From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jul 22 2001 - 21:10:39 MDT
Olga writes
>> From: Miriam English
>> Oh, of course, how silly of me! And here I thought it was to do with
>> colonisation and rape of lands, accidents of geography, desertification,
>> aftermath of wars, and so on that caused third world countries to be
>> underdeveloped.
>
> Seems to me there is no one explanation to the dilemma of disparity. I got
> some insights from Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" ...
Yes, that is an absolutely terrific book. He says things that
were simply beyond the pale twenty years ago. (By the way, thanks
for the correction of "vail" to "vale" as in "vale of tears".)
> ... It is interesting to speculate how so-called underdeveloped countries
> will reap benefits from technology in the future. Will there ever be an
> equalization of brains, beauty, brawn and beaucoup bucks?
I think not. At least the pattern in the history of wealth
distribution has been (over a big historical average), the
greater the total wealth, the greater the difference between
the typical rich and the typical poor. The Pareto distribution,
if I recall correctly---much used by economists to model wealth
distributions---has as a characteristic that the ratio of the
very wealthiest to the poorest increases inexorably with wealth.
But I don't really care so much; just so long as the poor also
get richer.
In the future, there will be those who upload and then transform
themselves at a dizzying speed into something of no real resemblance
to their former selves and who will leave those of us who are more
cautious in the dust. Likewise, those of us who cautiously upload,
and prudently run lots of more primitive versions of ourselves
in the background, will leave far behind the Amish, or even those
that have a less burning desire to become more intelligent.
Thus disparity (and diversity) will increase.
Lee
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