EDITORIAL: "Can the World Afford a Middle Class? Yes, but it will be awfully expensive," by Moises Naim, Foreign Policy, March/April 2008, p. 96.
Interesting piece.
First lines lay down the challenge:
The middle class in poor countries is the fastest-growing segment of the world's population. While the total population of the planet will increase by about 1 billion people in the next 12 years, the ranks of the middle class will swell by as many as 1.8 billion. Of these new members of the middle class, 600 million will be in China.
By 2025, Naim points out, China's middle class will be the biggest in the world, which means the middle-class ideology, sentiment, worldview of the Chinese will be an important input to global consciousness. Shaping that, I would think, and as oddly as this sounds, would be of huge interest to the Chinese Communist Party.
Naim runs with the food price rise issue, which he points out is not about less food but more people affording more and better (meaning intensive in creation) food.
The food price index compiled by the Economist, we are told, is higher than it's been since 1845, soaring 30 percent last year alone.
Before I rush to the revolutionary tones of 1848, that 30% rise tells me the global ag market is being caught unawares on some level. You'll see a response to this.
But the underlying general resource draw from Asia is undeniable. As Naim points out, China adds more electricity generation in 2005 than Britain uses in a year.
Malthus is raised at the end, but Naim is smart to avoid indulging there, because the record sucks on that model, but only after your society gets seriously turned on to the potential of markets and its culture embraces that sort of ideology that says: getting ahead is the way to go.
That's a serious middle class ideology in and of itself, so again, with the big growth happening in China, it'll be interesting to see how that version of the ideology unfolds and does it shape similar gains elsewhere around the planet? Pitched just so, it could either help or hinder the world's overall adjustment to all this extra wealth, making the environmental aspect, for example, a whole lot easier or a whole lot harder.
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