Typical Youthful Misconception
I was drawn to read this because I too spent a fair amount of time travelling around India as a younger pup, was beguiled by it and have a pang in my heart from afar over the terrorist attack yesterday in Bombay. But this stuck out:
"When there's no rain, that means there's no water, which means there's no flushing toilets and plenty of cold water bucket baths (which are actually quite nice in the heat). It means that doing daily things requires more thought and planning. Disposing of a tampon is a pain. You don't let the water run for no reason--ever! The other day the warden of the apartment complex told us the water would be on for one hour. It was like Christmas. It has made me realise how wasteful we are in 'the West'. Wars will be fought about water, and we leave the taps on, steep ourselves in bubble baths, wallow in extravagant pools--water is precious."
Water is indeed precious, that is why in the West smart people have applied themselves to making sure we have access to plentiful amounts of it, and our political and economic systems are setup to enable that. Now, I know India is a dry place, but you would be hard pressed to convince me that we have vastly more water available here in the US to "waste" than over there. What we have is a greater capacity to convert available but unusable water to usable water. What we have is modern collection and distribution infrastructure, advanced filtration and purification technologies, and the standard of living to pay for ample, clean water thus rewarding those who can solve the inherent challenges of utilizing a scarce resource. Under a less open political and economic system, we might not have all that water. We do not "waste" water in the West, rather we go to great lengths to create vast amounts of it in usable form and we then use it in direct relation to its subsequent availability. What we take for granted is not water, but the democratic free market capitalist system that enable us to convert precious, scarce resource into abundant everyday commodities.
India is emerging from decades of statist control of the economy and corruption so deeply imbedded that it has choked individual enterprise of any meaningful scale off in the crib. Hopefully that will change and the millions of incredibly smart and talented Indians will be free to surmount their water shortage by way of free enterprise and diffuse self-interested actions emerging as order. Bastiat said, "Paris gets fed." Hopefully someday we can say that "Bombay gets washed."
You can forgive a young person this error, I would have likely said the same silly thing in my younger days of wanderlust.
"When there's no rain, that means there's no water, which means there's no flushing toilets and plenty of cold water bucket baths (which are actually quite nice in the heat). It means that doing daily things requires more thought and planning. Disposing of a tampon is a pain. You don't let the water run for no reason--ever! The other day the warden of the apartment complex told us the water would be on for one hour. It was like Christmas. It has made me realise how wasteful we are in 'the West'. Wars will be fought about water, and we leave the taps on, steep ourselves in bubble baths, wallow in extravagant pools--water is precious."
Water is indeed precious, that is why in the West smart people have applied themselves to making sure we have access to plentiful amounts of it, and our political and economic systems are setup to enable that. Now, I know India is a dry place, but you would be hard pressed to convince me that we have vastly more water available here in the US to "waste" than over there. What we have is a greater capacity to convert available but unusable water to usable water. What we have is modern collection and distribution infrastructure, advanced filtration and purification technologies, and the standard of living to pay for ample, clean water thus rewarding those who can solve the inherent challenges of utilizing a scarce resource. Under a less open political and economic system, we might not have all that water. We do not "waste" water in the West, rather we go to great lengths to create vast amounts of it in usable form and we then use it in direct relation to its subsequent availability. What we take for granted is not water, but the democratic free market capitalist system that enable us to convert precious, scarce resource into abundant everyday commodities.
India is emerging from decades of statist control of the economy and corruption so deeply imbedded that it has choked individual enterprise of any meaningful scale off in the crib. Hopefully that will change and the millions of incredibly smart and talented Indians will be free to surmount their water shortage by way of free enterprise and diffuse self-interested actions emerging as order. Bastiat said, "Paris gets fed." Hopefully someday we can say that "Bombay gets washed."
You can forgive a young person this error, I would have likely said the same silly thing in my younger days of wanderlust.
posted by Donny Baseball at 9:02 AM
2 Comments:
Does this mean that we natually become better thinkers with age and experience? If not, then what's the missing ingredient(s)?
Reflection. How much time in your younger years did you really think things through, hard, in-depth, intensely. Me, not much. Those years there was too much other stuff to distract me from rigorous thought. All I need was a superficial understanding, just enough to sound intelligent. Now things are different, there is too much at stake personally to let distractions prevent me from a deeper understanding of things.
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