On my last
visit to India, I walked into a restroom at the airport in Bangalore,
the high-tech capital of India, and was greeted by an attendant whose
job was to dispense liquid soap and paper towels. The work was, of
course, superfluous, but he clearly needed the job and the tips he
occasionally received. Perhaps his labor could have been put to a more
productive use elsewhere. But
anyone who has seen the vast ocean of humanity in a large developing
country like India has to wonder what kind of productivity can truly
provide a decent life to everyone. India’s high-tech mecca is full of
people with low-tech skills or no skills at all, who provide their
labor in myriad ways to keep the city running while elite engineers
write software and design computer chips. Labor is not a scarce
commodity in many developing regions of the world. In
contrast, labor productivity is central to any discussion of the U.S.
economy. High labor productivity has been cited as one of the reasons
for the slow job growth in the current economic recovery. Still, many
economists believe that productivity growth, which allows goods and
services to be produced at decreasing cost, is the ultimate source of
wealth for everyone. In competitive markets, lower production costs
mean lower consumer prices, which stimulate demand and lead to further
increases in productivity and, ultimately, wages. But this conventional
argument ignores the crucial role of natural resources in production
and consumption. Labor
remains expensive relative to natural resources such as energy and raw
materials in industrialized countries. In response, new technologies
are designed to reduce and eliminate human labor, making the remaining
workers more and more productive. In the past 100 years, the farm
sector has gone from using 40% of the U.S. workforce to just 2%. The
manufacturing sector continues to lose jobs to automation and the use
of cheaper labor overseas. We now transact much of our routine business
with the likes of banks, bookstores, and airlines without ever seeing a
human face or hearing a live voice. Is
it possible that we are over-optimizing one factor of production --
labor -- at the expense of other resources that are truly scarce? One
way to answer this is to look at the biologically productive land and
water area required to support our resource consumption and waste
output. Redefining
Progress, a nonprofit organization that develops tools and policies for
sustainability, estimates that it takes 9.57 hectares to support an
average American. This ecological footprint is about 80% higher than
locally available regenerative and absorptive capacity. The deficit is
made up through imports and disproportionate use of global resources
such as the atmosphere. The per-capita footprint is 1.36 hectares in
China (36% above capacity) and 0.76 hectares in India (9% above
capacity). Humanity’s total ecological footprint is nearly 16% higher
than earth’s capacity, indicating an unsustainable depletion of natural
capital. The
United States has the largest per-capita ecological footprint among all
nations and consumes more than 20% of the world’s resources. Developing
countries aspire to a similar living standard but face the enormous
task of lifting hundreds of millions out of deep poverty. Their plan
for economic growth depends on using large amounts of additional
natural resources. China, for example, has become an insatiable
consumer of energy and raw materials, with its energy consumption
expected to more than double by 2030. At
the time of such unprecedented resource use, nearly 750 million people
around the world are either unemployed or classified as “working poor”,
according to the International Labor Organization. More than 500
million additional workers will enter the world’s labor markets by
2015. A
number of resource economists and sustainability thinkers have
advocated an environmental tax shift in developed nations, which would
reduce the tax burden on labor and increase it on fossil fuels, virgin
raw materials, waste generation, and pollution. The idea is to
encourage more employment of labor and less of scarce natural
resources. Tax shifting is finding much more traction in Europe than in
the United States. In
developing nations where labor costs are low and raw materials are
relatively expensive, resource-saving and employment-generating
activities such as repair and remanufacturing are already widespread.
But technologies and lifestyles borrowed from rich countries --
including private automobiles and disposable products -- could destroy
any possibility of sustainable development in these countries. What
they lack -- and perhaps need the most -- are policies and technologies
designed to radically increase resource productivity and employment
opportunities in tandem. It
is difficult to imagine a livable future where unemployment and
underemployment are rampant and the use of natural resources remains
unrestrained. Both developed and developing nations face the same
ultimate challenge: moving from a narrow view of productivity to a
balanced consideration of how best to employ both human and natural
resources. Kumar Venkat (kvenkatmy-fb@yahoo.com) is a technologist, entrepreneur and writer based in Silicon Valley.
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