Planet of Slums

I have to say that I’ve pretty much never thought about any of this. Davis brings up many good points. I feel like our country is so industrialized and developed that we would never have a problem like this. But the more I think about it, people do seem too crowded in their living situations and it’s only going to get worse. Davis makes his point very clear in the first couple paragraphs. He says “For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred.” Before reading this article, this honestly meant nothing to me and I didn’t realize how this could possibly affect us in years coming.

Davis makes many good points in his article about our global population. I always knew that the rural areas were less populated but never thought that the cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population since 1950 and it continues to grow. He talks about the countryside reaching its maximum population and will begin to shrink after 2020. Basically, every one’s going to move into the urban communities or the “slums.” What I found really interesting in this article was the talk about the slums. Davis says, “slums is also unusual in its intellectual honestly. One of the researchers associated…… defining the problem of global slums not as a result of globalization and inequality but rather as a result of “bad governance…… the primary direction of both national and international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their efforts to use cities as engines of growth.” I find that very interesting considering that these interventions were supposed to help but completely failed.
Davis has really got me thinking about this urban population problem. I think we all need to think about it but when thinking of ideas to stop this problem just seems crazy to me. I don’t think there’s a way to deal with this problem, to be completely honest.

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Davis- Planet of Slums

First I would like to say this essay really made some good points and talked about things that I have never thought of or put together. At the start of his essay he makes his point very clear; the world’s population is being forced into smaller and smaller areas to live where the only way of life is to live in a slum in some mega cities. The time is even coming for the small rural towns; soon everything will merge close to one another or at least the mega cities will be where someone is going to have to live to survive. Davis states that “The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecision’s of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred”. Davis puts out a view of the world around us and it does not look so good and he makes it clear that it is only getting worse with time.

He then goes on to explain that there are limits and those limits have been broken for years and are bound to get worse before they get better. He states “In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960” which is crazy to even begin to think about and apply to the world around you. The majority of humanity live in a urban area and because of that places like China, Brazil and India only kind of equal the population of Europe plus North America and they is little room for the people that currently live there (Davis). Small cities and towns now have to deal with converting to the urban feeling of life. The urban are the poorest in the world and in some places of the world those people are living in environments that are unsafe, unsanitary and are breeding grounds for disease and death. In one part of this essay Davis suggest that some of these urban slums are comparable to Victorian London and it is the modern developed world. Davis explains the mass amount of growth in terms that when you think about it you kind of get a feeling that you wish you could have heard these years ago or go back and change history. He makes one see what is going to happen. He references research and science that has been proven to show that the more we grow as a global population the worse for humankind. It is not natural to grow in numbers that we cannot globally sustain.
Davis goes on to say that the urban slums are built upon economic, political and ways of government that seem to keep those in the slums there. They might not be meaning to but with the growth of the population and the way the economy is today the only way a good majority of people can survive is by moving into the slums or the cities, and towns next to the cities. Some are even forced to move to the largest parts of the cities where the feel like they can stay a float in the world around them. Davis gives great examples and one of the ones I think fit well and will bring the point home for the whole essay is when he is states that
“Slums is also unusual in its intellectual honesty. One of the researchers associated with the report told me that ‘the “Washington Consensus” types (World Bank, IMF, etc.) have always insisted on defining the problem of global slums not as a result of globalization and inequality but rather as a result of “bad governance”.’ The new report, however, breaks with traditional UN circumspection and self-censorship to squarely indict neoliberalism, especially the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes.[24] ‘The primary direction of both national and international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their efforts to use cities as engines of growth”.
He is saying that slums are created and maintained and they are not going any where soon. Countries are struggling to survive but without the slums they would be dying and would be with even less resources, or at least they fear. The point Davis is trying to make is that being aware is a good thing, because of course someone needs to see the problem, but can we fix it? It might just be too late to fix what society has created and we might as well just ride it out, I think that Davis is suggesting the same thing. How would we live without mega cities with million people populations?

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Massive Global Income Inequality

Firebaugh starts out by citing classical economists like Thomas Malthus who during the time of the Industrial Revolution thought that humans across the globe would suffer low levels of income and living in the future. To make a point, he goes on to note that the truth is actually quite the opposite. Firebaugh goes on to mention that the world's average income has risen dramatically in the past two centuries, from $651 in 1820 to $5,204 in 1990. This is where I began to question a few things myself. Of course the average income is up, because more money is being made. Capitalism has made making money the top priority in many different ways all over the globe.
The next point that Firebaugh makes addresses that issue. The problem is that the income of the world has risen, along with the disparity between those with that income and those with much less. Western industrialized countries dominate the market in so many ways, and the average income in those areas show it. The areas of the world that control the most valuable resources and the most important markets have a stranglehold on the income of the world, while many other underdeveloped areas (such as Africa and India) are a completely different story with many citizens living in poverty. Firebaugh goes on to state that the global income inequality is not necessarily any worse than it was 40 or 50 years ago, but it is shifting from "inequality across nations to inequality within nations". I see this as meaning that globalization has changed the world income so mnuch that wealth can be found almost anywhere in the world, in any country. The problem is that disparity now exists in those countries instead of just between countries or areas of the the world, further increasing the gap between low-income people and the upper-class elite. With ever-increasing technological advancement, making money has never been easier for those people who hold the means of production. Technology has put efficiency at an all-time high, decreasing manual labor and increasing profit because of it. The problem is that we're seeing this gap continually widen, the gap between those with money/power and those struggling to attain it. The effects of this type of system have put economies, not just in the U.S., but all over the world in question.

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