What? This has nothing to do with the rich. This is the tragedy of the commons - other fishers are allowed to use dynamite to fish extremely effectively, so the only way for you to make a living wage is to do the same.

I think its a general cultural disdain for the environment within some cultures.

Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.

This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.

If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?

The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.

> Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.

Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.

You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.

Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.

It's possible - just perhaps barely possible - that you might get a better reception from a more friendly audience if you didn't describe trade as theft. In the eyes of many, it robs your truthful, necessary, utterly critical message of credibility to the people who most need to internalize it.

It's not so much cultural disdain as weak governance and a current priority for jobs and economic growth over environmental protection. If 'enlightened' western countries really cared more about the environment perhaps they would impose more restrictions about the goods that they allow to be imported into their countries.

Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.

> The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level.

We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.

An average US citizen contributes far more to pollution than the average African or Asian.

The Philippines are catholic so birth control might actually be illegal, if the Catholic Church is concerned about the environment they need to promote birth control not present it as a cardinal sin. Countries like this the pope holds a heck of a lot of sway. He talks a good game about global warming but here is where the rubber meets the road. For the sake of the common good they need to shift the focus of sin from sex to wrecking the environment and causing overpopulation.

And what is the solution given that these people exist ? Because undoing that seems immoral now, even by non-catholic standards.

I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...

I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.

He’s talking about the millions of people not yet born.

When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging.

And what will happen to the country and the economy that sustains them if they "stop digging" ?

We'll have to figure that out, won't we? The Philippines birth rate is somewhere in the vicinity of 3 children per woman. What's a more sustainable number?

Economically, to take care of those ?

4

How did you come to that number and why do you think a double the replacement birth-rate can be sustained forever?

I would come to the number by calculating how people will support themselves and others, and yet have a reasonable load on them.

That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.

How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?

The first thing the world needs is to wrestle money from these billionaires and fund education for people.

Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.

Huh? Isn't Bill Gates spending his money strategically to best help those people. He's spent over $15 Billion dollars on vaccines. I highly doubt a government will be able to spend that money more effectively.

He is one of the very few oligarchs giving above and beyond the amount required for tax breaks.

It's funny to me because you're bitching about effective govt spending on the internet..a technology developed by the govt.

Id argue government funding has developed more cures for diseases and more technological advances than any other sources of funding in all of history.

NASA put a man on the moon..

This has everything 100% to do with the rich and inequality.

"Tragedy of the commons" is a total strawman.

You want to stop this from happening...give these people enough money to go to the grocery store or get trained for a job.

Its extremely simple.

Anytime some proposes a simple solution to a complex problem that nobody's been able to solve and calls it "simple", they're wrong. Who's going to give them money? Bill Gates? No, he's spending it curing malaria. Jeff Bezos? No, he's using his money for his rockets. You? No, you're using your money for whatever luxuries you indulge in. Once you find the people who're going to give away their money, how will you convince them to do so? Threaten violence? No, you'll get arrested. Steal it? No, you'll get arrested. Form a revolution and steal it? No, you don't have enough desperate people willing to give up their lives just so they'll be compelled to give their money to some strangers in another country.

Even if it succeeds, now you have a bunch of unskilled people who don't need to work. What will they do with their time? There's plenty of examples in the US and other countries of how that turns out.

Theres alot to unpack in what you just said. Not to mention your entire thesis is based on claims and assertions.

Who's going to give them money? Taxes?

Unskilled people who don't need to work? You missed my whole point about 'education' and 'training' so they can provide value to make money. I'm not giving anyone money. Just lower the ladder for them to climb up that the rich have pulled up behind them.

Many rich people are rich because they employ people and profit from it. Many rich people are rich because they own real wealth and not (just) money. Rich people are not the problem. Rich people are no excuse for doing bad things.

Poverty is no excuse for doing bad things.

Deficient morality leads to bad actions and bad constraints.

Change requires change. Understanding who and what to blame is an improvement. Becoming vegan is an improvement. Voting for better politicians is an improvement.

Become vegan and vote? Thats the whitest most privileged first world solution I've ever heard.

There's around 3 billion people in the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from. Should they also recycle?

They are not concerned with abstract concepts like morality when their fundamental survival is at stake.

You, me, anyone would kill someone to feed their kid without a second thought. Dyanamiting fish is NOTHING to these people.

>Many rich people are rich because they employ people and profit from it.

Correction: Without proper regulations, Rich people EXPLOIT people in subhuman wages/conditions to make insane profit.

>Many rich people are rich because they own real wealth and not (just) money. Rich people are not the problem. Rich people are no excuse for doing bad things.

You basically just said "rich people aren't the problem" with no evidence for that claim. You have not sufficiently made the case that rich people aren't the problem.

Vegan food is the cheapest food and the most efficient food with regard to natural resources in the Philippines. Eating meat is a tradition and a personal choice but not a requirement in the Philippines.

Maybe several millions but not billions of people are hunters or farmers living in barren locations were only grass and shrubs grow well and thus animal products are needed. Too often land is stolen for animal farming. Too often deserts are created by animal farming. Animal farming is maybe the most important activity promoting global warming.

Regarding rich people:

-) Why not become rich yourself instead of working for rich people ? You can not do anything else than work for rich people ? Thus rich people are not the problem.

-) Except for Swaziland and North Korea, all (AFAIK) poor states in the world are democratic states were people vote for those in power. Thus the rich minority or the 10% or the 1% is not the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_monarchy#Contemporary...

So true, yet we largely agree that the broadest shoulders should beat the largest load... ie. progressive taxes.

We should do more of that to fight poverty, as that will hopefully mitigate things like this.

I’d argue: the problem with progressive taxes is ... ok, the problem with taxes as a means of wealth transfer is it puts the money in the hands of politicians, who are themselves already wealthy, to spend on behalf of their drinking buddies.

I don’t believe these problems are solvable in the strict sense, but they are fun to critique.

Sometimes you just have to fight even though you expect to lose.

Edit: spelling.

*lose

Who am I kidding, I simply gave up on getting people to know the difference between "loose" and "lose".

Very true! We’ve had some great wins over the ages.

As a stereotypically apathetic Australian: those who can be bothered fighting the good fight certainly have my supportive clicks!

Thanks. I agree that we should have the morality to defend Human Rights and to not tolerate poverty.

Unfortunately no state in the world respects the Human Rights for its citizens.

http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/human-rights/

IMO not progressive taxes but progressive economics and progressive politics should be implemented.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2X_Ywepzm46_uGJDfRjYeQ/vid...

IMO in a perfect world, there would be no tax and no debt but a moral government that distributes money as needed to private persons and not to banks by the central bank and by bailout programs.

E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the...

Perfect worlds are, probably, the worst of all possible outcomes.

It is unfortunate that how the world is conducted at any point in time is largely a result of the choices of those with the most power to bring about their desires.

So it has always been and so shall it always be.

> It is unfortunate that how the world is conducted at any point in time is largely a result of the choices of those with the most power to bring about their desires.

This is scary but true. Why are human beings so primitive?

Could it at the same time be, that the less wealthy people are getting more influencial?

Certainly, democracy have made this happen... Certainly, media have made politicians more accountable... So while sure it might look bleak on a scale of 10-15 years, I would argue we are better off than in the 70ties :)

Generally, you exchange wealth for goods made from natural resources.

If half the wealth is tied up in 8 people who could not possibly spend it, what do you think would happen to the earth's natural resources if it were suddenly dumped on the bottom 3 billion? It would be a huge boon to the economy at first, until we burnt through every resource.

What does that even mean? Are you saying that once money is spent it's gone forever?

Are you trying to say that if you buy a fishing boat with money you borrowedfrom Warren Buffett, then dynamiting the fish is understandable, but if you borrow from the ABC Pension Fund it's not?

I'm trying to say that with less inequality and more resources available to them, these people could go to the grocery store to feed their family, or go to school to get a profession...

Its not a complex idea at all.

Not a complex idea.

But it sounds as if you're trying to blame eight rich people, when you yourself have your henchmen, oops, your fund managers do the same thing. (I assume you're trying to get a maximum interest for your own pension savings?)

Everytime I see this argument I shake my head at the naivety. People with high net worth are so because they have capital tied up in assets. Nobody is rich because they hoard liquid money.

Say you distribute a rich man's investments in risky instruments to a community living in a remote, impoverished land. Now each investment becomes infinitely less useful because they are not part of a portfolio, it may be difficult to find a buyer for them. Next, how does the community in the remote land trade them, seeing as they live so far from a market?

This is a structural issue of capitalism and not something that anyone can boil down to some greed of the rich. For as long as populations do not see the need to pass laws regulating wealth, capitalist countries will always develop high inequality.

Those 8 people must work really hard to have earned all that money.

They worked hard to get born to rich parents.

You have very low margin for being called "rich" in that case. Some of the top richest people were born in quite average Westerners family.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_life_and_educ...

Not to compare what average lives are but

>He accepted an estimated 300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon

This is the exact difference between someone who works and someone who is handed money to do work. I don't know if Amazon would be alive without this transaction, but it sure helped that Bezos was given 300k by his parents.

Can you explain the causal link between those rich people's greed and this fishing technique? Is it because rich people enabled dynamite to be produced cheaply enough for them?

I'll explain it.

Maybe not _those_ 8 rich people, but generally Western nations were made rich by exploiting the tragedy of the commons. Oil and other mining are the classic examples.

Why should we expect these poor, poor fishermen to prioritize our poor, poor planet over their poor, poor families when our own rich got that way through exploitation of natural resources and pollution?

Wasn't every nation? Europe and China have lost almost all their forests. Pre-European New Zealand natives exterminated the giant flightless moa. There was a powerful ancient African civilization that died out because they used up all the artesian water. I'd say nobody cared about conservation until rich people we comfortable enough to stop worrying about their next meal and look at broader issues.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted. You're 100% right.

I specifically mention the West because it is the West (the EU) who are pressuring the Philippines to better regulate their fishing industry, as per the fine article, and also because it is the West who are now comfortable enough to worry about the tragedy of the commons since they are done exploiting it.

BTW, elsewhere I just read that the amount of forests in England has now recovered above the levels recorded in Domesday Book (William Conqueror's land survey in 1086).

Same's happening in many countries in Europe. I have a picture of my birth home, taken in 1903 from a nearby hill. The landscape is mostly bare, almost everything except the actual fields is used for cattle. Now you can't take a picture like that. Almost everything is covered by a forest, but you can't see it from the trees growing on the hill.

Surprising! But now it sounds like rich people are regrowing the forests that the poor people of earlier centuries destroyed. Evidence that rich people help the environment and poor people harm it. Still no sign of the harm that the grandparent claimed rich people are doing to the environment.

England might have been lucky enough (blessed with rain and all). Southern France and Greece, not so much, and will probably never recover pre-roman empire forests.

If there's not enough rain to sustain a forest, then even should they have been left untouched in antiquity they wouldn't be there anymore now either right?

Where I live, you can't really destroy a forest. You can hack it down and lay concrete over the ground; if you then leave it there, in a matter of decades or centuries it'll be a forest again, if you don't regularly weed it out and hack it down again.

If climate changes - as it has changed in the Mediterranean, prior to industrialisation - that's then different.

I don’t know, so their children and grandchildren will have fish to catch and live off of?

As opposed to eating today? As per the fine article, legal fishing methods net 0-6 KG of fish per day. Explosive fishing nets 15-45 KG of fish per day.

...because the area has been overfished.

> In the Philippines, stocks have declined precipitously. According to a report by the Philippine national statistics board, the average daily catch in 1970 was 45 pounds. By 2000, that had dropped to 4.5 pounds.

It's because "richness" creates a pathologically competitive social system that encourages this sort of destruction activity in order to get the token that conveys value.

I’m going to argue pathologically competitive people are the causative factor rather than richness itself.

I'm going to argue that lack of resources(caused by inequality) makes people pathologically competitive.

You mean rich people are to blame for poor people destroying their environment because the rich people set an example for poor people to aspire to? Have you got a suggestion for a way to solve that problem other than what the Khmer Rouge did?

I have. Forbid poor people from becoming rich. By keeping them in fixed economic classes, they won't have the motivation to compete so hard and then the fish will be saved. There are obvious bad side effects of this. Can you improve on it?

How efficient have rich people made the economies of 3rd world countries?

Exactly. Rich people literally put the dynamite in these people’s hands. That is the only plausible and widely accepted explanation for inequality, and kudos to you for advancing it.