7 ms·

Their imagined future resurgence scenario -- someone in a lab gets infected, then travels abroad -- highlights one of the reasons developed countries need to he

Their imagined future resurgence scenario -- someone in a lab gets infected, then travels abroad -- highlights one of the reasons developed countries need to help less developed countries: Out of enlightened self interest, not "charity" nor "the goodness of their hearts." We currently are de facto breeding antibiotic resistant infections in places without adequate sanitation or water infrastructure and you can go from pretty much anywhere on the planet to pretty much anywhere else these days in 24 hours or less. When people from developed countries get sick while someplace else, they are often medevaced out to get them good care in a modern facility, thereby potentially exposing people in their country to whatever they have. We need to do a better job of providing basics like adequate water infrastructure worldwide if we want to be free from such diseases in our cushy developed countries.

genman 3y ago
We must collectively understand the reason why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development by large margin. You can make large investments and build everything for 1 million people, but after two decades there are now 2 million people and then 4 and then 8. Africa started out with 200 million people After the WW2 period. In the beginning of this century there were around 800 people. Now there are 1.5 billion people. The rate of population growth is just unbearable. And Africa is here just an example. The same problem affects also India and other places.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Malawi is one of the countries mentioned in this article as a source of polio outbreaks. A famous singer has invested millions in hospitals there and they still lack adequate water infrastructure. I imagine their post operative stats are probably not great. Getting surgery in a modern hospital and going home to inadequate clean water and inadequate nutrition likely actively fosters post operative infections. Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society. My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that. We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.
- BariumBlue 3y ago
  The Malthusian argument is incorrect and I disagree with the concept of physical infrastructure being the end-all-be-all. Japan, South Korea, Germany, as well as the USSR had explosive growth after WW2 not because they had massive existing infrastructure, but because of social systems & processes that enable a reliable, stable, productive society. If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth. An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.
  - epicureanideal 3y ago
    I don’t think they’re making a Malthusian argument. It’s about the difference in the rate of change or two variables, not the absolute carrying capacity of a set of resources as in the Malthusian argument.
- epicureanideal 3y ago
  Although some might be interpreting the previous poster as having some bad motives for saying what they’re saying, it does seem to be objectively true that population growth in developing countries is absolutely huge. If the population level had remained the same as 50 years ago the level of development would be much higher. But of course the population growth rate is declining so standards of living should hopefully start to catch up.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - genman 3y ago
    Yes and no. This is my argument indeed that if the population growth stayed lower then a lot more people would have been able to rise above the poverty level (or even much higher). UN prediction for Africa is that they fall close to the reproduction threshold for the end of century. Until that the poverty trap will continue. It also means that by that time now 4 billion people require their needs satisfied instead. But the population growth has been huge and exponential. From 200 million to 4 billion in 150 years is an incredible amount of growth.
- andrewmutz 3y ago
  That's not the reason that nations stay "developing". Nations stay "developing" due to extractive economic and political institutions that prevent economic growth. Great book about the topic by economist Daron Acemoglu ("Why nations fail"). The reason that countries that have high population growth tend to be poor is because when a country gets rich its people have fewer children. The high fertility rate does not cause the poverty, instead its the other way around: the poverty causes the high fertility rate.
  - genman 3y ago
    I can't agree with this unfortunately. While getting rich further lowers the fertility rate then there is a certain threshold that must be first exceeded to get rich (relatively speaking of course). There must be a feedback loop that incentivizes to get better education, to get better productivity to get richer. Raising a child is expensive, raising a highly educated child is very expensive. If you have 8 children then you can barely feed them unless you are very rich indeed. Even if you manage to provide good education for few of your children then the larger part of them continues the poverty loop. Breaking out of poverty requires breaking of this loop. It should be very obvious - if your economy grows 5% but your population grows 10% then everybody is getting poorer as the growth per capita is negative. The same applies for everything, education, sanitation, food production. If you capacity to provide any of them is lower than the population growth then the amount of the poor continues to increase.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      And providing more basics, like improved agriculture, education and essential infrastructure like clean water access, is a better means to combat that issue than sending in surgeons to play hero and have a feel-good moment without making any real difference in the root causes that led to someone needing surgery.
      - genman 3y ago
        Current problem in Africa is that their capacity to produce food, while it is increasing relatively fast, doesn't increase enough to keep up with the population growth. This is why Russia can play with the grain shortage to begin with.
- teddyh 3y ago
  > why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development Opinions are divided: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m>
  - genman 3y ago
    Yes, the communist argument - everybody else is at fault but not myself. Yet the communist paradise, the 1/6 of all the land with incredible riches stayed poor and finally collapsed.
    - teddyh 3y ago
      That argument has nothing to do with communism. At most, it could be seen as anti-capitalist. As I understand it, the argument is that some so-called “underdeveloped” country is actually rich in natural resources, but foreign companies have come in and extracted the vast majority of the wealth, given some resources only to a select elite, as essentially bribes, and the large masses of people get nothing, and so remain poor. Even though the wealth extracted, had it remained in the country, would have made the country on the same level, or even higher, than the so-called “developed” countries. I can see no argument for communism here. If anything, the argument is a nationalistic one, and nationalism have traditionally been associated with the right, not the left.
      - genman 3y ago
        You have to know the history to understand why this argument is communist.
        teddyh 3y ago
        I don’t see how this invalidates the argument itself. I mean, who cares if evil communists have made that argument. Does that make the argument wrong?
- harshalizee 3y ago
  Also forgot the part where India and North/West African regions were incredibly wealthy in the past and were basically strip mined by colonialism. It's been only 50 years or so that they're trying to catch up.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    West Africa was never "incredibly wealthy". Yes, before Europeans it was part of long-range trading routes with the Muslim world, but empires were feudalistic and only a tiny elite had access to that trade-related wealth, while the vast majority of the population was barely surviving through subsistence farming and pastoralism, just like so many do today, or hunting and gathering.
    - genman 3y ago
      Lets also not forget the slavery and slave trade that was practiced in Western and Northern Africa.
boxed 3y ago
This is the same reason rich people should put a ton of their resources into basic science, tech, and health infrastructure.
- mptest 3y ago
  And since philanthropic approaches to such aspirations demonstrably do not work, we need extremely high taxes on the ultra wealthy. Before the six-seven digit earning engineers here lambast me, I'm talking billionaires. No one intelligent can/has yet looked me in the eye and told me earnestly: anyone with a billion + $ would have a single degree lower quality of life if their wealth was capped at 999 million If you want empirics google "highest marginal tax rate 1950- present" and "infrastructure spending 1950- present".
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    >And since philanthropic approaches to such aspirations demonstrably do not work, we need extremely high taxes on the ultra wealthy. Here you're just shoehorning in a specifically ideological posture in the context of a complex situation that's completely irrelevant to your fixation. Government spending today is enormous in the developed countries and among intergovernmental organizations. In the context of existing health research spending there's vastly more than enough money at least available inside government budgets even as they are for increasing that health spending. Just by reducing several gargantuan military budgets, many governments could easily increase health spending without some arbitrary new punitively huge tax on billionaires. The two things are literally unrelated in cause. In any case, the revenue you'd generate from this billionaire tax you propose would be much less stable or bountiful than you think or is possible through much less antagonistic alternative means, and this revenue tax from basically forbidding billionaires would probably decrease too, because after all, billionaires, generally being protective of their assets in very sophisticated ways, would find ways to circumvent it. Thus just from a practical standpoint, stable funds for medical research would be much better obtained from reasoned, non-punitive incentives and tax schemes complemented by certain budget cuts for absurd outlays that governments often spend ridiculously wasteful amounts on as is. >No one intelligent can/has yet looked me in the eye and told me earnestly: anyone with a billion + $ would have a single degree lower quality of life if their wealth was capped at 999 million No, your hypothetical billioniare wouldn't live any less materially good a life by having just under a full billion dollars, but certain incentives that do also contribute to good things in the economic and developmental world could be destroyed by this prohibition. Also, simply, you might with this tax also badly and pointlessly disincentivize pharmaceutical companies when you could have just tolerated high profits and encouraged them to help with medical generosity in other ways. Remember after all that within health spending, a vast and very useful part of its percentage is sustained by a properly incentivized private sector that it would be stupid to burn just for the sake of cheap anti-capitalist ideological notions. >If you want empirics google "highest marginal tax rate 1950- present" and "infrastructure spending 1950- present". Seriously? you're comparing the speed of progress in medical infrastructure and related spending during the 50's with today? You do realize that part of a reduction in gains could simply be because, oh I don't know, the easier problems and projects having been already handled with older, simpler methods and now the harder problems steadily dominating, requiring much more complex solutions with slower progress and higher cost...
jona-f 3y ago
[flagged]
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  If you must insult me, the word you are looking for here is maternalistic. Please and thank you.
  - jona-f 3y ago
    I did not mean to insult you, i actually tried to make an argument. Nor was I looking for maternalistic. That's a different thing and i meant the negatively connoted one. Also reading again I realize I went too far saying all the helping, which is an unfortunate generalization, surely, being compassionate is a good thing.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      I'm a woman. It's pretty well established that lack of rights and education for women is a root cause of high birth rates and other negative factors being discussed here. "Paternalistic" implicitly assumes I'm male and that's kind of a problem if we are wanting to treat all people with respect as a baseline means to make the world a better place. We absolutely shouldn't be interfering in a colonial sort of fashion, but the reality is that "not interfering at all" is not a realistic goal. The only way you get that is by not interacting at all and that amounts to calling for not trading with poorer countries which is an excellent means to ensure they remain poor and can't develop. The reality is we already do interfere and often in ways that make the people going in to "help" feel good more than really helping. Real help does, in fact (as you suggested), require one to have some kind of baseline respect for people that many people lack generally. I will suggest that if you think maternalistic has positive connotations but paternalistic has negative, you should spend some time examining your implicit assumptions about men, women, parenting roles, etc and wonder exactly why you think the female-coded version of that word is not negative but the male-coded version is. FWIW: I'm an environmental studies major (as background for wanting to do urban planning) and I'm far from ignorant. If you weren't intending to insult me, leading with calling me paternalistic and ending with saying "...so people like you can keep ignorant..." seriously fails to achieve the stated intentions.
iwontberude 3y ago
I had this realization when I was like 8 years old. It goes to show how undemocratic our governments are that we still cannot get the leaders, who are more insulated from the effects, to act on our vulnerability.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> We currently are de facto breeding antibiotic resistant infections For my understanding, if no one else's: are there a lot of places without decent water, but with antibiotics? What's causing that strange inconsistency?
- dralley 3y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Proper water infrastructure is both difficult and expensive to develop, and requires constant maintenance. Antibiotic pills are cheap and easy to distribute.
- akdor1154 3y ago
  Anecdotal, but most towns in Vietnam you'd want to boil your water, and if you want antibiotics you go to the pharmacy, pay about $2, and get some. What's causing it? The free market is working great to build the systems to get drugs to people. In fact if a pharmacist refused to give out antibiotics when they weren't needed, the pharmacist would probably just go out of business because the customer would just head up the street to the next guy. The free market is not so hot at building expensive infrastructure like safe water in a tropical biome, that requires government involvement (not meaning to rag on SE Asian governments: building this stuff is difficult even if your country has been stable for the last 100 years, which is a luxury they haven't been lucky enough to have)
  - junofan 3y ago
    I dunno if safe drinking water is a great example. There are many success stories both of public and private provisioning. It’s not rocket science. You need to: 1. Build, operate, and maintain wastewater treatment plants 2. Require everyone send their wastewater to a treatment plant Vietnam has a neat loophole for 2. where if you simply generate too much wastewater for your zone’s plant to handle, you don’t have to send it to the plant. That’s more a policy decision with a side of administrative corruption that’s unrelated to who’s handling the infra.
    - troupo 3y ago
finite_depth 3y ago
If only we had some sort of massive example that had killed literally a million Americans. Then maybe we'd learn. Oh well. Maybe when that happens.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  You are apparently shadow banned. I have vouched for your comment with some trepidation hoping you will clarify what incident or issue you mean.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    It's visible now, so your vouching worked. It seems obvious to me GP is writing about COVID-19. The US CDC lists estimated US deaths from COVID at currently 1,153,910. But we've had plenty of other examples in living memory, with influenza currently averaging about a million deaths in the US every 30 years.
  - finite_depth 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm aware. Happens to all my comments. And as the other poster correctly guesses, this was a sarcastic reference to covid.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Thank you.
klyrs 3y ago
I assume a more cynical scenario: there's no way that governments haven't stockpiled a variety of horrible diseases (and their vaccines) for use in biological warfare. It isn't acceptable today, but what if somebody else moves first?

genman 3y ago

We must collectively understand the reason why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development by large margin. You can make large investments and build everything for 1 million people, but after two decades there are now 2 million people and then 4 and then 8. Africa started out with 200 million people After the WW2 period. In the beginning of this century there were around 800 people. Now there are 1.5 billion people. The rate of population growth is just unbearable. And Africa is here just an example. The same problem affects also India and other places.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Malawi is one of the countries mentioned in this article as a source of polio outbreaks. A famous singer has invested millions in hospitals there and they still lack adequate water infrastructure. I imagine their post operative stats are probably not great. Getting surgery in a modern hospital and going home to inadequate clean water and inadequate nutrition likely actively fosters post operative infections. Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society. My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that. We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.
BariumBlue 3y ago
The Malthusian argument is incorrect and I disagree with the concept of physical infrastructure being the end-all-be-all. Japan, South Korea, Germany, as well as the USSR had explosive growth after WW2 not because they had massive existing infrastructure, but because of social systems & processes that enable a reliable, stable, productive society. If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth. An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.
- epicureanideal 3y ago
  I don’t think they’re making a Malthusian argument. It’s about the difference in the rate of change or two variables, not the absolute carrying capacity of a set of resources as in the Malthusian argument.
epicureanideal 3y ago
Although some might be interpreting the previous poster as having some bad motives for saying what they’re saying, it does seem to be objectively true that population growth in developing countries is absolutely huge. If the population level had remained the same as 50 years ago the level of development would be much higher. But of course the population growth rate is declining so standards of living should hopefully start to catch up.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- genman 3y ago
  Yes and no. This is my argument indeed that if the population growth stayed lower then a lot more people would have been able to rise above the poverty level (or even much higher). UN prediction for Africa is that they fall close to the reproduction threshold for the end of century. Until that the poverty trap will continue. It also means that by that time now 4 billion people require their needs satisfied instead. But the population growth has been huge and exponential. From 200 million to 4 billion in 150 years is an incredible amount of growth.
andrewmutz 3y ago
That's not the reason that nations stay "developing". Nations stay "developing" due to extractive economic and political institutions that prevent economic growth. Great book about the topic by economist Daron Acemoglu ("Why nations fail"). The reason that countries that have high population growth tend to be poor is because when a country gets rich its people have fewer children. The high fertility rate does not cause the poverty, instead its the other way around: the poverty causes the high fertility rate.
- genman 3y ago
  I can't agree with this unfortunately. While getting rich further lowers the fertility rate then there is a certain threshold that must be first exceeded to get rich (relatively speaking of course). There must be a feedback loop that incentivizes to get better education, to get better productivity to get richer. Raising a child is expensive, raising a highly educated child is very expensive. If you have 8 children then you can barely feed them unless you are very rich indeed. Even if you manage to provide good education for few of your children then the larger part of them continues the poverty loop. Breaking out of poverty requires breaking of this loop. It should be very obvious - if your economy grows 5% but your population grows 10% then everybody is getting poorer as the growth per capita is negative. The same applies for everything, education, sanitation, food production. If you capacity to provide any of them is lower than the population growth then the amount of the poor continues to increase.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    And providing more basics, like improved agriculture, education and essential infrastructure like clean water access, is a better means to combat that issue than sending in surgeons to play hero and have a feel-good moment without making any real difference in the root causes that led to someone needing surgery.
    - genman 3y ago
      Current problem in Africa is that their capacity to produce food, while it is increasing relatively fast, doesn't increase enough to keep up with the population growth. This is why Russia can play with the grain shortage to begin with.
teddyh 3y ago
> why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development Opinions are divided: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m>
- genman 3y ago
  Yes, the communist argument - everybody else is at fault but not myself. Yet the communist paradise, the 1/6 of all the land with incredible riches stayed poor and finally collapsed.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    That argument has nothing to do with communism. At most, it could be seen as anti-capitalist. As I understand it, the argument is that some so-called “underdeveloped” country is actually rich in natural resources, but foreign companies have come in and extracted the vast majority of the wealth, given some resources only to a select elite, as essentially bribes, and the large masses of people get nothing, and so remain poor. Even though the wealth extracted, had it remained in the country, would have made the country on the same level, or even higher, than the so-called “developed” countries. I can see no argument for communism here. If anything, the argument is a nationalistic one, and nationalism have traditionally been associated with the right, not the left.
    - genman 3y ago
      You have to know the history to understand why this argument is communist.
      - teddyh 3y ago
        I don’t see how this invalidates the argument itself. I mean, who cares if evil communists have made that argument. Does that make the argument wrong?
harshalizee 3y ago
Also forgot the part where India and North/West African regions were incredibly wealthy in the past and were basically strip mined by colonialism. It's been only 50 years or so that they're trying to catch up.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  West Africa was never "incredibly wealthy". Yes, before Europeans it was part of long-range trading routes with the Muslim world, but empires were feudalistic and only a tiny elite had access to that trade-related wealth, while the vast majority of the population was barely surviving through subsistence farming and pastoralism, just like so many do today, or hunting and gathering.
  - genman 3y ago
    Lets also not forget the slavery and slave trade that was practiced in Western and Northern Africa.

boxed 3y ago

This is the same reason rich people should put a ton of their resources into basic science, tech, and health infrastructure.

mptest 3y ago
And since philanthropic approaches to such aspirations demonstrably do not work, we need extremely high taxes on the ultra wealthy. Before the six-seven digit earning engineers here lambast me, I'm talking billionaires. No one intelligent can/has yet looked me in the eye and told me earnestly: anyone with a billion + $ would have a single degree lower quality of life if their wealth was capped at 999 million If you want empirics google "highest marginal tax rate 1950- present" and "infrastructure spending 1950- present".
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  >And since philanthropic approaches to such aspirations demonstrably do not work, we need extremely high taxes on the ultra wealthy. Here you're just shoehorning in a specifically ideological posture in the context of a complex situation that's completely irrelevant to your fixation. Government spending today is enormous in the developed countries and among intergovernmental organizations. In the context of existing health research spending there's vastly more than enough money at least available inside government budgets even as they are for increasing that health spending. Just by reducing several gargantuan military budgets, many governments could easily increase health spending without some arbitrary new punitively huge tax on billionaires. The two things are literally unrelated in cause. In any case, the revenue you'd generate from this billionaire tax you propose would be much less stable or bountiful than you think or is possible through much less antagonistic alternative means, and this revenue tax from basically forbidding billionaires would probably decrease too, because after all, billionaires, generally being protective of their assets in very sophisticated ways, would find ways to circumvent it. Thus just from a practical standpoint, stable funds for medical research would be much better obtained from reasoned, non-punitive incentives and tax schemes complemented by certain budget cuts for absurd outlays that governments often spend ridiculously wasteful amounts on as is. >No one intelligent can/has yet looked me in the eye and told me earnestly: anyone with a billion + $ would have a single degree lower quality of life if their wealth was capped at 999 million No, your hypothetical billioniare wouldn't live any less materially good a life by having just under a full billion dollars, but certain incentives that do also contribute to good things in the economic and developmental world could be destroyed by this prohibition. Also, simply, you might with this tax also badly and pointlessly disincentivize pharmaceutical companies when you could have just tolerated high profits and encouraged them to help with medical generosity in other ways. Remember after all that within health spending, a vast and very useful part of its percentage is sustained by a properly incentivized private sector that it would be stupid to burn just for the sake of cheap anti-capitalist ideological notions. >If you want empirics google "highest marginal tax rate 1950- present" and "infrastructure spending 1950- present". Seriously? you're comparing the speed of progress in medical infrastructure and related spending during the 50's with today? You do realize that part of a reduction in gains could simply be because, oh I don't know, the easier problems and projects having been already handled with older, simpler methods and now the harder problems steadily dominating, requiring much more complex solutions with slower progress and higher cost...

jona-f 3y ago

[flagged]

DoreenMichele 3y ago
If you must insult me, the word you are looking for here is maternalistic. Please and thank you.
- jona-f 3y ago
  I did not mean to insult you, i actually tried to make an argument. Nor was I looking for maternalistic. That's a different thing and i meant the negatively connoted one. Also reading again I realize I went too far saying all the helping, which is an unfortunate generalization, surely, being compassionate is a good thing.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I'm a woman. It's pretty well established that lack of rights and education for women is a root cause of high birth rates and other negative factors being discussed here. "Paternalistic" implicitly assumes I'm male and that's kind of a problem if we are wanting to treat all people with respect as a baseline means to make the world a better place. We absolutely shouldn't be interfering in a colonial sort of fashion, but the reality is that "not interfering at all" is not a realistic goal. The only way you get that is by not interacting at all and that amounts to calling for not trading with poorer countries which is an excellent means to ensure they remain poor and can't develop. The reality is we already do interfere and often in ways that make the people going in to "help" feel good more than really helping. Real help does, in fact (as you suggested), require one to have some kind of baseline respect for people that many people lack generally. I will suggest that if you think maternalistic has positive connotations but paternalistic has negative, you should spend some time examining your implicit assumptions about men, women, parenting roles, etc and wonder exactly why you think the female-coded version of that word is not negative but the male-coded version is. FWIW: I'm an environmental studies major (as background for wanting to do urban planning) and I'm far from ignorant. If you weren't intending to insult me, leading with calling me paternalistic and ending with saying "...so people like you can keep ignorant..." seriously fails to achieve the stated intentions.

iwontberude 3y ago

I had this realization when I was like 8 years old. It goes to show how undemocratic our governments are that we still cannot get the leaders, who are more insulated from the effects, to act on our vulnerability.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> We currently are de facto breeding antibiotic resistant infections For my understanding, if no one else's: are there a lot of places without decent water, but with antibiotics? What's causing that strange inconsistency?

dralley 3y ago
Yes, absolutely. Proper water infrastructure is both difficult and expensive to develop, and requires constant maintenance. Antibiotic pills are cheap and easy to distribute.
akdor1154 3y ago
Anecdotal, but most towns in Vietnam you'd want to boil your water, and if you want antibiotics you go to the pharmacy, pay about $2, and get some. What's causing it? The free market is working great to build the systems to get drugs to people. In fact if a pharmacist refused to give out antibiotics when they weren't needed, the pharmacist would probably just go out of business because the customer would just head up the street to the next guy. The free market is not so hot at building expensive infrastructure like safe water in a tropical biome, that requires government involvement (not meaning to rag on SE Asian governments: building this stuff is difficult even if your country has been stable for the last 100 years, which is a luxury they haven't been lucky enough to have)
- junofan 3y ago
  I dunno if safe drinking water is a great example. There are many success stories both of public and private provisioning. It’s not rocket science. You need to: 1. Build, operate, and maintain wastewater treatment plants 2. Require everyone send their wastewater to a treatment plant Vietnam has a neat loophole for 2. where if you simply generate too much wastewater for your zone’s plant to handle, you don’t have to send it to the plant. That’s more a policy decision with a side of administrative corruption that’s unrelated to who’s handling the infra.
  - troupo 3y ago

finite_depth 3y ago

If only we had some sort of massive example that had killed literally a million Americans. Then maybe we'd learn. Oh well. Maybe when that happens.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
You are apparently shadow banned. I have vouched for your comment with some trepidation hoping you will clarify what incident or issue you mean.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  It's visible now, so your vouching worked. It seems obvious to me GP is writing about COVID-19. The US CDC lists estimated US deaths from COVID at currently 1,153,910. But we've had plenty of other examples in living memory, with influenza currently averaging about a million deaths in the US every 30 years.
- finite_depth 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm aware. Happens to all my comments. And as the other poster correctly guesses, this was a sarcastic reference to covid.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Thank you.

klyrs 3y ago

I assume a more cynical scenario: there's no way that governments haven't stockpiled a variety of horrible diseases (and their vaccines) for use in biological warfare. It isn't acceptable today, but what if somebody else moves first?