Yesterday in my human geography class, which just happens to be right after our FESM 100J class, we started to learn about Rostow’s five stages of development and modernization. After going into detail about each stage (traditional society, preconditions for “take-off”, “take-off”, drive to maturity, and high mass comsumption), our class had a provocative discussion that led me to think of globalization. The professor started out by asking us where we thought parts of the world were categorized and why.
This led me to the conclusion that most of the world is now at the high mass consumption stage, but there are still many pockets in the world that have yet to be touched. After I just had this thought, our professor whipped out a graph demonstrating how the richest five percent of countries have gotten richer over the past few decades and the poorest have gotten poorer.
Then our class started heading down the path of how richer countries are exploiting poorer countries. I realized at that point that at no point in time will the entire world be at the high mass consumption stage. This could not happen because the poor, agriculturally based countries depend on the richer countries to buy their goods and without the goods produced in the poor countries, there would be no cheap goods. The result of this would be for the price of goods to infinitely increase.
Just curious, what do you guys think will happen to the world in the future if 1) everyone in the world were to be at the high mass consumption stage and/or 2) we were so polarized and only had traditional societies and high mass consumption?
