Peace

One of the things that really surprises me is that people don't appreciate what a wonderful time of peace we live in with war declining in importance. For the last four thousand years technology has permitted an ever larger population of people. Of course, the population could increase even faster except that there was not enough food and other resources to support that many people. As a result, the traditional limits on population were imposed by famine (starving), pestilence (disease), and, of course, war. As technology improved a smaller and smaller proportion were killed by famine and pestilence and more and more were killed in war with more and more of our resources being devoted to war. Simply put, it is hard work to kill very many people with a sharp stick, but with improved technology we have been able to kill people ever faster.

However, about 1950 there seems to have been an almost miraculous rejection of war. While the war in Iraq gets lots of attention around the world, it hardly warrants being called a war at all. In WWII, the Russians and Germans each had casualties in excess of one million a year (or over 3,000 a day)¹. Of course with our very best nuclear, biological, and chemical weopons we could easily kill more than 200 million people a year until civilization was devastated and could no longer support the vast populations that remained. Then famine and disease would likely reduce the world population to under a billion within five years or so which would be a record death rate of over 500 million a year (well over a million a day)!

I guess it was this horror that got people's attention and got people to consider other methods of restraining population. As we have used war less and less to restrict population, we have increasingly relied on a fourth method, birth control. While reliable methods of birth control were available over two thousand years ago (e.g. Egyptian IUD's), they never caught on. Also, the use of birth control is not consistent around the world and so there are still a few minor wars (and plenty of famine and disease) in certain regions. It appears that prosperity and stability are sufficient (along with the associated education) to allow people to use birth control whether it is out of fear of war or just because it is easier to pursue your own prosperity with a smaller family. China and India seem to have been able to adopt birth control with simply stability and a desire for prosperity.

Of course this brings me to the other exciting thing about these times. With the resulting economic growth of India and China (along with other countries) we could easily see the day when most of the world is developed with those populations too busy pursuing sneakers, cell phones, iPods, and such to have large families (who would have time?) or to have a serious war. I personally am not all that excited about acquiring more stuff as you may have read previously. However, I am really excited to see so many jobs exported to other countries. It may mean that Americans (and the people in other developed countries) don't have quite as much stuff, but we have way more stuff than we need anyway. What we gain from it is the potential for long term peace and prosperity around the world as the rest of the world gets caught up in the pursuit of iPods (and uses birth control and doesn't bother with war). Wouldn't that be grand!

In that light, saving and investing becomes a really humanitarian thing to do. It appears that there are plenty of people around the world who are eager join in the pursuit of iPods and all that is really needed is money (capital) to invest in factories and training. Once they are fully engaged in the pursuit of iPods, they will generate their own demand for the output of their factories. Each nation's prosperity will stabilize around their own productivity level (as they will consume about what they produce) and the established developed nations will be about where they were to start with. However, that will likely take a century or so. Until then, we can all help by saving what we can and investing in mutual funds which specialize in developing countries. When we do spend, it is good to buy goods made in the developing countries while we try to adapt to jobs that can't be exported overseas so easily.

Also, as this continues the U.S. will almost certainly need to surrender the mantle of world leadership to India and China, and won't that be a relief. What could be better than being a respected member of the world community and one which previously helped bring about a lasting world peace?

1 Of course these figures may be overstated somewhat as the majority of these deaths were caused through the actions or inactions of their own government. This clearly demonstrates just how awful a government of 'strong man rules' can get. However, a significant proportion of the deaths were caused by the other side and were clearly the result of war.