everything

In reading this article about the damage wrought upon Ghana by the trade in used clothing, I see a larger trend.

As the world becomes richer, places like Ghana are becoming less common. What I mean by that is at some point, there will be no more Ghana's to give all the discarded clothing to.

Richer people in the US and Europe consume clothing at a fast pace, and donate these clothes to charity shops. The charity shops sell 20% of it, and the rest gets baled up and shipped overseas to places like Ghana, the Philippines, etc., where it is sold to locals. Then the remaining 40% or something that is not sold is disposed of, often improperly, because local governments can't actually afford to properly dispose of the waste of much richer societies.

The same thing plays out in recycling, and China deciding to stop playing at the receiving end of this game has thrown a lot of “recycling” efforts into doubt, as it slowly dawns on us that likely none of this stuff was actually getting recycled anyway.

I suppose we can keep going if we build big enough landfills. I am not sure about the economics of landfills, though I do believe that environmentally they aren't too bad. Things like textiles should likely go into landfills quite safely, after all, even moreso than plastics.

But is there a point where we decide as a society that this isn't worth it? I'm not sure. If there is, there has to be a next step.

Actually durable materials? Actual recycling? Moving away from single use plastics and the like? If anything, we're moving towards these things, and the alternatives are often somehow worse, like the case of reusable shopping bags which are often not reused enough times to make their use more environmentally friendly than just using the thin plastic bags in the first place.

I worry that it's more complicated than anyone wants to reckon with, and the simple solutions often actually hurt more than they help.

When I think about that, and consider how, at least in the US, the government has reacted to what are conceptually quite simple problems (transportation, housing, racial equity), I have little hope for our ability to address these more complicated problems with our current government.

I see glimmers of hope in places where there appears to be more competence in government, but this competence also comes with costs. In Europe, competence in addressing human needs comes with economic costs. Maybe they don't matter that much if people are happier, but it is a mixed bag there. In some places, people seem to be happier. In others, it seems they aren't.

In Asia, the competence seems to come with a loss of freedom, like in Singapore, or the exploitation of a neighboring, poorer country (also Singapore, Hong Kong, and other places). In Europe and America, our exploitation of others is more at an arm's length, through trade and the exporting of waste, pollution, and so on. In Asia, exploitation is up close and personal, with domestic helpers and manual laborers from neighboring countries who have second-tier employment rights and no stake in the governance of the country they live in and work within.

I don't have any solutions, just wondering how we progress. Are we stuck at a local maximum, bounded by our own state capacity? It would be a shame if the march of progress was halted by such a simple thing, but the technology of government seems to have stalled quite a while ago.