Who starves first?

George Orwell in an essay Charles Dickens.

All our struggles are intertwined around three questions. How do we produce enough to survive, thrive and reproduce?, Who starves first?, and Who gets to decide? The more prosperous we become (the more effective at addressing question 1), the more we are able to skirt questions 2 & 3. All biological history addresses question 1. In Europe until 1700 or so, and everywhere else until much more recently, the chief question in recorded history was question 2. All social structure and hierarchy was really just a mask of a latent scheme of prioritization - in a world of scarcity and uncertainty, who suffers first and most during adverse circumstances? Question 3, dependent on better answers to question 1 and a passing of the immediacy of question 2, really only came to the forefront in the 1700s and is still being worked through.

Our history is a rich mix of answers as we try and optimize the balance between effective productivity, necessary hierarchy, and collaborative decision-making. The challenge is that the balance is never in stasis, there are always exogenous shocks, and that assessments have to be taken between the balance of short and long term views. On top of that, evidentiary data is not always patently clear. China learned the lesson of the need for at least some form of competitive market thirty years ago and began their economic rise. In that time, they have not made any significant change in the previously established hierarchy of starvation (peasants first, politburo last). And even though prosperity has made collaberative decision-making both more necessary and more feasible, they don't want to risk the transition from centralized decision-making to localized decision-making. Centralized rule-setting which worked for the first thirty years, is unlikely to work in the next fifty years - short term and long term issues.

Orwell, in his passage, reminds us that Dickens was bringing to our attention the knowledge which should be still fresh in our minds and articulating the dynamic balance between these age-old pillars: productivity, hierarchy, and collaboration.

The one thing that everyone who has read A Tale of Two Cities remembers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine — tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A Tale of Two Cities is not a companion volume to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in the clearest terms:

It was too much the way... to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain terms recorded what they saw.

And again:

All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves.