by
The Baffler
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It is still common to hear of a division between absolute and relative poverty. But poverty is always both relative and absolute. In a monetized economy, an individual’s relative lack of income can result in absolute deprivation. ($1.90, whatever it is worth in sub-Saharan Africa, can’t purchase three meals in most other parts of the world.) This is not reflected by the World Bank’s poverty line, one reason why its numbers are so low. In 2016, the economist Robert Allen proposed in an independent report that the World Bank instead measure poverty based on the resources needed to purchase basic necessities of subsistence. In theory, this would make the Bank once again recognize poor people in Thailand, Turkey, and Romania—countries where, according to the $1.90 line, poverty has been entirely banished.
there you go!! been saying this
In July, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat. The wealthiest large society on earth, built on perhaps its most favorable geography, is home to a mass of people living off tins of collected food. In the end, it is not the particularity of “Third World” poverty that matters, but the community of degradation the links the poor of the world’s periphery and of its developed metropolises. The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. The most dangerous effect of the happy talk about eradicating poverty is the complacency it encourages. It gives a blessing to the system that promises more of the same.
The island still collects no income tax, and abandoned mansions litter the coast. Having depleted their previous revenue streams, the Nauruan government is looking for a new way to make money—and, for sponsoring states, deep sea mining could mean quite a bit of money. But it also entails a certain amount of risk. The whole point of requiring a sponsoring state, rather than just allowing private companies to mine the sea at will, is that the state will be held co-responsible for any potential environmental damages, which could be staggering. Back when the Law of the Sea was first written, Matt Gianni says, “they thought these nodules were a renewable resource. That they would form as quickly or even more quickly than you can find them. A bit like Thomas Huxley, back in the 1800s, saying it’s impossible to overfish the ocean.”
Technically, the nodules are a renewable resource, but they take an incomprehensible amount of time to form. Ocean currents carry dissolved metals across the abyssal zone until they collect around a nucleus—a shark’s tooth, for example, or a fragment of whale bone—and coagulate in concentric circles. Dense, black rock slowly begins to appear. The nodules grow only a few centimeters every million years, and no one is totally sure how they remain perched atop the seabed, unobscured by falling sediment, which accretes much faster. Geologists suspect it has to do with the feeding patterns of starfish.
arghhh
When I ask Barron if he is planning on triggering the rule, he demurs. “Well, it’s not for us to trigger, it would be for the member state to trigger,” he says. “Do I think a drop dead date would be useful for the development of this industry? Yes, I do.” We talked about why Nauru had been chosen as a sponsor state to begin with. I wanted to know if it was because of the island nation’s general disarray—a 2018 report from the Lowry Institute for International Policy stated that “Nauru has recently lurched towards authoritarianism”—or if he was looking to avoid the kind of pushback that DeepGreen’s predecessor, Nautilus Minerals, got from the indigenous people of their sponsoring state, Papua New Guinea. Barron becomes uncomfortable. Everything with Nauru was completely transparent and aboveboard, he insists. “I just thought it would be an interesting story to have one of the smallest economies sponsoring one of the most ambitious ideas,” he says. “Because these small nations, you know, have a voice, but it doesn’t get heard.”
lol
But what is killing the state is not overdevelopment or lousy public planning or even climate change. It is the persistence of certain ghosts. If California-in-flames is at the forefront of the Anthropocene, which by one scholarly definition is the age in which “humans in their attempt to conquer nature have inadvertently become a major force in its destruction,” then the key word is not humans—because not all of us were involved in the attempt—but conquer. California is where Anglo-European settlement of the Americas came up against the hard edge of the continent. This is where the conquest ended, and where it bounces back.
Five years earlier, when organized groups of Anglo settlers first began to trickle in over the Sierra Nevada mountains, scholars estimate that fewer than four hundred “foreigners” were living in what was still the Mexican state of Alta California. The newcomers, who in the eyes of the Mexican authorities were illegal immigrants with no valid claims on the land, made their homes in a vast territory already inhabited by about eight thousand Californios, as the state’s Mexican citizens were known, and more than a hundred thousand Indians. They were not content to share it. In June 1846, unaware that President James K. Polk had already declared war on Mexico, a small band of settlers, supported by the dashing Army captain and genocidaire John C. Frémont, took up arms against the Mexican government. On arriving, Bryant promptly organized a company of volunteers and joined Frémont’s troop.
Land speculation, tamed into what we unironically call “real estate”—for what could be less real than an earth emptied of all but monetary value?—would remain one of the state’s dominant economic motors. It is not hard to draw a straight line from the settler hustles of early statehood to the inequities that map California today. James Irvine arrived in 1849 and figured out he could make more money selling goods to miners than by mining himself. He funneled his profits into San Francisco real estate and Mexican land grants in southern California, ultimately holding title to about one hundred thousand acres. In the late twentieth century much of that land, still owned by the Irvine Company, would be subdivided into “master-planned communities” throughout what had by then become suburban Orange County. The Irvine Company now owns sixty-five thousand apartments and forty shopping centers and has been a major financial supporter of groups organized to defend California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that froze property taxes, hobbling the state’s ability to fund education, health care, and public housing. Legitimated by a century and a half of dedicated lawyers, legislators, and lobbyists, the grifts are subtler these days, but the results are the same: vast wealth remains in a few, very powerful hands.
pano bg - old money to marry into
If I, like Raymond Moody, had learned to my own satisfaction that the soul is real and life is eternal, would I really rush to convene an association of “interested researchers”? I didn’t think so. I’d take up skydiving or scripture. I would not submit my divine revelation for peer review. After all, religious experience has never drawn its power from rational discourse but from the fact that rational discourse has always felt insufficient to explain it. The very notion of “proof of Heaven” is inimical to faith, which depends on the absence of certainty, on a leap into the unknown. Even if you could reconcile epiphanic experience with science, it wasn’t clear to me why you needed to.
I don’t recognize the Mayses in Wolfe’s analysis of the 1970s. They might have been New Agers, but they certainly weren’t narcissists; Suzanne spent years playing therapeutic music for people in palliative care[*]. I did, however, recognize a familiar brand of cynicism. Permeating Wolfe’s assessment of the Me Decade is a contempt for utopian thinking of any kind. He makes no distinction between left utopianism and old-fashioned holy rolling—both, in his mind, are expressions of the same self-obsessed irrationalism. In Wolfe’s analysis, class consciousness had become a joke by the 1970s; the New Left always was one. The utopian politics of the previous decade—of the previous century—had just been the comedic setup for the punchline of the New Age. It’s not an uncommon view. From the standpoint of secular liberalism, utopian beliefs—whether in a worker’s paradise or the Kingdom of God—all flow from the same cracked pot. Religion, despite the supposed Great Awakening of the 1970s, has been in steady decline for sixty years. Marxism strikes many Americans as, at best, an embarrassing anachronism, not much different from believing in spirit mediums or psychics. And yet wages are more or less the same as they were in 1978; income inequality is on the rise; young generations enjoy far worse financial prospects than their parents; the list goes on. Most Americans have discarded the idea of paradise, and yet we’ve come no closer to achieving it here on Earth.
The IANDS may exist to give scientific legitimacy to the claims of near-death experiencers, but I suspect most of its members would believe in Heaven even if it didn’t. Their belief isn’t predicated on scientific research but on the essential strangeness of life and death; I thought again of Chris Kito in his little blue hospital socks, almost killed by a peanut and flooded with love. To my mind, NDEs aren’t proof of Heaven, but they do prove that nearness to death changes you, rearranges your sense of the possible. And so it does. I stopped believing in God in my furtive way after my dad died—some switch was flipped, and that high clear tone, a frequency I could once hear, went dead. God was there and then he wasn’t; my dad was alive and then he wasn’t. And yet the world seems vaster and stranger than I had fully accounted for. Even now, I sometimes let myself imagine running into my dad at the grocery store—I turn the corner and spot him in the dairy aisle, wearing sweatpants with suspenders and trundling along with his shopping cart. Just plainly there, unremarkably alive. To see him resurrected in an Acme would confound my sense of reality, but I’m not sure it would be any more confounding than his death. On any scale, death feels arbitrary and inexplicable. It shouldn’t happen, so when it does, you get to thinking that anything might.