis will utterly destroy the third world. For instance:

The current issue is, of course, global warming. As a citizen of a developed nation, I will most likely avoid major life-threatening consequences of my polluting heritage. Going green is, for me, fiscal common sense at best and a social responsibility at worst. I'll put up solar panels and plug in my car when it saves me money. However, global warming could lead to a drought in a third world country that will destroy an entire season's crop and bring a famine unto millions. Once again, my good fortune to be born in America insulates me from suffering.

Another possibility is a worldwide pandemic. A growing likelihood is that a superbug, encouraged to evolve by our industrialized use of antibiotics, could become highly contagious and spread rapidly throughout the world. A mortality rate of just one percent could leave 3 million Americans dead, overwhelming our health care system and keeping our docs, who may have gone forth in humanitarian aid, here at home. In third world nations, absent adequate health care, lacking vaccines or treatments, the mortality rate could easily be ten times that of developed nations.

Just some food for thought this Sunday morning. As you can probably tell, I am awfully bored and had some time to kill on watch.

An interesting application of this Development Threshold is that it applies to any nation today as well as any nation in the future. We have so efficiently removed the resources of industrialization from the earth that we have discovered and mined all the minerals that are close to the surface. It is only through our technology and sheer industrial effort that we continue to mine and drill. Oil no longer seeps out of the ground in Texas, nor can you find gold in Californian streambeds. We have created an environment where we need oil to get to more oil, and we need steel to find more iron. If a global catastrophe removed most of the world's population and along with it our industrial capacity, we have left our descendants a threshold so high that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate an industrialized society.