Kevin Kelly takes a look at some farm houses under construction in remote areas of Yunnan province China:
They were not unusual; farmsteads this size were everywhere in rural China. Note the scale of these massive buildings. Each support post is cut from a single huge tree. The massive earth walls are three stories high and taper toward the top. They are homes for a single extended family built in the traditional Tibetan farmhouse style. They are larger than most middle-class American homes. The extensive wood carvings inside and outside will be painted in garish colors, like this family room shown in a finished home. This area of Yunnan is consider one of the poorer areas in China, and the standard of living of the inhabitants here would be classified as “poor.”
Part of the reason is that these homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don’t even have outhouses.
But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.
Robert Gordon asks, Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?, and answers, yes, because our current information revolution is obviously not as important as previous industrial revolutions:
With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?
[...]
I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for Option A is so obvious.
To the farmers in rural China, Option A is not obvious at all.
These houses must have some form of generated power. How do they charge their cellphones?
There are still a fair few farmhouses here (SW France) that aren’t that modern. I’ve seen them without water and electricity, but there’s always a well outside or sometimes in the basement. They’ve nearly all been modernized at some point in the last 50 years. There are still a few unmodernized, but they’d be rarely occupied. Gotta have that TV.
The outdoor toilet without a light used to be seen a few times in Sydney rentals when I was a student. The DIY boom has removed most of those by now I suspect.
They have solar chargers for their phones.
They may have petrol or diesel generators for larger tasks, although I’m wondering how much of modern life needs more than solar charging. The washing machine, for sure, but maybe they do hand washing.
This guy is an interesting read, although there’s something embarrassing about reading about someone working way harder than me.
Still, it does say something about how you measure standard of living.
With option A you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t drink. Option B is that you can drink as much fire-water as you like, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets.
To the American Indians, Siberian natives etc , Option A was not obvious at all. (…)
Most of the hunter-gatherer tribes didn’t have such access to resources as these Yunnan farmers, but even in their poorer environment they still chose to use their meager cash to buy vast amounts of alcohol over the benefits of investment in agriculture, education or manufacturing. Drink before work. It is an almost universal choice.
So if people value the benefits of vodka so much why don’t we see this value reflected in the growth of the economy?
That is the question!
The report released Thursday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found 11.7 percent of deaths among Native Americans and Alaska Natives between 2001 and 2005 were alcohol-related, compared with 3.3 percent for the U.S. as a whole.
What depresses me most is that they can afford to lavishly decorate their buildings and we, apparently, cannot. Their decorations are not to my taste, but at least it doesn’t look like a competition to make the ugliest, dingiest building that can still stand up.
It does exude old-world craftsmanship. I can’t imagine how much the lumber alone would cost in the US.