-----Original Message----- From: Brad De Long <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, December 03, 1998 12:45 PM Subject: Re: World Bank memos
>>Dear Doug and the LBOers,
>>
>>Tom Kruse pretty much lays out in his description of a Bolivian glass
factory
>>the idea that I was trying to get across in an earlier post on the same
>>subject.
>>
>>The factory that Tom describes has no pollution control and this is
reflected
>>in both the unsafe conditions and the general environment of the site.
Worker
>>safety and health are nonexistent. I'd be willing to bet that their are
more
>>deadly conditions present than Tom's tour picked up on---things that we
know
>>about in this country that they are ignorant of in Bolivia. Ignorance can
be
>>bliss, it also can kill you.
>
>Yes. That's the big and powerful argument against Enzo's point: the workers
>aren't qualified to judge the risks of going to work in the dark satanic
>mills, the bosses aren't likely to tell them, and the executive of the
>modern state... is a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie.
Hey, wait: you omitted a most important part of Tom L.'s post:
>> So that makes me think that the business community is stupid and greedy.
The
>> engineering community is ignorant and incompetent. The government is
military
>> feudal. And the countries philosophy is pre-reformation.
The most polluted places are those who haven't yet reached a sufficiently developed stage, be they ruled by right-wing dictatorships, or by socialist (China, URSS) or social-democratic (India) governments. Rich countries, be they California or Singapore, can afford paying the costs of cleaning up. If you can provide a *realistic* path from a subsistence economy to the Information Age, skipping the "Dickens phase", I'm ready to follow you. But this time it must work for real: even if the enemy is bad, ugly and unfair.
Enzo