Wealth is in the eye of the holder, agreed. What wealth we can mirror is what wealth we can appreciate.

Let’s go wide and deep, so that the allure of sharing health and the joy of composting toilets is communicable and mirror-able by all!

Vinay, I liked your writing

One excerpt from it:

“There is one proviso: according to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute individual developing-world consumers will only leapfrog to technologies which are already deployed by the rich. Everybody wants an “American Toilet” not a urine-separating or composting one. Consumer preference is “do as the rich do” and there’s not much we can do about it, even if we know that “the rich” are doing it in a poor, expensive, messy way. Other solutions may be ecologically better, but poor consumers are usually no more ecologically motivated than rich ones are, and often less. That’s damned inconvenient, but may not constrain institutional investment quite so much. Individuals may want the loud flush and the gleaming porcelain for their own house, but most people do not care how their school is lit or cooled”

Sam writes: The way that I read the above through my biases, that are based on thinking about things through Bio-Psycho-Social theories, is that core problem is how people define in their mind what “wealthy” actually is. And, how that peception is re-inforced by whatever mass media trickles to these people.

What if they had rich and engaging mediums that showed them a different kind of wealth? One that is based more on their core values, and less on those of the industrial world. That shows what is possible and available for them, and also shows them the darker sides of what we have in the industrial world, where following that path would likely lead them. The point I make here is that it is possible to reframe what “wealth” and “luxury” is for people.

I see their (developing world) perception is something like a toxic waste byproduct of mass media and commercialization need to entice and entice people here to spend more and more. This toxic waste posions the perceptions in people’s minds of what a “good” life is. Because, most of these ads, tv shows, etc are designed to appeal to base emotions and influence people in that way, a “commercial” psychology. You can either teach people to decipher these messages and understand what they really mean, or you can create a competing message (which is what David Korten proposes to do, BTW)

Leaving this out turns the world into consumers, and sets up a dialogue that allows Leapfrogging to be pursued by centralized industries as a simple market expansion goal.

In many cases, with regard to health and human welfare limited services, this is useful. Shipping welfare vaccines in sufficient amounts, or vitamin rich calories. This is especially useful in a time limited sense, though.

In other cases, though, the reliance on cost structuring from international subsidization of import products creates the illusion that foreign production may be cheaper or better for a local economy.

Many local economies can ill afford the choice right now, so it has to be a mix, but some priority must be placed on enabling local production of all required tools and products.

I don’t expect household and informal production to
completely supplant factory production. But Ralph Borsodi argued that
some two-thirds of what we consume could be most efficiently produced
using small-scale electrically powered machinery in the household, and
I believe he would have agreed that much of the other third could have
been best produced in small factories serving local markets.

What he envisioned, as he described it, was a shift in production of
most of the goods we consume from the factory to small-scale machine
production in the household, with relatively small factories existing
mainly to produce the small-scale household machinery rather than to
produce consumer goods for direct consumption.

There are some forms of production that require extremely large scale,
like the kind of heavy engine block IC engine that has prevailed in
the auto industry since WWII, the large jet aircraft, and the
microprocessor. But with the removal of all subsidies, I’d expect the
production of passenger and cargo jets to virtually disappear, because
they simply won’t pay for themselves in a free market. The fraction
of existing long-distance shipping that would survive in a
decentralized economy would probably rely almost entirely on
railroads. I would also expect the demand for automobiles of
present-day design to shrink by more than an order of magnitude, as we
moved toward walkable communities and the use of light rail for travel
between communities, and much lighter electric vehicles were
sufficient for the remaining functions of transporting people from
rural areas into town or transporting goods from railheads to retail
outlets. Microprocessors are probably most problematic, but a shift
to reprogrammable chips will probably reduce primary production to a
small fraction of the market, with most of the need being supplied by
the recycling of chips from old appliances in the same way a major
part of present-day steel needs are met by small mini-mills recycling
scrap metal.

And in almost all other industries besides that tiny handful, the
prevailing firm and plant size is far, far beyond the optimum for
meeting economies of scale. So we could get the vast majority of what
we presently consume, more efficiently, with the largest scale of
production being a small factory serving a local market area of a
hundred thousand people or so–and most production being carried out
at the level of household and neighborhood or small town. IMO, once
we reach a minimum threshold of technical development (say, that of
the industrialized West in the 1950s), the single biggest factor in
quality of life is the balance between work and leisure. With an end
to subsidized waste and to the portion of commodity price that
reflects embedded rents on IP and other forms of artificial property,
I’d expect the average workweek to be one or two days. That’s an
immense improvement in quality of life, even if we have to give up
SUVs and use composting toilets.

“I attempted to leave the following comment at Kelley’s post, before I
realized it was an old one and comments are apparently closed:

The problem with your argument is that history may not be a reliable guide.

What you say is true, so long as centralized infrastructure and
large-scale, capital-intensive, corporate-owned industry remain viable
and accessible.

But leapfrogging to decentralized, ephemeral systems may be the only
viable option if adopting the older style of centralized
infrastructure and capital-intensive production becomes unsustainable.

I expect that we’re in the early stages of a number of dovetailing
crises that will render the old kind of large-scale, industrial
capitalism unsustainable: Peak Oil; assorted other input crises
resulting from the inevitable economic law that demand for subsidized
inputs (like long-distance shipping) outstrips the state’s fiscal
resources for providing them; and the realization crisis facing
capitalism, as described by Michel Bauwens, resulting from the growing
unsustainability of IP-based business models.

I believe state capitalism is hitting the wall of resource and input
crises at the very time small-scale production technology of the kind
Borsodi, Mumford and Bookchin envisioned is approaching a singularity.
The latter singularity will mean the feasibility of shifting ever
greater amounts of production from wage labor to the informal and
household economies, which may be extremely welcome as a safety net
when the old industrial economy stagnates and runs out of gas.

The old centralized industry, to put it bluntly, may not be there.
And the “small is beautiful” stuff may be all that’s left.”