Cap Good

Cap Sustainable – Generic

Capitalism is sustainable and self-correcting---alt can’t solve

Seabra 12 (Leo, has a background in Communication and Broadcasting and a broad experience which
includes activities in Marketing, Advertising, Sales and Public Relations, 2/27, “Capitalism can drive
Sustainability and also innovation,” http://seabraaffairs.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/capitalism-can-
drive-sustainability-and-also-innovation/)

There are those who say that if the world does not change their habits, even the end of economic
growth, and assuming alternative ways of living, will be a catastrophe. “Our lifestyles are unsustainable. Our
expectations of consumption are predatory.Either we change this, or will be chaos”. Others say that the pursuit of unbridled
economic growth and the inclusion of more people in consumption is killing the Earth. We have to create
alternative because economic growth is pointing to the global collapse. “What will happen when billions of Chinese decide to adopt the lifestyle
of Americans?” I’ll disagree if you don’t mind… They
might be wrong. Completely wrong .. Even very intelligent people wrongly
interpret the implications of what they observe when they lose the perspective of time. In
the vast scale of time (today, decades, not
centuries) it is the opposite of what expected, because they start from a false assumption: the future is the
extrapolation of this. But not necessarily be. How do I know? Looking at history. What story? The history
of innovation, this thing generates increases in productivity, wealth, quality of life in an unimaginable
level. It is innovation that will defeat pessimism as it always did. It was innovation that made life today is
incomparably better than at any other time in human history. And will further improve. Einstein, who was
not a stupid person, believed that capitalism would generate crisis, instability, and growing impoverishment.
He said: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the true source of evil.” The only way to eliminate this
evil, he thought, was to establish socialism, with the means of production are owned by the company. A centrally controlled economy would
adjust the production of goods and services the needs of people, and would distribute the work that needed to be done among those in a
position to do so. This would guarantee a livelihood to every man, women and children. Each according to his possibilities. To each according to
their needs. And guess what? What happened was the opposite of what Einstein predicted. Who tried the
model he suggested, impoverished, screwed up. Peter Drucker says that almost of all thinking people of the
late nineteenth century thought that Marx was right: there would be increased exploitation of workers by employers. They
would become poorer, until one day, the thing would explode. Capitalist society was considered inherently
unsustainable. It is more or less the same chat today. Bullshit. Capitalism, with all appropriate
regulations, self-corrects. It is an adaptive system that learns and changes by design. The design is just
for the system to learn and change. There was the opposite of what Einstein predicted, and held the
opposite of what many predict, but the logic that “unlike” only becomes evident over time. It wasn’t obvious
that the workers are those whom would profit from the productivity gains that the management science
has begun to generate by organizing innovations like the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone .. to
increase the scale of production and cheapen things. The living conditions of workers today are infinitely
better than they were in 1900. They got richer, not poorer .. You do not need to work harder to produce
more (as everyone thought), you can work less and produce more through a mechanism that is only now becoming apparent, and that
brilliant people like Caetano Veloso still ignores. The output is pursuing growth through innovation, growth is not
giving up. More of the same will become unsustainable to the planet, but most of it is not what will
happen, will happen more different, than we do not know what is right. More innovative. Experts, such as
Lester Brown, insist on statements like this: if the Chinese also want to have three cars for every four inhabitants, as in the U.S. today, there will
be 1.1 billion cars there in 2030, and there is no way to build roads unless ends with the whole area used for agriculture. You will need 98
million barrels of oil per day, but the world only produces about 90 million today, and probably never produce much more. The mistake is to
extrapolate today’s solutions for the future. We can continue living here for 20 years by exploiting the same resources that we explore today?
Of course not. But the other question is: how can we encourage the stream of innovations that will enable the
Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Africans .. to live so as prosperous as Americans live today? Hey, wake up …
what can not stop the engine of innovation is that the free market engenders. This system is self
correcting, that is its beauty. We do not need to do nothing but ensure the conditions for it to work
without distortion. The rest he does himself. It regulates itself.

The system’s sustainable and the alt can’t solve

Kaletsky ’10 (Anatole, Masters in Economics from Harvard, Honour-Degree Graduate at King’s College and Cambrdige, editor-at-large of The
Times of London, founding partner and chief economist of GaveKal Capital, He is on the governing board of the New York– based Institute for
New Economic Theory (INET), a nonprofit created after the 2007– 2009 crisis to promote and finance academic research in economics outside
the orthodoxy of “efficient markets.” From 1976 to 1990, Kaletsky was New York bureau chief and Washington correspondent of the Financial
Times and a business writer on The Economist,

The world did not end. Despite

all the forebodings of disaster in the 2007– 09 financial crisis, the first decade of
the twenty-first century passed rather uneventfully into the second. The riots, soup kitchens, and bankruptcies
predicted by many of the world’s most respected economists did not materialize— and no one any longer
expects the global capitalist system to collapse, whatever that emotive word might mean. Yet the capitalist system’s survival
does not mean that the precrisis faith in the wisdom of financial markets and the efficiency of free enterprise will ever again be what it was
before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. A return to decent economic growth and normal financial conditions is
likely by the middle of 2010, but will this imply a return to business as usual for politicians, economists, and financiers? Although
globalization will continue and many parts of the world will gradually regain their prosperity of the precrisis
period, the traumatic effects of 2007– 09 will not be quickly forgotten. And the economic costs will linger for decades in the
debts squeezing taxpayers and government budgets, the disrupted lives of the jobless, and the vanished dreams of homeowners and investors
around the world. For what collapsed on September 15, 2008, was not just a bank or a financial system. What fell apart that day was an entire
political philosophy and economic system, a way of thinking about and living in the world. The question now is what will replace the global
capitalism that crumbled in the autumn of 2008. The central argument of this book is that global capitalism will be replaced by
nothing other than global capitalism. The traumatic events of 2007– 09 will neither destroy nor diminish the
fundamental human urges that have always powered the capitalist system— ambition, initiative, individualism, the
competitive spirit. These natural human qualities will instead be redirected and reenergized to create a new
version of capitalism that will ultimately be even more successful and productive than the system it
replaced. To explain this process of renewal, and identify some of the most important features of the reinvigorated capitalist system, is the
ambition of this book. This transformation will take many years to complete, but some of its consequences can
already be discerned. With the benefit of even a year’s hindsight, it is clear that these consequences will be different from the nihilistic
predictions from both ends of the political spectrum at the height of the crisis. On the Left, anticapitalist ideologues seemed
honestly to believe that a few weeks of financial chaos could bring about the disintegration of a politico-
economic system that had survived two hundred years of revolutions, depressions, and world wars. On the Right,
free-market zealots insisted that private enterprise would be destroyed by government interventions that were clearly necessary to save the
system— and many continue to believe that the crisis could have been resolved much better if governments had simply allowed financial
institutions to collapse. A balanced reassessment of the crisis must challenge both left-wing hysteria and right-
wing hubris. Rather than blaming the meltdown of the global financial system on greedy bankers, incompetent regulators, gullible
homeowners, or foolish Chinese bureaucrats, this book puts what happened into historical and ideological perspective. It reinterprets the crisis
in the context of the economic reforms and geopolitical upheavals that have repeatedly transformed the nature of capitalism since the late
eighteenth century, most recently in the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of 1979– 89. The central argument is that capitalism has never
been a static system that follows a fixed set of rules, characterized by a permanent division of responsibilities between private
enterprise and governments. Contrary to the teachings of modern economic theory, no immutable laws govern the behavior of a capitalist
economy. Instead, capitalism
is an adaptive social system that mutates and evolves in response to a changing
environment. When capitalism is seriously threatened by a systemic crisis, a new version emerges that is
better suited to the changing environment and replaces the previously dominant form. Once we recognize that
capitalism is not a static set of institutions, but an evolutionary system that reinvents and reinvigorates itself through crises, we can see the
events of 2007– 09 in another light: as the catalyst for the fourth systemic transformation of capitalism, comparable to the transformations
triggered by the crises of the 1970s, the crises of the 1930s, and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803– 15. Hence the title of this book.

Innovation and adaptation make growth sustainable---green tech investment solves warming
and poverty
Harte and Harte 12 John, Professor of Ecosystem Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley and
Mary Ellen, biologist and columnist who writes on climate change and population, “Alarmism Is
Justified”, Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Sep/Oct 2012, Vol. 91, Issue 5

The Limits to Growth predicted catastrophe: humanity would deplete natural resources and pollute
itself to death. Its solution was less economic growth, more recycling, and organic farming. My essay documented how the book's
predictions were wildly off, mainly because its authors ignored how innovation would help people
overcome environmental challenges. Because the book's goal was so dramatic -- averting the end of the world -- its recommendation was for society to
simultaneously do everything in its power to forestall that outcome. Today, much of the environmental movement continues to evince such alarmism and, consequently, is unable to prioritize.
Developed countries focus as much on recycling, which achieves precious little at a high cost, as they do on attaining the much larger benefits from tackling air pollution, a massive, if declining,
threat. Meanwhile, some environmentalists' demands are simply counterproductive. Avoiding pesticides, for example, means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices,
more hunger, more disease (because of a lower intake of fruits and vegetables), and less biodiversity. My essay argued that although the The Limits to Growth's analysis has been proved
wrong, much of its doomsaying and policy advice still pervades the environmental debate 40 years later. These four critiques, instead of refuting my argument, in fact vindicate it. First, only

DennisMeadows really tries to defend The Limits to Growth's predictions of collapse, and he does so with
little conviction. Second, at least some of the responses accept in principle that society needs to prioritize among its different environmental goals and that economic growth will
make achieving them easier -- in Frances Beinecke's words, "prosperity often leads to greater environmental protection." Third, all four of the
critiques of my essay rely on the language of doom to motivate action, which, to the detriment of the environment, convinces society that it must pursue all its environmental goals at once,

by focusing on the threats of economic growth to the environment, the authors

regardless of the costs and benefits. Finally,

generally neglect that growth has lifted billions of people out of grinding poverty and that others may remain poor because
of the developed world's environmental concerns, real or imagined. WRONG AGAIN Defending The Limits to Growth, Meadows curiously complains that I address only the original book, which
is "long out of print." He then posits that my case rests on one table from that book, on resource depletion, which he says I misrepresent. That is incorrect on several counts. First, it is patently
false to claim, as Meadows does by way of a quotation from Matthew Simmons, that "nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000." (Jørgen Randers
makes a similar point.) The Limits to Growth quoted approvingly the first annual report by the U.S. government's Council on Environmental Quality, in 1970: "It would appear at present that
the quantities of platinum, gold, zinc and lead are not sufficient to meet demands. At the present rate of expansion … silver, tin and uranium may be in short supply even at higher prices by the
turn of the century." Meadows' own table publicized "the number of years known global reserves will last at current global consumption," showing that gold, lead, mercury, silver, tin, and zinc

According to the book's model, the main driver of the global system's so-
would not last to the year 2000. The instances go on.

called collapse would be the depletion of resources, and averting that outcome was the book's widely publicized rallying cry. So focusing on that
aspect of the book can hardly be called a misrepresentation. What is more, claiming that this is my only critique ignores that I also showed how the book got pollution wrong and how its
analysis of collapse simply did not follow. Meadows and Randers both claim that in their model, pollution consisted of long-lived toxics, not air pollution. In fact, they were much more vague
on this question in 1972. In the best case for their predictions of deadly pollution, they meant air pollution, which today accounts for about 62 percent of all environmental deaths, according to

their prediction that "pollution rises very rapidly,

the World Bank and the World Health Organization. But if they indeed meant long-lived toxics,

causing an immediate increase in the death rate" has been clearly disproven by the declining global
death rate and the massive reductions in persistent pollutants. John Harte and Mary Ellen Harte put forth a similarly weak defense of The
Limits to Growth, as they do not challenge my data. They quote an article by the ecologists Charles Hall and John Day to say that The Limits to Growth's results were "almost exactly on course
some 35 years later in 2008." This is simply wrong when it comes to resource levels, as the data in my original article shows, and indeed the cited article contains not a single reference for its
claims about oil and copper resource reductions. Harte and Harte further argue that the increase in the cost of resources during the last ten years is evidence of "the limitations on the human
enterprise." Meadows claims that this uptick may "herald a permanent shift in the trend." Yet neither carries through the argument, because the empirical data from the past 150 years
overwhelmingly undermine it. The reason is that a temporary increase in the scarcity of a resource causes its price to rise, which in turn encourages more exploration, substitution, and
innovation across the entire chain of production, thereby negating any increase in scarcity. Harte and Harte demonstrate the unpleasant arrogance that accompanies the true faith, claiming
that I "deny" knowledge, promote "scientific misconceptions," and display "scientific ignorance." They take particular issue with my assertion that DDT is a cheap solution to malaria, stating
that I overlooked the issue of biological resistance. In fact, all malarial treatments face this problem, but DDT less so than the others. Whereas many malarial treatments, such as dieldrin, work
only by killing insects, DDT also repels and irritates them. Dieldrin strongly selects for resistance, whereas DDT works in three ways and even repels 60 percent of DDT-resistant mosquitoes.
FALSE ALARM All four critiques contain grand dollops of doom. Beinecke invokes "alarming" environmental problems from overfishing to the destruction of the rain forests and global warming.
These are real issues, but they, too, deserve practical thinking and careful prioritization. Fish and rain forests, like other resources subject to political control, tend to be overused. By contrast,

Beinecke's response reflects the

when resources are controlled by individuals and private groups, their owners are forced to weigh long-term sustainability. Indeed,

most unfortunate legacy of The Limits to Growth: because of its persistent belief that the planet is in
crisis, the environmental movement suggests tackling all environmental problems at once. This is impossible, of
course, so society ends up focusing mainly on what catches the public's attention. Beinecke acknowledges that campaigns to enact environmental policy "emerged from what people saw with
their own eyes: raw sewage in the Great Lakes, smog so thick that it obscured the George Washington Bridge, oil despoiling Santa Barbara's pristine beaches." Yet the smog killed more than
300,000 Americans annually, whereas the effects of the oil spills, although serious, were of a much lower order of magnitude. She claims that the U.S. Clean Air Act somehow contradicts my
argument, when I in fact emphasized that society should have focused much more on cleaner air. Today, roughly 135,000 Americans still die from outdoor air pollution each year, and two
million people, mostly in the developing world, die from indoor air pollution. Instead of focusing on the many negligible environmental problems that catch the public's attention, as the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency did when it focused so heavily on pesticides in the 1970s and 1980s, government should tackle the most important environmental problems, air quality chief
among them. Beinecke misses this tradeoff entirely. Harte and Harte demonstrate a similar lack of proportion and priority. In response to my claim that a slightly larger portion of the world's
arable land -- roughly five percent -- will need to be tapped in order to feed humanity, they offer an unsubstantiated fear that such an expansion would undermine "giant planetary
ecosystems." Yet when they fret about pesticides, they seem impervious to the fact that eschewing them would require society to increase the acreage of land it farms by more than ten times
that amount. COOL DOWN If The Limits to Growth erred in some of its quantitative projections, then perhaps, as Harte and Harte put it, its "qualitative insights [are] still valid today." Randers
cites global warming as the new reason the book was right. Discussing his predictions for high carbon dioxide emissions, Randers writes, "This future is unpleasantly similar to the 'persistent
pollution scenario' from The Limits to Growth." But the comparison is unfounded and leads to poor judgment. In The Limits to Growth's, original formulation, pollution led to civilizational
decline and death. Although many environmentalists discuss global warming in similarly cataclysmic terms, the scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change project instead
a gradually worsening drag on development. Standard analyses show a reduction of zero to five percent of global GDP by 2100, in a world where the average person in the developing world
will be 23 times as rich as he or she is today. Moreover, although the responses to my essay invoke global warming as a new rallying cry for environmental activism, they fail to suggest specific

actions to avert it. Harte and Harte claim that " the scientific community knows how to transition to renewable clean energy."
Sure, developed countries have the technical know-how to adopt clean energy, but they have not done so because it would still be phenomenally expensive. Policies aimed at stopping climate
change have failed for the last two decades because much of the environmental movement, clutching dearly to The Limits to Growth's alarmism and confident sense of purpose, has refused to
weigh the costs and benefits and has demanded that countries immediately abandon all polluting sources of energy. Many economists, including the 27 climate economists involved in the

The best means of tackling global warming would

2009 Copenhagen Consensus on Climate conference, have pointed out smarter ways forward.

be to make substantial investments in green energy research and development, in order to find a way to produce
clean energy at a lower cost than fossil fuels. As one of the leading advocates of this approach, I cannot comprehend how Harte and Harte could claim that
I do not support clean-energy innovation. Unfortunately, the world will be hard-pressed to focus on smarter environmental

policies until it has expunged the dreadful doom of The Limits to Growth. And unless the environmental
movement can overcome its fear of economic growth, it will also too easily forget the plight of the
billions of poor people who require, above all, more and faster growth.
 Cap Sustainable – US Order

US capitalist order locked in – US international order locked in—massive economic,

technological, and military advantages
BROOKS* and WOHLFORTH** 16-*Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, PhD @ Yale, **Daniel Webster
Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, PhD and MA in Political Science @ Yale [Stephen, William, “The Once and Future Superpower-
Why China Won’t Overtake the United States,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-
04-13/once-and-future-superpower, DKP]

Ater two and a half decades, is

the United States’ run as the world’s sole superpower coming to an end? Many say yes,
seeing a rising China ready to catch up to or even surpass the United States in the near future. By many measures, after all, China’s
economy is on track to become the world’s biggest, and even if its growth slows, it will still outpace that of the United States for many years. Its coffers overflowing,
Beijing has used its new wealth to attract friends, deter enemies, modernize its military, and aggressively assert sovereignty claims in its periphery. For many,
But this is wishful, or fearful, thinking.
therefore, the question is not whether China will become a superpower but just how soon.

Economic growth no longer translates as directly into military power as it did in the past, which means that it is now
harder than ever for rising powers to rise and established ones to fall. And China —the only country with the raw
potential to become a true global peer of the United States—also faces a more daunting challenge than previous rising states because of

how far it lags behind technologically. Even though the U nited S tates’ economic dominance has eroded from its peak, the country’s
military superiority is not going anywhere, nor is the globe-spanning alliance structure that constitutes
the core of the existing liberal international order (unless Washington unwisely decides to throw it away). Rather than
expecting a power transition in international politics, everyone should start getting used to a world in which the
U nited S tates remains the sole superpower for decades to come. Lasting preeminence will help the United States
ward off the greatest traditional international danger, war between the world’s major powers. And it will give Washington
options for dealing with nonstate threats such as terrorism and transnational challenges such as climate change. But it will also
impose burdens of leadership and force choices among competing priorities, particularly as finances grow more straitened. With great power comes great
responsibility, as the saying goes, and playing its leading role successfully will require Washington to display a maturity that U.S. foreign policy has all too often
lacked. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing
domestic challenges: its slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets,
nonexistent social safety net, rapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these
problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise

compared with the United States’. Relative to past rising powers, China has a much wider technological gap to close with the leading power.

China may export container after container of high-tech goods, but in a world of globalized production, that doesn’t reveal
much. Half of all Chinese exports consist of what economists call “processing trade,” meaning that parts are imported into China
for assembly and then exported afterward. And the vast majority of these Chinese exports are directed not by Chinese firms but by

corporations from more developed countries. When looking at measures of technological prowess that better reflect the national origin
of the expertise, China’s true position becomes clear. World Bank data on payments for the use of intellectual property, for example,

indicate that the U nited S tates is far and away the leading source of innovative technologies, boasting $128
billion in receipts in 2013—more than four times as much as the country in second place, Japan. China, by contrast, imports technologies on a massive
scale yet received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its intellectual property. Another good indicator of the

technological gap is the number of so-called triadic patents, those registered in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, nearly 14,000 such

patents originated in the United States, compared with just under 2,000 in China. The distribution of highly influential articles in science and

engineering—those in the top one percent of citations, as measured by the National Science Foundation—tells the same story, with the United States

accounting for almost half of these articles, more than eight times China’s share. So does the breakdown of Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry,
and Physiology or Medicine. Since 1990, 114 have gone to U.S.-based researchers. China-based researchers have received two. Precisely because the Chinese
economy is so unlike the U.S. economy, the measure fueling expectations of a power shift, GDP, greatly underestimates the true
economic gap between the two countries. For one thing, the immense destruction that China is now wreaking on its
environment counts favorably toward its GDP, even though it will reduce economic capacity over time by
shortening life spans and raising cleanup and health-care costs. For another thing, GDP was originally designed to
measure mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economies, and so the more knowledge-based and
global-ized a country’s production is, the more its GDP underestimates its economy’s true size. A new statistic
developed by the UN suggests the degree to which GDP inflates China’s relative power. Called “inclusive wealth,” this measure represents economists’ most
systematic effort to date to calculate a state’s wealth. As a UN report explained, it counts a country’s stock of assets in three areas: “(i) manufactured capital (roads,
buildings, machines, and equipment), (ii) human capital (skills, education, health), and (iii) natural capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” Added
up, the U nited S tates’ inclusive wealth comes to almost $144 trillion—4.5 times China’s $32 trillion. The true size of China’s
economy relative to the United States’ may lie somewhere in between the numbers provided by GDP and inclusive wealth, and admittedly, the latter measure has
yet to receive the same level of scrutiny as GDP. The problem with GDP, however, is that it measures a flow (typically, the value of goods and services produced in a
year), whereas inclusive wealth measures a stock. As The Economist put it, “Gauging
an economy by its GDP is like judging a
company by its quarterly profits, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet.” Because inclusive wealth
measures the pool of resources a government can conceivably draw on to achieve its strategic objectives, it is the
more useful metric when thinking about geopolitical competition. But no matter how one compares the size of the U.S. and
Chinese economies, it is clear that the U nited S tates is far more capable of converting its resources into military

might. In the past, rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the United States didn’t lag far behind the United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany
lag far behind the erstwhile Allies during the interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union backward technologically compared with the United States during the early
Cold War. This
meant that when these challengers rose economically, they could soon mount a serious
military challenge to the dominant power. China’s relative technological backwardness today, however, means that even if
its economy continues to gain ground, it will not be easy for it to catch up militarily and become a
true global strategic peer , as opposed to a merely a major player in its own neighborhood.
 Cap Sustainable – Liberalism

US not in decline but even if it was, alliances lock in the liberal order
NYE 16-distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, PhD in Political Science @ Harvard,
Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University's Exeter College [Joseph, “How Trump Would Weaken America,” 5/11/2016, Harvard Belfer Center,
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/26611/how_trump_would_weaken_america.html?breadcrumb=%2Fregion%2F130%2Fasia%3
Fpage%3D4, DKP]

While the US has had bitter partisan differences over disastrous interventions in developing countries such as
Vietnam and Iraq, there is a bedrock of consensus on its alliance system — and not just among those who make
and think about foreign policy. Opinion polls show popular majorities in support of Nato and the US-Japan alliance. Nonetheless, for the first
time in 70 years, a major US presidential candidate is calling this consensus into question. Alliances not only reinforce US
power; they also maintain geopolitical stability — for example, by slowing the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons.
While US presidents and defence secretaries have sometimes complained about its allies' low levels of
defence spending, they have always understood that alliances are best viewed as stabilising
commitments — like friendships, not real-estate transactions. Unlike the constantly shifting alliances of convenience that
characterised the nineteenth century, modern American alliances have sustained a relatively predictable
international order. In some cases, such as Japan, host-country support even makes it cheaper to
station troops overseas than in the US. And yet Trump extols the virtues of unpredictability — a potentially useful tactic when
bargaining with enemies, but a disastrous approach to reassuring friends. Americans often complain about free riders,
without recognising that the US has been the one steering the bus. It is not impossible that a new
challenger — say, Europe, Russia, India, Brazil, or China — surpasses the US in the coming decades and takes the wheel. But it is
not likely, either. Among the features that distinguish the US from "the dominant great powers of the
past," according to the distinguished British strategist Lawrence Freedman, is that "American power is based on alliances
rather than colonies." Alliances are assets; colonies are liabilities. A narrative of American decline is
likely to be inaccurate and misleading. More important, it holds dangerous policy implications if it
encourages countries like Russia to engage in adventurous policies, China to be more assertive with its
neighbours, or the US to overreact out of fear. America has many problems, but it is not in absolute
decline, and it is likely to remain more powerful than any single state for the foreseeable future. The
real problem for the US is not that it will be overtaken by China or another contender, but that a rise in the
power resources of many others — both states and non-state actors — will pose new obstacles to global
governance. The real challenge will be entropy — the inability to get work done. Weakening America's alliances ,
the likely result of Trump's policies, is hardly the way to "make America great again." America will face an
increasing number of new transnational issues that require it to exercise power with others as much as over others. And, in a
world of growing complexity, the most connected states are the most powerful. As Anne-Marie Slaughter has put
it, "diplomacy is social capital; it depends on the density and reach of a nation's diplomatic contacts." The US, according to Australia's Lowy
Institute, tops the ranking of countries by number of embassies, consulates, and missions. The US has some 60 treaty allies; China has few. The
Economist magazine estimates that of the world's 150 largest countries, nearly 100 lean toward the US, while 21 lean against it. Contrary
to claims that the "Chinese century" is at hand, we have not entered a post-American world. The US
remains central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods. But
American preeminence in military, economic, and soft-power terms will not look like it once did. The US share of the world
economy will fall, and its ability to wield influence and organise action will become increasingly constrained. More than ever,
America's ability to sustain the credibility of its alliances as well as establish new networks will be central
to its global success.
Liberalism makes the world better and will continue to be locked in
WYNE 16-Nonresident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Former Research Assistant,
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs [Ali, “The world is getting better. Why don’t we believe it?” Harvard Belfer Center, originally
published in the Washington Post, 1/26/2016,
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/26231/world_is_getting_better_why_dont_we_believe_it.html?breadcrumb=%2Fregion%2F1
30%2Fasia%3Fpage%3D13, DKP]

It would seem entirely reasonable to conclude that the world has taken several turns for the worse since President
George H.W. Bush delivered his famous “new world order” address. The United Nations estimates that more than 250,000 people have perished in
Syria’s civil war, and another million or so have been injured. With vast swathes of the Middle East collapsing, the Islamic State continues to wreak havoc,
increasingly inspiring and coordinating attacks outside the region. There are now more “forcibly displaced” people worldwide than there have been at any point
since World War II. Russia’s incursions into Ukraine have challenged Europe’s post-Cold War peace, and North Korea has conducted its fourth nuclear test. Pope
Francis summarized many observers’ judgments when he lamented that “after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one
fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.” Still,we would be remiss to discount how much progress has been
made in the quarter-century since Bush’s speech. According to the World Bank, the rate of extreme poverty fell from 37 percent in 1990
to about 10 percent last year. The Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the rate of undernourishment fell from 18.6 percent to
10.9 percent during that same window. A major study by the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation found that life
expectancy increased by 5.8 years for men and 6.6 years for women between 1990 and 2013. Doctors have made
extraordinary strides in reducing the mortality rates of polio, measles and malaria. And the threat of a nuclear war, as
well as that of a war between great powers, has declined significantly. It is easy to discount all that is going well: We tend
to overestimate how good the “good ol’ days” were, the media disproportionately covers bad news, and
contemporary progress is occurring amid profound uncertainty about the evolution of world order. While the United States remains the world’s

lone superpower, it is no longer as preeminent as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s implosion. In addition, it has
to sustain an increasingly challenging balance of competitive and cooperative dynamics with China (whose
resurgence underpins a broader, eastward shift in the center of global gravity). While the two countries’ political systems, understandings of history and approaches
to foreign policy are fundamentally different, each is convinced of its own exceptionalism. The evolution of their
relationship — as uncertain as it is consequential — is occurring against the backdrop of fundamental
changes in each of the world’s principal strategic theaters. The Middle East is undergoing a cataclysmic
transformation, and it is anyone’s guess as to how the evolving tapestry of relations among the region’s governments, political outfits and militant
organizations will resolve itself in the coming decades. A range of phenomenons — among them unfavorable demographics, resurgent populism and

Russian revanchism — are testing Europe’s cohesion. And while transatlantic ties have long anchored the postwar order , America’s

rebalance to the Asia-Pacific raises questions about their durability. And in the Asia-Pacific itself, what has been called “the
contest of the century” is unfolding between the United States and China: China’s neighbors are doing their utmost to
strengthen their security ties with the former while reaping the fruits of the latter’s economic ascent. The architecture of any “new world

order” will (appropriately) have to accommodate the redistribution of power among states and the growing sway of non-state
actors. We will see a more equitable balance of voting shares within the main postwar institutions (among them the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund), the establishment of parallel and supplementary institutions (such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank),

the reconfiguration of long-standing alliances and enmities, the further blurring of the divide between “wartime” and “peacetime”
fighting, and so forth. It would be premature to infer, however, that there is a coherent alternative to the

postwar liberal order in the offing. No less than the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s National People’s Congress, Fu Ying,
observes that while China is “dissatisfied and ready to criticize,” it is “not ready to propose a new design.
. . . We need to come up with more specific ideas, to reassure others and advance our common
interests.” Democracy and democratic values continue to strengthen globally, even if incrementally and haltingly.
Globalization continues to sputter along, and the progression of initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and China’s “One Belt, One Road” undertaking — not to mention the

proliferation of regional economic organizations and institutions — suggests that economic interdependence
worldwide will continue to grow. The structure of world order stands to grow more complex; the ownership of its evolution, more
contested. Still, Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose reminds us that the postwar system “has outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted

every rival for three-quarters of a century.” That it will be strained and renegotiated, therefore, does not
necessarily imply that it will disappear.
 World Improving – Structural Violence

Capitalism good. It greatly increases the standard of living for those living in poverty,
and has created an overall increase in the standard of living.
Bandler 2017 (Aaron, Graduate from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a Journalism degree Economics
minor, “5 Statistics Showing How Capitalism Solves Poverty”, Daily Wire, 3/18/17,
http://www.dailywire.com/news/14525/5-statistics-showing-how-capitalism-solves-poverty-aaron-
bandler#, 7/24/17, Comrade)
Here are five statistics showing how capitalism solves poverty.
1. The number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide declined by 80 percent from 1970 to 2006It
i. People living on a dollar a day or less dramatically fell from 26.8 percent of the global population in
1970 to 5.4 percent in 2006 – an 80 percent decline. s a truly remarkable achievement that doesn't receive a lot of media
coverage because it highlights the success of capitalism.
"It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship," American Enterprise Institute (AEI) president Arthur Brooks said
in a 2012 speech. "In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world."
2. Povertyworldwide included 94 percent of the world's population in 1820. In 2011, it was only 17
percent. What is even more incredible is that the global poverty rate was 53 percent in 1981, causing the decline
from 53 percent to 17 percent to be "the most rapid reduction in poverty in world history."
"Since the onset of industrialisation – and as a consequence of this, economic growth — the share of people living in
poverty started decreasing and kept on falling ever since," wrote Oxford University's Martin Roeser, who
compiled the aforementioned data.
3. Globally, those
in the lower and middle income brackets saw increases in pay of 40 percent from 1988 to
2008. According to the Adam Smith's Institute's Ben Southwood:
Those in the middle and bottom of the world income distribution have all got pay rises of around 40%
between 1988-2008. Global inequality of life expectancy and height are narrowing too – showing better
nutrition and better healthcare where it matters most. What we should care about is the welfare of the poor, not the
wealth of the rich.
4.The world is 120 times better off today than in 1800 as a result of capitalism. The Foundation for Economic
Education's (FEE) Steven Horwtiz, citing author Deidre McCloskey, noted that the 120 times figure comes from
multiplying "the gains in consumption to the average human by the gain in life expectancy worldwide by
7 (for 7 billion as compared to 1 billion people)."
"The competitive market process has also made education, art, and culture available to more and more
people," wrote Horwitz. "Even the poorest of Americans, not to mention many of the global poor, have
access through the Internet and TV to concerts, books, and works of art that were exclusively the
province of the wealthy for centuries."
Horwitz added capitalism has also resulted in people spending "a much smaller percentage of our lives working for pay" due to the increased
value of labor and has produced higher life expectancy "by decades."
5. Mortality rates for children under the age of five declined by 49 percent from 1990 to 2013. This is
according to World Health Organization (WHO) data, a decline termed "faster than ever."
Capitalism results in lower child
mortality rates by producing better access to medicine and standards of living.
In sum, the wealth and innovation spurred by capitalism has done more to help the poor than any
government program ever could. Singal is simply wrong to suggest that "capitalism is not designed" to solve poverty.
 World Improving – War
Largescale war on the decline—structural violence matters but doesn’t outweigh
GOLDSTEIN AND PINKER 16-(Joshua, emeritus professor of International Relations at American
University, PhD at MIT, Steven, Johnstone professor of psychology at Harvard, PhD at Harvard, “The
decline of war and violence,” 4/15/2016, http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/15/the-
decline-war-and-violence/lxhtEplvppt0Bz9kPphzkL/story.html?event=event25, DKP)

QUIETLY, AMID the carnage and chaos in the daily news, 2016 is shaping up as a good year for peace in the world. You
read that right. A
significant escalation of war over the past few years is , at the moment, abating.
For nearly two-thirds of a century, from 1945 to 2011, war had been in overall decline. The global death rate
had fallen from 22 per 100,000 people to 0.3. But then the Syrian civil war became the bloodiest conflict in a generation, with hundreds of
thousands killed, millions displaced, and multiple foreign powers joining the fight or supporting their proxies. The UN Security Council
deadlocked on what to do about it, and eventually ISIS carved out a territory and enlarged it into Iraq and beyond.
New wars cropped up elsewhere. The world’s youngest country, South Sudan, fell into grotesque tribal violence. Nigeria lost territory to Boko
Haram, with its penchant for kidnapping girls and other ways of brutalizing civilians. A Christian-Muslim divide in the Central African Republic
devolved into a horrific civil war. Russia grabbed Crimea from Ukraine in flagrant violation of international law. An inept Saudi bombing
campaign has devastated Yemen, while Libya has split into pieces controlled by armed groups including ISIS. To top it off, in several countries,
Islamist militants carry out spectacles of bombing and shooting. By 2014 (the most recent year with complete data), the death rate had climbed
to 1.4 per 100,000 — still far lower than in the Cold War years, but a troubling U-turn from the world’s peaceward course.
Because most of these wars have not yet ended, and because lurid terrorism continues in many parts of the world, almost nobody has noticed a
happy development that wafted in during the first quarter of 2016: The level of war violence has fallen markedly. The big
event is the partial cease-fire in Syria, which has now lasted for six weeks. Fighting with ISIS and the Nusra Front continues, and violations recur,
but much of the country is breathing a sigh of relief, and humanitarian access has expanded substantially. According to the Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights, the rate of killing has dropped by nearly half since the cease-fire began. That means that around 2,000 lives were spared in
the first month. Since Syria is by far the world’s largest war, this reduction takes a big bite out of the global rate of war deaths as well.
In Ukraine, a cease-fire in effect since last year has been violated regularly, but at a small scale, far below the earlier levels of bloodshed. In
South Sudan, the recent formation of a unity government brings hope, even if some fighting continues. In the Central African Republic, the civil
war has ended and a presidential election was completed successfully. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has been driven from its main territories, though
it continues to perpetrate smaller-scale attacks. In Pakistan, despite ongoing terrorism, the major fighting of a few years ago has abated. And a
cease-fire in Yemen just took effect, with a prisoner exchange already accomplished and peace talks scheduled for the coming weeks.
All of this progress is shaky and incomplete. Even longstanding cease-fires can break down, as we have recently
seen in Mozambique and Azerbaijan. An apparent decrease in Iraqi deaths this year is too uncertain to celebrate, while the war in Afghanistan
drags on with no signs of respite.
But, mercifully, as the major wars have died down, new ones have not sprung up in their place. Of special
note is the continuing absence of wars between the world’s uniformed national armies. These forces exceed
20 million soldiers and are armed to the teeth. Yet the last sustained war between these armies was in 2003, in Iraq. Today’s skirmishes
between countries, such as the recent Armenia-Azerbaijan flare-up, the Turkish downing of a Russian plane, and the incidents between North
and South Korea, kill dozens of people rather than the hundreds of thousands, or millions , that died in the all-out wars that nation-
states have fought throughout history, such as the Iran-Iraq and India-Pakistan wars.
The geography of war is also shrinking. This year’s cease-fire between Colombia and the FARC guerrillas ended the last active
political armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere. The Americas thus join Western Europe and East Asia as major
regions of the globe that have moved from pervasive war to enduring peace.
In fact, virtually all the war in the world is now confined to an arc stretching from Nigeria to Pakistan,
which contains less than a sixth of the world’s population. We are hardly, as pessimists like to say, a “world at
war.” Of course, the world continues to suffer from other forms of violence: terrorist bombings that kill dozens,
drug gangs that kill thousands, and homicides that kill hundreds of thousands. But the latest inroads against a major category
of violence — war — after five years in which it had lurched in the wrong direction, deserves our attention and
gratitude.
Today’s glimmers of hope might fade as fast as they emerged. But the recent cease-fires and peace talks are, as mathematicians
like to say, an existence proof that the violence of war can be reduced. By redoubling our efforts to make them stick, the
international community just might make 2016 the year when the war fever of the past half-decade finally breaks.
 Cap God-Space Colonization

Capitalism is key to avoid human extinction by colonizing Mars.

Spring 16 (Todd, Writer, "A Case for Capitalism, In Regards to Space Travel – The Policy", Policy, 6-3-
2016, https://thepolicy.us/a-case-for-capitalism-in-regards-to-space-travel-d77e50f8116e, DOA: 7-28-
2017) //Snowball //strikethrough on gendered language
As of now, N.A.S.A. does not plan on sending a manned mission to Mars until the 2030s — assuming, of course, they get
the government funding they need to undertake such a massive project. Considering the recent cuts to deep space exploration,
down nearly $300 million from 2016, I am not certain what the condition of the program will look like in another
two years…much less the gap between now and the 2030s.
Where, then — if the government and its agencies will not provide us with the money for exploration — will we
turn to slake our thirst for cosmic space travel?
SpaceX. Private corporations. Capitalism.
Seeing this article in the news, reading day after day the story of budget cuts to N.A.S.A. in regards to deep-space exploration
and other related programs, got me thinking about just how important it will be for private companies and
corporations to undertake these projects…such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and countless others (read the full list here).
The problem is that we have gotten it into our heads that Capitalism is the root cause of our economic woes in
the United States, perhaps failing to understand that such policies are something like a double-edged sword: they could also be
our salvation.
This article provides a great list of the pro’s and con’s of Capitalism. I would recommend you take the short passing of time it requires to read it
through-and-through before continuing.
Now then.
I have never been for for fully-unhindered Capitalism. I do not believe that the government should stay out of
economic affairs entirely, for as provided in the article many of the con’s relate to improper regulation (monopolization) as opposed
to something fundamentally wrong, but I do not believe that any government should be going about shoving their
claws into every economic affair either. There must be a healthy balance, especially if Capitalism is to work
as it is supposed to work. The same goes for any policy. The government should be there to bolster competition between
businesses…not favor one or bail-out the other. The more regulation, the more interference or amendment, the less it works…but this mix of
regulation and free market must fall in the “goldilocks zone” if the citizens of said society are to reap its full benefit.
If not, like planets about a star, the society shall either burn or freeze.
One of those benefits is highlighted by Elon Musk’s SpaceX: the intervention of privately-funded companies
to do things that a traditional government agency cannot. Namely, the exploration and eventual
colonization of Mars in a reasonable, step-by-step timeframe…unlike the “we will get to it eventually”
mindset plaguing the bowels of the United States government. Were not the policies in place to foster the growth of private
companies, our best chance at getting people out of Earth-orbit — the Bush-approved, now-cancelled, insanely-expensive Constellation
program — would have gone the way of promises and well-wishes.
It is my hope that Elon Musk and space entrepreneurs like him are not simply blowing steam, and that one day — perhaps even within my
lifetime — I could be on my way to a space hotel on the Moon, flying aboard a space airliner with the name of a private company plastered
across the side.
Regardless, if we humans are to truly become a multi-planet species we must not hinder economic
growth with narrow thoughts. We must not become confused that the “problems down here” and the
“problem of getting out there” must be in conflict; they do not need to, and we must not suppose they should. They are two
separate issues with two unique sets of problems, and thus this policy of taking resources from one to give to the other
will only ensure that neither issue is given that which it needs, or enough to fix what must be solved.
Capitalism is key to space exploration – only private corporations solve.
Zimmerman 3/10/17 (Robert, award-winning independent science journalist and historian,
"Capitalism in Space", CNAS, 3-10-2017, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/capitalism-in-space,
DOA: 7-29-2017) //Snowball

All of these
goals require a prosperous U.S. aerospace industry, which in turn requires above all a viable space-
launch industry, capable of placing payloads, both unmanned and manned, into orbit cheaply and efficiently.

Unfortunately, since the beginning of the 21st century the U.S. government has struggled to create and maintain a
viable launch industry. Even as the government terminated the Space Shuttle program, with its ability to place and return humans and
large cargoes to and from orbit, NASA’s many repeated efforts since the mid-1980s to generate a replacement have come up empty.1

In addition, in the 1990s the Department of Defense instituted a new program, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle
(EELV), to guarantee itself launch services that – though successful in procuring those services – have done so at a very high cost, so
high, in fact, that the expense now significantly limits the military’s future options for maintaining its
access to, and assets in, space.

Even as the federal government struggled with this problem, a fledgling crop of new American private
launch companies have emerged in the past decade, funded initially by the vast profits produced by the
newly born internet industry. These new companies have not been motivated by national prestige, military
strength, or any of the traditional national political goals of the federal government. Instead, these private
entities have been driven by profit, competition, and in some cases the ideas of the visionary individuals
running the companies, resulting in some remarkable success, achieved with relatively little money and
in an astonishingly short period of time.

Because of these differing approaches – the government on one hand and the private sector on the
other – policymakers have an opportunity to compare both and use that knowledge to create the most
successful American space effort possible.
 Get of the Rock!

Becoming a multi-planetary species allows us to avoid existential risks.

Bates 5/8/17 (Jordan, Executive Editor at HighExistence LLC, "In Order to Ensure Our Survival, We
Must Become a Multi-Planetary Species", Futurism, 5-8-17, https://futurism.com/in-order-to-ensure-
human-survival-we-must-become-a-multi-planetary-species/, DOA: 7-28-2017) //Snowball

We possess thousands of nuclear warheads capable of occasioning an existential catastrophe, and we are at the
liberty of a fairly fragile global ecosystem with limited resources. Beyond that, our being confined to this single
planet means that a single asteroid collision or some other unforeseen cataclysmic event could wipe out
our entire species and potentially all intelligent life on Earth. There are numerous other theorized
existential risks (e.g. risks arising from advances in artificial intelligence, biotech, nanotech, etc.) as well. In his pioneering 2002 paper,
Dr. Nick Bostrom defined “existential risk” as follows:

“Existential risk – One

where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating
intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

An existential risk is one where humankind as a whole is imperiled. Existential disasters have major adverse
consequences for the course of human civilization for all time to come.”

If it sounds far-fetched to consider earthly extinction scenarios, it shouldn’t. Many intelligent people are discussing this topic, and
many are even devoting their lives to attempting to avert crisis situations that could decimate earthly intelligent life. The Future of Life
Institute, Future of Humanity Institute, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, and Centre for the Study of Existential Risk are a few prominent
organizations specifically dedicated to this cause. According to Muller and Bostrom (2014), a sample of the top 100 most-cited authors on
artificial intelligence ascribed a 10% chance of existential catastrophe when and if AI reaches human-level intelligence. In 2008, a group of
experts at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference at Oxford estimated a 19% chance of human extinction before 2100.

If you’re curious to know more about existential risk, Bostrom’s landmark 2002 paper is the place to start. You may also want to follow this list I
compiled on Twitter of the best sources of information related to existential risk.

HOW TO ENSURE THE CONTINUATION OF OUR EVOLUTIONARY BRANCH

The various existential risks that threaten to decimate humanity and the entire earthly biosphere in the
coming decades and centuries have, as I said, compelled a multitude of very smart people to consider how
best to avoid the potential catastrophes we’ve identified and how best to identify potential catastrophes that we have yet
to notice.

Other smart folks have begun asking a similar question: If a catastrophe does occur, how can we at least ensure that
our evolutionary branch will persist?

One popular answer, in certain circles, is that we must become a multi-planetary species as soon as
possible.
 Existential Risk Outweighs Morality

Solving existential risks is the dominant moral priority.

Bostrom 12 (Nick, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and
winner of the Gannon Award, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6, “We're
Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction”,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-
extinction/253821/)

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction
risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society . Some of these existential risks
are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential
risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.¶ Despite his concerns
about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the
effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a
bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of
philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What
follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in
the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.¶ Some have argued that we ought to be directing
our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You
have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the
alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why? ¶ Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that
counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't
matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of
view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa
or something. A
human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future
generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark
implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that
you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if
humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our
descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions
times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability
of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty
or curing malaria , which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.
 Trade

Trade prevents war – best theoretical studies

Jackson 14 (Matthew O. Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford and Stephen
M. Nei, PhD Student in Economics at Stanford, “Networks of Military Alliances, Wars, and International
Trade”, October 2014, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2389300)

This instability provides insights into the constantly shifting structures and recurring wars that occurred
throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.6 Wars , however, have greatly subsided in parallel with
the huge increase of trade (partly coincidental with the introduction of containerized shipping in the 1960s): between 1820
and 1959 each pair of countries averaged .00056 wars per year, while from 1960 to 2000 the average
was .00005 wars per year, less than one tenth as much. We see this pattern quite clearly in Figure 1.7 These changes also
follow the advent of nuclear weapons, which impacted the technology of war. Indeed, we show how nuclear weapons can lead
to some changes in stability, but does not generate peace on its own. Indeed, in order to capture the
actual patterns that have emerged one must add other considerations - such as trade considerations - since the
base model shows that networks of alliances would not be stable with nuclear weapons but without
trade .8¶ Thus, the second part of our analysis is to enrich the base model to include international trade. Indeed, there has been a rapid
increase in global trade since World War II (partly coincident with the growth of container shipping among other stimuli). The empirical
relationship between war and trade is an active area of research, with strong suggestions (e.g., Martin, Mayer,
and Thoenig (2008)) that network concerns may be important. So, we introduce a concept of a network of alliances being war
and trade stable, which allows countries to form alliances for either economic or military considerations. In this richer model, an alliance allows
countries to trade with each other and to coordinate military activities, and so can be formed for either reason. This restores existence of
Trade provides two helpful incentives: first
networks of alliances that are stable against the addition or deletion of alliances.
it provides economic motivations to maintain alliances, and the resulting denser network of alliances
then has a deterrent effect; and second, it can reduce the incentives of a country to attack another
since trade will be disrupted. This reduces the potential set of conflicts and, together with the denser
networks, allows for a rich family of stable networks that can exhibit structures similar to networks we see currently.¶ We provide
some results on the existence and structure of war and trade stable networks of alliances, showing that structures similar to those observed
over the past few decades are economically stable under apparently reasonable parameters. It is important to note that another dramatic
change during the post-war period was the introduction of nuclear weapons, which changes the technology of war and is generally thought to
have greatly increased the defensive advantage to those with such weapons.9 Our model suggests that although world-wide adoption of
nuclear weapons could stabilize things in the absence of trade, it would result in an empty network of alliances as the stable network. To
explain the much denser and more stable networks in the modern age along with the paucity of war in a world where nuclear weapons are
limited to a small percentage of countries, our model points to the enormous growth in trade as a big part of the answer. We
close the
paper with some discussion of this potential role that the growth in trade has played in reducing wars over
the past half century, and how this relates to the advent of the nuclear age.¶ Before proceeding, let us say a few
words about how this paper contributes to the study of war. The literature on war provides many rationales for why wars
occur. Our analysis here fits firmly into what has become a “rationalist” tradition based on cost and benefit analyses by rational actors, with
roots seen in writings such as Hobbes (1651) Leviathan, and has become the foundation for much of the recent international relations
literature.10¶ To our knowledge, there
are no previous models of conflict that game-theoretically model
networks of alliances between multiple agents/ countries based on costs and benefits of wars . 11 There are
previous models of coalitions in conflict settings (e.g., see Bloch (2012) for a survey). Here, network structures add several things to the picture.
Our model is very much in a similar rationalist perspective of the literature that examines group conflict (e.g., Esteban and Ray (1999, 2001);
Esteban and Sakovicz (2003)), but enriching it to admit network structures of alliances and of international trade. This allows us to
admit patterns that are consistent with the networks of alliances that are actually observed, which are far
from being partitions (e.g., the U.S. is currently allied with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India, just to mention a couple of many
prominent examples). More importantly, our Theorem 3 provides a first model in which such non-partitional such structures are stable and
provide insight into peace. Moreover, as we already mentioned above, the
observed patterns of wars and of alliances are
not partitional, and so this provides an important advance in moving the models towards matching
observed patterns of wars, trade and alliances.¶ Our model thus serves as a foundation upon which one
can eventually build more elaborate analyses of multilateral interstate alliances, trade, and wars. It is also
important to emphasize that the network of international trade is complex and can in fact be stable (and
prevent conflict) precisely because it cuts across coalitions. This is in contrast to coalitional models that generally predict
only the grand coalition can be stable or that very exact balances are possible (e.g., see Bloch, Sanchez-Pages, and Soubeyran (2006)). Again,
this is something illustrated in our Theorem 3, and which does not exist in the previous literature. Finally, our
model illuminates the
relationships between international trade, stable network structures, and peace, something not
appearing in the previous literature - as the previous literature that involves international trade and conflict generally revolves
around bilateral reasoning or focuses on instability and armament (e.g., Garfinkel, Skaperdas, and Syropoulos (2014)) and does not address the
questions that we address here.¶ The complex relationship between trade and conflict is the subject of a growing empirical
literature (e.g., Barbieri (1996); Mansfield and Bronson (1997); Martin, Mayer, and Thoenig (2008); Glick and Taylor (2010); Hegre, Oneal, and
Russett (2010)). The literature
not only has to face challenges of endogeneity and causation, but also of
substantial heterogeneity in relationships, as well as geography, and the level of conflict. The various
correlations between conflict and trade are complex and quite difficult to interpret, and a model such
as ours that combines military and economic incentives , and others that may follow, can provide some
structure with which to interpret some of the empirical observations , as we discuss in the concluding remarks.
 Warming
Capitalism solves warming – empirics prove capitalism’s dynamism solve
Rosenberg 17 (David, Haaretz contributor, 11/21/17, “Capitalism Is Our Only Hope of Rescue From
Climate Change”, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-capitalism-is-our-only-hope-of-
rescue-from-climate-change-1.5626663, AZG)
How the world will get there without costly social upheaval he doesn’t say except to casually posit that climate change has removed class warfare from the anti-capitalist cause. Tell it to the coal miners Yeah, sure. Tell that to the coal miners and SUV ow ners who voted for Trump and

Climate change may unite the classes – against measures

can’t wait for instructions from Fong’s politburo about job reassignment and rules requiring them to take a bus to work.

to fight it that require real sacrifice. In a modern capitalist economy,

On paper, Fong and other critics of capitalism have some points. But the reality is very different.

business is subject to regulations, societal values and forces beyond its control.
far from being the jungle that Fong and Klein portray it, It may fight

Take the energy crisis of the 70s

back, and sometimes fight back nasty, but it accepts the outcome. early 19 , which combined all of these factors, and in some respects echoes the dilemma facing business in the era of global warning.

Suddenly OPEC raised prices. oil the capitalist economies adjusted.

But rather than threaten war (as leftists who see no bounds to capitalist rapaciousness would assume),

Corporations became more energy efficient because that’s what the market and developed products that provided the same savings for consumers,

demanded. Government stepped in with regulations that filled in the gaps It worked. If where the market couldn’t or wouldn’t.

energy use were still at 1973 levels, the country’s energy use would be 40% greater
per unit of GDP in the United States over than its current

capitalism’s critics
level. The fact is, ignore its dynamism its willingness to
are so focused on the system’s fundamental wickedness, as they see it, that they its assets, namely –

dispense with anything that doesn’t work because it wants to beat the and try something else, not because it has the good of humanity in mind, but

competition and make bigger profits. Given the right incentives, businesses in capitalist economies set of

will conform to rules that limit environmental damage. they will develop the technologies to More importantly,

help mitigate climate change further. energy-saving technologies are Electric and self-driving cars, solar and wind power, smart transportation and a host of other

being developed by corporations , not by government, and certainly not in the world’s last surviving bastions of socialism. Fong doesn’t go into the particulars of the democratic socialism that he fantasizes will rescue the world from

the environmental record of the old Soviet Union was a disaster.

warming. If it’s a kind of centralized economy, he might do well to look back at , which If he imagines some kind

Capitalism is messy and uncooperative, but against

of squishy network of socialist collectives, what is to prevent them from engaging in the same selfish behavior as corporations?

climate change, it’s the best chance we’ve got.

Capitalism solves warming – reducing emissions is profitable

Fedrizzi 15 (Rick, CEO of the US Green Building Council, 11/30/15, “Capitalism is the solution to
climate change”, https://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/30/capitalism-is-the-solution-to-climate-change-
commentary.html, AZG)

Companies large
Environmentalists around the world are pinning their hopes on the international climate talks happening now. But conference rooms in Paris are not where the action on climate change really is. Rather, it's in boardrooms around the world.

and small are taking steps to protect the environment, while increasing their profits. They're motivated not

by cold hard cash.

by consensus or conservation, but It's true that industry has contributed enormously to climate change and environmental degradation. Business interests have long opposed sustainable practices they believed would negatively impact

capitalism is the only force strong enough and

profits. And the environmental community has held fast to this dynamic, holding up industry and capitalism as the enemy for decades. But the truth is that

capable of acting quickly enough to address climate change before the damage becomes irreversible.
I've seen the kind of positive effect business can have on our environment when driven by profit and economic growth — and in one of the world's largest, dirtiest industries no less: real estate. In 1993, I co-founded the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a non-profit organization
dedicated to sustainability in our built environment. USGBC created a voluntary rating system — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED — which allows buildings to earn credits for their sustainable features, including energy and water efficiency, indoor environmental
quality, and recycled materials. LEED has had a dramatic impact on profits and the planet. In just 15 short years, 14 billion square feet of real estate have been LEED registered and certified in more than 150 countries, including some of the most iconic buildings in the world, from the
Chrysler Building in Manhattan, which reduced energy use by 21 percent, to Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles, which has reduced its energy consumption by the equivalent of removing 41,000 cars per year from the road. Thanks to LEED, as legendary
environmentalist Paul Hawken put it, "USGBC may have had a greater impact than any other single organization in the world on materials saved, toxins eliminated, greenhouse gases avoided, and human health enhanced." Gr een schools—better for kids' health? But the benefits are more
than just environmental — they're economic. From hospitals to schools to skyscrapers to factories, communities and companies that have invested in LEED see energy savings, cost savings, and a significant return on their investment. And green buildings haven't only been profitable for
building owners, but also for the American economy at large. Green construction added $167.4 billion to the U.S. GDP from 2011 to 2014, according to a new 2015 Gree n Building Economic Impact Study. This year, the green building sector will employ more than 2.3 million Americans,

economic and environmental benefits align. the power of

and by 2018, it is expected to nearly double in size. Of course, real estate isn't the only industry where Today,

sustainability to drive profits is being quietly embraced throughout the global economy, and major
companies are reaping the benefits. UTC reduced its Take United Technologies, the manufacturing powerhouse that ranks 45th on the Fortune 500 list. Between 2006 and 2014,

greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, and water use by 33 percent. Over those same eight years, its
stock price more than doubled. Unilever has reduced emissions by 37 percent since , one of the world's largest consumer-goods companies,

2008, and its efforts have saved the company more than 400 million euros (US$422 million). GE's Ecomagination program has boosted its top line by $200

billion over the past decade, growing at four times the rate of the company at large. Last year, Siemens' Environmental Portfolio not only eliminated 428 million tons of CO2 emissions for its customers, but also brought in €33 billion. The list goes on and on. As Patagonia's CEO Yvon
 Every time we've made a decision that's right for the planet, it's made us more money.
Chouinard says: " " The private sector has

corporations are wasting less, earning more, and

long been seen as the enemy of environmentalism, and for good reason. But times have changed. Today, a select number of enlightened

proving just how profitable sustainability can be. market-driven There's no reason to keep waiting for an elusive climate agreement. Instead, let's take action to advance

solutions save the planet.

that have the potential — and the ability — to It's time for environmentalists and business leaders to leverage the profit motive to achieve our common goal: a sustainable, profitable future.
 Environment – Generic
Capitalism solves the environment
Follet and Tupy 16 (Chelsea, Cato Institute Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.,
and Marian, editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and
Prosperity, 2/17/16, “Capitalism Is Feeding a Hungry World”, https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-is-
feeding-a-hungry-world/, AZG)
Forbes magazine recently published “Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity by 2050,” by Drew Hansen. A businessma n and regular contributor to Forbes, Hansen starts out by claiming that capitalism has “failed to improve human well-being at scale.” Over the last few

decades, however, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of extreme poverty. In fact, the share of the world’s population, as well as the total number of

people living in poverty, is at an all-time low, despite a population increase of 143 percent since 1960. The left-leaning Brookings Institution predicts that absolute poverty will have been practically eliminated throughout the world by 2030. If this is not good news what is? Hansen argues
capitalism is responsible for widespread destruction of animal species, decimation of forests, and a growing risk of starvation. Let’s examine each of Hansen’s three claims in turn. 1) Hansen claims that “species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate.”

There is no doubt that humans have caused a pulse of

Journalist and Human Progress advisory board member Matt Ridley rebuts this claim in his book The Rational Optimist:

extinction But the rate of extinctions is

, especially by introducing rats, bugs and weeds to oceanic islands at the expense of endemic species… now that most of these accidental introductions to islands have happened,

dropping the extinction rate has fallen

, not rising, at least among birds and mammals. Bird and mammal extinctions peaked at 1.6 a year around 1900 and have since dropped to about 0.2 a year. Ridley also notes that

even farther in the most industrialized countries Capitalism, by creating , where people tend to care more about environmental stewardship.

wealth and enabling humanity to move past worries of basic survival, has helped us to preserve other
species. 2) Hansen says that 6 million hectares of forest are being lost every year. While forest area is slowly declining, there are plenty of reasons for optimism. In a recent paper for the Breakthrough Institute, environmental scientist Jesse H. Ausubel describes how

forests rebound as countries grow wealthier and their populations come to care more about the
environment the population of France has
: Foresters refer to a “forest transition” when a nation goes from losing to gaining forested area. In 1830, France recorded the first forest transition. Since then, while

doubled, French forests have also doubled. forest loss decoupled from population. In other words, Measured by growing stock, the United

States enjoyed its forest transition around 1950, and, measured by area, about 1990. The forest transition began around 1900, when states such as Connecticut had almost no forest, and now encompasses dozens of states. 3) Citing the 2014 US Census, Hansen notes that 15 percent of
Americans live in poverty. (The Census defines poverty as an income of less than $12,071 a year for a single-person household, or $33 a day). But, what does it mean to be poor in America? As economist Steve Horwitz writes, “

Cap solves the environment

Houser 17 (Adam, National Director of Collegians for CFACT, 11/2/17, “Want to Protect the
Environment? Embrace Capitalism”, http://www.cfact.org/2017/11/02/want-to-protect-the-
environment-embrace-capitalism/, AZG)
At the People’s Climate March in April of this year, one young woman held a particularly interesting, and unfortunately terribly inaccurate sign. It said: “List of things capitalism killed: F&*#%*@ everything.” What this individual,

capitalism lifted more people out of poverty than

and much of America and the world, fail to realize, is that capitalism’s benefits far outweigh its faults. Not only has

any system ever implemented in the history of civilization, but in so doing, it has done more to protect the environment than any socialist or communist initiative. If you want to
protect the environment, you should love capitalism. Capitalism increases living standards. When living
standards increase, people care more about the environment, and are more able to do something to
protect it. According to the World Bank, world poverty rates have been declining in every region of the world over the
last several decades. The Economist and the American Enterprise Institute say the primary reason for this is free markets, which involves the opening up of trade
between nations. This is a cornerstone of capitalism. As countries find more markets to sell their goods and services to, jobs, and

the elimination of poverty, follows. This is important, because as a nation creates more wealth, more individuals will
inevitably want to give back to society. We would not have the national parks in America without wealthy
individuals voluntarily giving away their wealth because they wanted to benefit society. Look at what John D. Rockefeller, Jr. did, according to the National Park Service: “The contributions of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and
his son Laurance S. Rockefeller to expand the national park system are especially remarkable. They gave more than $3 million for land and park roads at Acadia, more than $2 million to enlarge and improve Grand Teton National
Park, more than $5 million for land to establish Great Smoky Mountains National Park, more than $2 million for the land comprising Virgin Islands National Park, more than $1.6 million to expand Yosemite, and lesser amounts for
lands at Big Bend, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Haleakala, Lassen Volcanic, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, and Shenandoah national parks; Antietam, Big Hole, and Fort Donelson national battlefields; Capulin Volcano and George Washington
Birthplace national monuments; Colonial National Historical Park; Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site; and the Blue Ridge Parkway.” Many contributions from wealthy individuals happened before Congress had even created the
National Park Service in 1916. The museums at Mesa Verde National Park, Yosemite, and Yavapai Observation StationöMuseum at Grand Canyon National Park all are in existence because of private philanthropy, and those are only

Not only does more wealth provide greater opportunities for protecting the environment, but it
a few examples.

also creates greater demand for it. According to Donald Boudreaux’s book Globalization, “Environmental quality is very much like leisure time: as people become wealthier they demand
more of it, mostly because they can better afford it.” John Tamny, contributor at Forbes, explains this concept well: “In the 1930s the number of trips Americans took to U.S. national parks and forests were negligible. By 1950 total
visits were under 200 million. Today parks and forests average 1.4 billion visitors annually. Today’s citizens have the time to watch the trees grow and smell the roses.” While of course there is poverty in the United States that we

the overall quality of life of Americans has drastically improved. This means Americans need to spend
should all work towards reducing, over time,

Their minds are less focused on daily survival,

less time doing tasks by hand that they can now afford to hire a business to do, or can now use technology to accomplish.

and more on broader issues. This is a positive thing for protecting the environment. When you aren’t concerned about where or
 the evidence showing that capitalism
how to eat and get clean water or shelter, you care more about whether air is of good quality or if the nearby lake is protected from pollution. But

helps improve environmental quality is not just clear from history, it is shines as clear as day in statistical data as well. Yale University has a metric called the Environmental
Performance Index, which takes statistics on environmental health and ecosystem vitality to rate a country’s environmental protection. James Roberts and Ryan Olson of the Heritage Foundation took this number and compared it

to the Index of Economic Freedom, which measures how economically free through capitalism a nation is. They found a strong trend in the data that “indicates that as countries
move from economic repression to economic freedom, their environments improve as well.” Olson and Roberts then looked at the
state of private property rights in several countries, and compared that to Yale’s Environmental Performance Index. They found an incredibly strong correlation in this data, suggesting that as private property

rights increase, so does environmental protection and quality. The two researchers explain: “Because land values usually
increase over time, owners have an incentive to maintain the quality of the land and its improvements
in order to preserve its value. Owners of private property have no interest in destroying the value of the
land or its environmental qualities, because they would not profit from such degradation.” In the 1990’s, Iceland actually began to experiment with property rights when it comes to
fisheries. It was long thought that using private property rights on fish or areas of the ocean, since there is no way to stop fish from swimming to other parts, was impossible. But Iceland began using “Individual Transferable
Quotas” which allowed fishermen to “harvest specific portions of the overall quota of marine fish.” If a fisherman was having less success meeting their part of the quota, they could sell their rights to other more efficient
fishermen, thus creating an incentive to reward more efficient, successful fishermen. This helped limit over-fishing, and over time fish stocks improved, thus increasing environmental quality. But what about the track record of

communist countries? How do they do at protecting the environment? Countries in the European Soviet bloc, as well as the USSR and
Venezuela, do not just fare worse than capitalist countries at protecting the environment; they do such an awful job at protecting the environment that it
inevitably becomes a humanitarian crisis. According to a report from the Multinational Monitor in 1990, air pollution was a serious problem for the Soviet Union.

40% of citizens lived in areas where contaminants were three or four times the maximum safety levels. In
addition, water quality was abysmal. “In Leningrad, nearly half of the children have intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water from what was once Europe’s most pristine supply.” 44% of East

German forests were heavily affected by acid rain that came from coal facilities that lacked the equipment necessary to scrub sulfur from emissions. East Germany had air
pollution that was deemed to be as many as 12 times worse than that in capitalist West Germany. Venezuela is in a deep crisis on almost every social level. Food and basic necessities such as toilet paper are becoming almost non-
existent. Strong socialist policies have caused deep shortages. While the government was focused on depriving individuals of private property and growing its control over the economy, it ignored the issue of water supply. As the
financial crisis deepens and the recent drought continues, much of Venezuela is becoming ill with diarrhea, other stomach diseases, and skin conditions such as scabies, and folliculitis. Hospitals and households alike see limited

As a nation becomes wealthier through capitalism, it starts

water supply, and when there is water, it often comes out of faucets yellow or brown.

paying attention to environmental issues, because they no longer have to worry as much about simply
surviving. If only Venezuela’s government had focused on growing economic freedom, perhaps then enough could have been done to prevent the water quality crisis happening today. Whether you are a head of state or
just a concerned citizen that wants to protect the environment, you should embrace economic freedom, free markets, capitalism , and private property rights. Your citizens
will be lifted out of poverty, your air and water will become cleaner, and your people and neighbors will want to protect the environmental treasures your country offers because they don’t have to worry about what they are going

History, statistical data, and countless real-life examples all agree: to protect the
to eat and drink that night.

environment, embrace capitalism.

 War
Cap solves war – trade and economic integration
Beauchamp 15 (Zack, senior reporter at Vox, 6/4/15, “Steven Pinker explains how capitalism is killing
war”, https://www.vox.com/2015/6/4/8725775/pinker-capitalism, AZG)

The idea that war is on the decline — that is, that there are fewer wars today and fewer people are dying from them than ever

the data makes a

before — is hard for a lot of people to believe (including Republican presidential candidates). And yet case that that's true very compelling : Those numbers were put together by Steven Pinker, a Harvard

psychologist whose book The Better Angels of Our Nature makes the strongest case yet that the world is getting progressively more peaceful. Pinker's argument has come under fire recently, with some arguing that it's way too soon for anyone to say we've turned the corner from an era

of war. I spoke with Pinker this week to discuss some of the reasons why, specifically, he thinks the world has gotten so much safer, especially in the past 70 years. We talked about the idea that war just isn't as profitable as it
used to be , why Vladimir Putin and ISIS seem to think differently, and what world leaders should do if they actually want to make sure the unprecedented peace of the past 70 years holds. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and
clarity. Zack Beauchamp: One story you hear from political scientists for why there's been less war recently that it's just less profitable —countries don't gain very much, economically or politically, from taking over new land anymore. Does that seem right to you? Steven Pinker: Yes, it's

the capitalist peace: when it's cheaper to buy things than to steal them, people don't steal
one of the causes. It's the theory of

them. You don't kill your customers or your lenders, so the arrival of
Also, if other people are more valuable to you alive than dead, you're less likely to kill them.

the infrastructure of trade and commerce reduces some of the sheer exploitative incentives of
conquest. This is an idea that goes back to the Enlightenment. Adam Smith and Montesquieu extolled it; it was on the minds of the founders when they built incentives for free trade into the Constitution. I don't think it's the entire story of the decline in war. But I do

statistically countries that engage in more trade are less likely to

think it's part of the story. There was a well-known study from Bruce Russett and John Oneal showing that

get into militarized disputes, and countries that are more integrated into the world economy are less
likely to get into trouble with their neighbors . ZB: Is it just that pairs of countries are trading with each more, or has something fundamentally changed about the global economy? SP: It's both.

Countries that trade with each other are less likely to pick fights with each other. Independently,
individual countries that get more integrated into the global economy are less likely to make trouble. But one

of the reasons I say this is only part of the answer is that in the Oneal and Russett analysis, it counted for some percentage of the variance in militarized dispute, but only a chunk. They found independent contributions from democracy and me mbership in the international community
(namely, the number of international organizations and treaties that a country has signed on to). Quite across from calculations of interest that are tilted by international markets and institutions, there's the idea of norms: what you consider and don't consider as a legitimate possible
move. [Some scholars] argue that the main factor is that war has been delegitimated — at least among the great powers and the developed states — as a thinkable option. In the 19th century, there was this cliché from [Carl] von Clausewitz that war was just the continuation of politics by
other means: you consider whether to go to war [like any other policy option]. Now that's just not something decent leaders do. Finally, cost-benefit calculations depend on what counts as a "cost." If you lose several tens or hundreds of thousands of your own citizens, is that a cost? And
how big a cost is it? Now, increasingly, that counts as a cost: leaders are less likely to see their young men as cannon fodder, which means countries are willing to endure other costs to avoid that one. That's a result of the rise of humanistic sentiments, as opposed to nationalistic or
ideological ones. ZB: Russia under Vladimir Putin seems to be a clear exception to this pattern — clearly, Putin thinks waging war in Ukraine is worth the cost in international sanctions and opprobrium, not to mention lives lost. Why do you think that is? SP: I think there's been backsliding.
Gorbachev clearly felt it: that's why he didn't call out the tanks when the Berlin Wall fell. He clearly wanted to avoid military confrontations that would result in hundr eds and thousands of deaths. Putin is definitely backsliding, and he's quite explicit about it. He places a high value on
recapturing Russian national grandeur. That's a value that obviously can be at odds with preservation of lives. ZB: So the point here is that what's "rational" for a leader to do depends on what they want to accomplish. SP: Rational analysis of costs does not designate what the costs and
benefits are. Let's say one of the benefits is national glory, and one of the costs is the lives of your citizens or, even more poignantly, the citizens of another country. How you weight the value of glory versus lives is going to affect you how think about the rational cost-benefit analysis. ZB:
This seems like a major problem in the way we talk about the causes of war in public discourse. We call Iran, Russia, or ISIS "irrational," but that's not really what's going on. Instead, they're acting based on a very different set of cost-benefit calculations than what we're used to. SP: Yes,
but I'd add that the analysis of values itself can be put under a rational spotlight. It's not as if values are exclusively a matter of taste and whim. I think one can say "are these values consistent with other values you claim, such as respect for your life and your family" and "are your factual
beliefs about the coming of the messiah able to stand up to scrutiny," but it's a separate discussion. ZB: Earlier you mentioned international institutions, like the UN, as things that seem to put a damper on violence. Is there a way to strengthen these institutions — or do they not matter?
Is it just that the countries that tend to join a lot of these organizations are already democratic and integrated into the global economy? SP: Whether you can actually [promote peace by getting countries to join organizations] is a really good question, and I suspect the answer is yes. The
more you can jawbone countries to join international organizations and the international community, or get them to support these organizations financially, the greater the prospects will be for peace. In particular, there are analyses that show that peacekeeping forces, whether they're
blue-helmeted UN soldiers or more ad hoc coalitions, do tend to have a measurable effect in reducing the likelihood of a [newly peaceful] country's recidivism back into war. They don't work all the time, and there have been some famous failures, but to the extent that they're actually

things are moving in a positive direction

supported, that the world community arms them and trains them, they do have a beneficial effect. ZB: In broad strokes, then, : the conflicts we see are terrible, but they're

not fundamentally upsetting the longer trends toward peace. And yet that fact isn't transforming the American public discourse. When look at the Republican presidential campaign, for

example, you have people saying, "We have never seen more threats against our nation and its citizens than we do today." Why do you think it's so hard to convince people that things are all right? SP: Well, there is the peculiarity of the United States. It's an outlier among Western
democracies along a number of dimensions: the US has a higher rate of violent crime, it gets involved in more wars, it continues to have capital punishment, [and] has high rates of religious belief compared to other Western democracies. Now, the US is a complex, heterogeneous country.
But the more populist southern and southwestern areas are less shaped by the Enlightenment and more by a culture of honor: there are threats, and moral virtue consists in having the resolve to deal with them. A "manliness versus cowardice" mindset. On top of that American

the general style of punditry and analysis both in journalism and the government is event- and
peculiarity,

anecdote-driven, rather than trend- and data-driven. people are overly And we know from cognitive psychology — Daniel Kahneman and others — that

impressed by big, noisy, memorable events as compared to slow, systemic trends. The natural tendency is to go with what you read this

morning. The United States is also in the unique circumstance of having such outsize military power that it has the dual dema nds of protecting its own interests globally but also being seen in the role of "global policeman." It's the only single country that can do that, but it has no official
mandate for doing it.

Cap solves war – globalization and openness

den Ouden 18 (Marco, writer for the Federation for Economic Education, 2/13/18, “Global Trade Is
the Way to Global Peace and Prosperity”, https://fee.org/articles/global-trade-is-the-way-to-global-
peace-and-prosperity/, AZG)

He notes that according to the United Nations, "poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500." Not only has globalization increased wealth and prosperity worldwide, it has
produced a more peaceful world. That may seem an incredible claim considering continuing wars in places like Syria and parts of Africa, but it is true. Unprecedented Peace In his
monumental book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker describes the steady decline of violence over the centuries, a trend that
continues to this day, despite blips like the World Wars which he considers anomalies. He writes about the Rights Revolutions — civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, gay rights. He writes about the reduction in infanticide

Since 1945
and child abuse, the effective end of lynchings, the steady decrease in violence towards gays and the increased awareness of spousal abuse and its reduction as a result. And he writes about the Long Peace.

we have entered an unprecedented period of peace. He presents a detailed argument complete with
statistics to support his thesis. He looks for an explanation. The increase in the number of stable democracies is a factor. But an even larger factor is what he calls the
Liberal Peace. "The Democratic Peace," he writes, "is sometimes considered a special case of a Liberal Peace — "liberal" in the sense of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on political and economic
freedom , rather than left-liberalism. The theory of the Liberal Peace embraces as well the doctrine of gentle commerce, according to which trade is a form of reciprocal altruism which offers positive-sum benefits for
both parties and gives a selfish stake in the well-being of the other." Pinker specifically mentions globalization, noting that " history suggests many examples in which freer

trade correlates with greater peace. " He cites the research of Bruce Russett and John Oneal. "They found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to
have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year." "Russett and Oneal," he continues, "found it was not just the level of bilateral trade between nations in a pair that contributed to peace, but the dependence of each country on

the
trade across the board: a country that is open to the global economy is less likely to find itself in a militarized dispute." Some political scientists, he writes, have taken these findings "to entertain a heretical idea called

Capitalist Peace. The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace heresy, it's the
economic openness that does most of the pacifying." Pinker concludes the section on the Liberal Peace with a quote from peace researcher Nils Petter Gleditsch who
updated a popular 1960s anti-Vietnam War slogan to "Make money, not war!" Libertarians have and should continue to support a policy of exporting liberal values of individual rights, peace, capitalism, and free trade to the world
at large. If people are trapped in an insular state that oppresses its people, the ability to leave and seek freedom and opportunity elsewhere is the most precious of all rights. Given the opportunity, people will naturally gravitate
toward freedom and prosperity. Globalization encourages this natural inclination as well as puts pressures on governments to liberalize their economies and to improve individual rights.
 Inequality
Cap solves inequality – prefer a global scale
Cowen 14 (Tyler, professor of economics at George Mason University, 7/19/14, “Income Inequality Is
Not Rising Globally. It's Falling.”, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-is-
not-rising-globally-its-falling-.html, AZG)
Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations, yet

income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been
noted often enough. The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may
sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history. Of course, no one should use this

Policies on immigration
observation as an excuse to stop helping the less fortunate. But it can help us see that higher income inequality is not always the most relevant problem, even for strict egalitarians.

and free trade, for example, sometimes increase inequality within a nation, yet can make the world a better place and
often decrease inequality on the planet as a whole. International trade has drastically reduced poverty within developing nations, as
evidenced by the export-led growth of China and other countries. Yet contrary to what many economists had promised, there is now good evidence
that the rise of Chinese exports has held down the wages of some parts of the American middle class. This was demonstrated in a recent paper by the economists David H. Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David
Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid, and Gordon H. Hanson of the University of California, San Diego. At the same time, Chinese economic growth has probably raised incomes of the top 1 percent in

Chinese growth has added to income

the United States, through exports that have increased the value of companies whose shares are often held by wealthy Americans. So while

inequality in the United States, it has also increased prosperity and income equality globally. The evidence also
suggests that immigration of low-skilled workers to the United States has a modestly negative effect on the wages of American workers without a high school diploma, as shown, for instance, in research by George Borjas, a
Harvard economics professor. Yet that same immigration greatly benefits those who move to wealthy countries like the United States. (It probably also helps top American earners, who can hire household and child-care workers at
cheaper prices.) Again, income inequality within the nation may rise but global inequality probably declines, especially if the new arrivals send money back home. From a narrowly nationalist point of view, these developments may
not be auspicious for the United States. But that narrow viewpoint is the main problem. We have evolved a political debate where essentially nationalistic concerns have been hiding behind the gentler cloak of egalitarianism. To
clear up this confusion, one recommendation would be to preface all discussions of inequality with a reminder that global inequality has been falling and that, in this regard, the world is headed in a fundamentally better direction.

The message from groups like Occupy Wall Street has been that inequality is up and that capitalism is failing us. A more correct and nuanced message is this: Although significant economic
problems remain, we have been living in equalizing times for the world — a change that has been largely for the good. That may not make for convincing sloganeering, but it’s the
truth. A common view is that high and rising inequality within nations brings political trouble, maybe through violence or even revolution. So one might argue that a nationalistic perspective is important. But it’s hardly obvious that
such predictions of political turmoil are true, especially for aging societies like the United States that are showing falling rates of crime. Furthermore, public policy can adjust to accommodate some egalitarian concerns. We can
improve our educational system, for example. Still, to the extent that political worry about rising domestic inequality is justified, it suggests yet another reframing. If our domestic politics can’t handle changes in income distribution,
maybe the problem isn’t that capitalism is fundamentally flawed but rather that our political institutions are inflexible. Our politics need not collapse under the pressure of a world that, over all, is becoming wealthier and fairer.
Many egalitarians push for policies to redistribute some income within nations, including the United States. That’s worth considering, but with a cautionary note. Such initiatives will prove more beneficial on the global level if there

is more wealth to redistribute. In the United States,greater wealth would maintain the nation’s ability to invest abroad, buy
foreign products, absorb immigrants and generate innovation, with significant benefit for global
income and equality. In other words, the true egalitarian should follow the economist’s inclination to seek wealth-
maximizing policies, and that means worrying less about inequality within the nation. Yes, we might consider some useful revisions to current debates on inequality. But globally minded egalitarians should
be more optimistic about recent history, realizing that capitalism and economic growth are continuing their historical roles as the greatest and most

effective equalizers the world has ever known.

 Space
Cap solves space
IBD 15 (Investor’s Business Daily editorial team, 12/23/15, “SpaceX Rocket Is A Capitalist Triumph”,
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/falcon-9-rockets-return-from-suborbital-mission-kicks-
off-race-for-space/, AZG)

This week's return of a rocket to its launch pad

Free Markets: was a big deal, not only because it signals a new era in competitive space exploration but also because it shows a new generation

how capitalism solves problems. Americans keep hoping for something spectacular from NASA but are disappointed. In recent years, in addition to ending the costly shuttle program and forcing our astronauts to hitch rides with

the current battle between SpaceX

the Russians to go into space, NASA has made "Muslim outreach" a top priority. That's not much return for NASA's $18 billion annual budget. But founder Elon Musk and
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin rocket safely landed in November, will bring big benefits to the American people — and, huge
down the road, potentially

profits to the entrepreneurs who create the rockets. Included in the rivalry is the Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture, United Launch Alliance, which already has 100 launches under its belt. "Welcome to the club," tweeted Bezos to Musk.

That good-natured message — maybe "Game on!" would have been better — obscures the revolutionary nature of Musk's achievement, after three very public failures in the past year. While Bezos' Blue Origin was first to return a rocket safely, his rocket is capable of only sub-orbital
flight. Musk's Falcon 9 can actually go into space, and on this trip it delivered 11 satellites into orbit. NBC's Keith Wagstaff noted the interesting economics of space travel: Each rocket costs $60 million. Fuel costs per launch are roughly $200,000. So Falcon 9 opens up the possibility of

The difference in cost-effectiveness is staggering.

commercial access to space for less than $200,000 a trip, in contrast with the $450 million price tag to send a NASA shuttle into space. "If one can

NASA is
figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred," wrote Musk on the SpaceX website. Simply put, , hobbled by politics, federal bureaucracy and government contracting rules,

unable to move quickly to meet the needs of private users. the new space entrepreneurs respond Not so . They must

to the capitalist rules of the market that trips to

— not to the political dictates of big government. Nor are these private-sector achievements merely hobbies to amuse billionaires. Musk hopes short

space will lead some day to Mars an explosion of exploration. And it's
. Perhaps not since the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries has there been such

not kings and queens or big government leading the way, but capitalist dreamers.

We can and should go to Mars- but private corporations are key

Buchanan 17
Mark Buchanan is an American physicist and author. He was formerly an editor with the international journal of science Nature,
and the popular science magazine New Scientist. November 2nd, 2017. “Colonizing mars”. Nature.com.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys4311

No human being has set foot on an astronomical body other than Earth since 1972. One can argue that
there's no pressing need to do so, going back to the Moon — or further, to Mars or some other planet — especially with actual
people. Unmanned spacecraft can do an awful lot of useful science. It would be a waste of resources to send people, and we have enough other
pressing problems. Right? NASA
does have plans for Mars, but envisions human astronauts going there only
sometime in the 2030s. However, there is another perspective. Catastrophic events on Earth have
previously wiped out many long-lived species , and there's a small but non-zero chance that Earth
could, in any given year, get obliterated — by an undetected asteroid or comet, or a nearby supernovae.
Or human life might get erased from the planet by our inaction in the face of the pressures we're
putting on the biosphere, or by overaction in the form of an out-of-control engineered biological
organism. Given enough time, human extinction might be a more or less certain prospect — unless we
spread from the planet . From this perspective, efforts to spread our species to other astronomical objects
seems rather more urgent . It's this argument that lies behind the efforts of Elon Musk, who recently announced plans for his
company SpaceX to work toward taking paying passengers to Mars by 2022. His vision is hugely ambitious, inspiring, and also admirably
practical. It's motivated by the perception that human technical capabilities don't advance automatically, but only if
we decide to focus our scientific, engineering and industrial effort on a specific goal. That said, the project does
face some imposing and unsolved hurdles Why Mars? First, it's not too far away, and far more hospitable than
alternatives such as Venus or Mercury. The Martian day is 24 hours and 40 minutes, and temperatures range from −140 °C to 30
°C, compared to Earth's slightly warmer −88 °C to 58 °C. If we could warm Mars a little, it could be much like Earth, with
a dense gaseous atmosphere and liquid oceans. Plentiful CO2 in the atmosphere also means we could
grow plants. There's decent sunlight given that Mars is only 50% further from the Sun than Earth. Musk's path to getting lots of
people to Mars — and making humanity a multiplanet species — rests on bringing the price of getting a
human to Mars to a reasonable level so that many people who want to go can also afford to go. Musk estimates this to be about
US$200,000 — roughly the median value of a house in the US. It's likely that lots of people would opt for the challenge, and
there would be plenty of jobs on the newly inhabited planet. Presumably, many other visitors would be sponsored. Is this price
achievable? This represents a price reduction of around four and a half orders of magnitude from what it cost to put astronauts on the
Moon. As Musk reasons — based on discussions with technical experts — this is achievable if engineers pursue two
strategies. First, we're going to need to make spacecraft and the boosters used to get them to Mars fully
reusable and capable of multiple trips. That, he suggests, could provide a reduction of between two and two and a half orders of
magnitude. The final two orders of magnitude would then come from the development of an industrial scale production of the right spacecraft
fuel on Mars itself. As Musk points out, reusability
is what makes many transport technologies affordable. A trip on
a modern commercial aircraft would cost roughly US$500,000 per person if planes could only be used
once, but comes down to the order of US$100 due to reusability. The same applies to spacecraft for Mars, although the
gain is limited somewhat by the fact that the Earth–Mars rendezvous only happens every 26 months, limiting how frequently a craft can be
used. Also important, he argues, will be launching the spacecraft into orbit with fuel tanks essentially
empty, and refilling them in orbit from a fleet of boosters that carry fuel to space. This way the craft can
have very large tanks and carry large payloads. Musk has discussed these and other details of his plans in a recent article (New
Space 5, 46–61; 2017). Another key would be extensive production of spacecraft propellant on Mars itself, so
that ships sent to Mars could return to Earth. This should be possible, he suggests, given that the Martian atmosphere is predominantly CO2,
with water and ice present in the soil. Both methane (CH4) and oxygen (O2) can then be produced as a fuel source. In Musk's vision, this would
fuel a fleet of spaceships that would in time come to number as many as 1,000. Each ship would carry about 100 people on a
trip of 80 days, and would, of course, need to carry an incredibly wide range of cargo to support
everything from manufacturing and oxygen production to farming and entertainment. Building up a
sustainable population on Mars — of, say, one million people — would take many decades, possibly as long
as a century. Musk goes on to examine the kind of engine technology that might be used, based on the
recent technological success of his company SpaceX. This part of the story seems quite believable, especially given the
impressive progress SpaceX has had over the past decade or so. It's become the largest private producer of rocket engines
in the world, and produces the engine giving the highest ever thrust to weight ratio. It's also mastered technology to have rocket boosters
return to their launch sites and land carefully back on the pad. One big stumbling block — one Musk doesn't mention in
his essay — is radiation. Earth has a nice magnetosphere that largely protects us from the harsh solar wind and high-energy cosmic
rays arriving from outer space. Travelling through space to Mars presents serious risks to astronauts; this remains the primary risk as viewed by
analysts at NASA. There appear to be few technical solutions to shield astronauts, who may inevitably suffer serious radiation damage. Yes,
of course — going to Mars en masse is risky, the method unproven and uncertain, still awaiting
invention. But historically, this is often how amazing scientific, technological or cultural
accomplishments have come about . On occasion, as our capabilities advance, something that for so
long seemed impossible suddenly becomes possible, given the right sustained effort. Musk's vision aims
for just such a change. It may all end in disappointment and failure. But, even then, we're sure to learn
many things along the way.

We could colonize mars- cyanobacteria solve nitrogen, water, food, and metal
constraints
Verseux et all 16
Cyprien Verseux at the PNRA/C.N.R (google that). Ivan Glaucio Paulino Lima at NASA ARC/USRA in the Planetary Systems
Branch. Mickael Baqué at German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research. Daniela Billi works at the University
of Rome Tor Vergata at the Dipartimento di Biologia. Lynn Rothschild works at NASA. January 2016. “Synthetic Biology for Space
Exploration: Promises and Societal Implications”. Public Engagement in Synthetic Biology: “Experts”, “Diplomats” and the
Creativity of “Idiots”. (pp.75-80). Graphs and images removed. EL

2 Providing “Off the Land” Substrates for Microbial Growth Does Mars contain the substrates we need for feeding
microorganisms without sending materials from Earth? Obviously you won’t find, waiting under a rock,
bottled culture media as those used in laboratories to grow microbes. Yet, most elements needed to
support life have been detected in the Martian soils and rocks, including all the basic building blocks (C,
H, O, N, P, S) and other elements needed in smaller amounts (Mg, Fe, Ca, Na, K, Mn, Cr, Ni, Mo, Cu, Zn…). There is
gaseous carbon (in carbon dioxide but also, as recently evidenced, in methane—see Webster et al. 2015) and nitrogen in the
atmosphere, and additional carbon atoms can be found in the CO2 ice caps, in the surface and subsurface regolith (the loose soil that can
be seen on photographs of Martian landscapes) due to exchange with the atmosphere, possibly in reservoirs formed
when the atmosphere was thicker (Kurahashi-Nakamura and Tajika 2006). Fixed nitrogen compounds have also been detected
(Ming et al. 2014), even though what exactly they are and whether or not they could be used by living
organisms is not defined yet. Thus, Martian rocks (Cockell 2014) and atmosphere seem to contain all the basic elements needed to
support life. Water is also there : it has been detected in large amounts (Tokano 2005) as ice at the north polar ice cap, under the south
carbon ice cap and in the subsurface at more temperate latitudes, as mineral hydration, and as vapor in the atmosphere,
even though at low concentrations. It will also be a by-product of human metabolism and industrial
activity. Solar energy is of course present . As Mars is approximately 1.5 AU from the Sun, the average radiation flux is 43 % that
of Earth’s. So, while all needed elements are naturally present and some additional sources will come from human activity (Table 1), they are in
a form that most organisms cannot use. In particular, many
organisms—qualified as heterotrophic and including
animals such as us humans, as well as most microorganisms—need organic compounds as carbon and
energy sources, and their state and availability on Mars remain poorly known (Ming et al. 2014) but is likely low.
Fixed nitrogen, such as nitrate (NO3 − ), ammonia (NH3) and amino-acid chains (but not atmospheric nitrogen
which is in the form of dinitrogen, N2), is also needed for most organisms. The main limitation is
consequently not the lack of life-supporting elements, but the abilities of microorganisms to use them
under the form they are encountered on Mars’s surface. That being said, not all microorganisms need
organic compounds to grow; autotrophs such as cyanobacteria don’t . Just like plants, cyanobacteria can
photosynthesize—they use CO2 and solar radiation as carbon and energy sources to produce their own organic material. In a
nutrient desert such as Mars, this would give them a strong advantage over heterotrophic organisms. In
addition, some can fix N2, which like CO2 is present in the Martian atmosphere. On top of this, some have the
ability to extract and use nutrients from analogues of Martian rocks and have consequently been suggested as a basis
for systems producing life-sustaining compounds from local resources (Brown et al. 2008; Brown 2008a, b). Most—if not all—nutrients needed
to cover their needs could be directly provided from Mars’s resources.
Some cyanobacteria (e.g., Anabaena cylindrica) are capable
of growing in distilled water containing only powdered Mars basalt analogues, under terrestrial atmosphere
(Olsson-Francis and Cockell 2010a). Other studies showed that the growth of several species of cyanobacteria isolated from iron-depositing hot
springs in Yellowstone National Park was stimulated by the presence of Martian soil analogues in culture media (Brown and Sarkisova 2008) and
that a strain called Nostoc sp. HK-01 could grow on a Mars regolith stimulant for at least 140 days,
without any other nutrient source besides atmospheric gas (Arai et al. 2008). As cyanobacteria produce
organic compounds, why not use them for feeding heterotrophic organisms ? Cultures could be used after simply
destroying the cyanobacterial cells; researchers have successfully used lysed cyanobacterial biomass as a
substrate for ethanol-producing yeasts (Aikawa et al. 2013; Möllers et al. 2014). However, if we could harvest nutrients without
killing cells, processes could be much more efficient. This could be achieved by having cyanobacteria release
substrates in the extracellular medium, and this solution has been investigated in the Rothschild
laboratory since the 2011 Brown-Stanford iGEM team engineered Anabaena PCC7120 to secrete
sucrose.5 Heterotrophic bacteria from a common soil species, Bacillus subtilis, were able to grow in filtered medium in which the engineered
Anabaena had grown but no additional organic compounds were added (unpublished data). Previously, the cyanobacterial strain
Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942 had been engineered to produce and secrete either glucose and
fructose, or lactate, which then served as a substrate for growing the model bacterium Escherichia coli (Niederholtmeyer et al. 2010).
Ammonium (NH4 + ; a fixed nitrogen compounds that can be used by most microorganisms) is naturally released by some cyanobacteria. The
extracellular concentration of ammonia can reach more than 10 mM in cultures of Anabaena species
relying on atmospheric nitrogen as a sole nitrogen source, without killing the cyanobacteria (Subramanian
and Shanmugasundaram 1986). Ammonia becomes limiting only when at extremely low concentrations; for Escherichia coli, for instance, it is
below a few µM (Kim et al. 2012), several orders of magnitudes below the above mentioned concentrations in cyanobacterial cultures. Then,
cyanobacteria grown using Martian rocks as a substrate would release inorganic elements (Ca, Fe, K, Mg, Mn,
etc.) into water, as shown in a study performed with terrestrial analogues of Martian basalt (Olsson-Francis and Cockell 2010a), making
them available to species which cannot extract them from rocks. Taken as a whole, these studies suggest
that using cyanobacteria to produce substrates for microorganisms from Martian resources (see Fig. 1)
may be a viable option . In addition to that of other microorganisms, cyanobacterial cultures could be used to support the growth of
plants. Even though basalt is the dominant rock type in Martian regolith and weathered basalt can yield
extremely productive soils on Earth (Dahlgren et al. 1993), regolith would probably need a physicochemical
and/or biological treatment before it can be used as growth substrate for plants. Reasons for this include its poor
water-holding properties (due to its low organic carbon contents), and that regolith nutrients are hardly available to plants (Cockell 2011; Maggi
and Pallud 2010). Besides carbon, the soil will need to be enriched in other elements, including nitrogen, as most
plants cannot fix atmospheric nitrogen (even though symbiotic nitrogen fixation occurs in some plants, mainly legumes, due to
harboring specific bacteria in their tissues). It has already been proposed to use cyanobacteria to release chemical
elements from extraterrestrial rocks to an aqueous phase, aimed at being incorporated in a substrate
for hydroponic cultivation (Brown and Sarkisova 2008). In addition to these elements, fixed nitrogen and biomass
resulting from cyanobacterial cultures could be used as substrates for plant cultivation, as a hydroponic
substrate and/or to make a fertile soil. More information about the potential of Mars-specific cyanobacterium-based biological life support
systems (CyBLiSS) is given elsewhere (Verseux et al. 2015) and an overview is given in Fig. 2. The key point is that, thanks
to their
photosynthetic, rock leaching and nitrogen fixing abilities, cyanobacteria could be used for processing
inorganic compounds found on Mars into a form that is available to other microorganisms and to plants.
Additional nutrients could come from the recycling of human waste. Finally, if some micronutrients (e.g.,
some metal ions) could not be mined or biologically synthesized on site, bringing them from Earth would
only add negligible mass to the initial payload, as they are needed in trace amounts only. Why would synthetic
biology be useful here? First, as illustrated above, cyanobacteria can be engineered to secrete organic substrates ;
proofs-of-concept have been done with the secretion of sucrose, lactate, glucose and fructose. Even though growth rates of the
heterotrophic organisms were quite low due to low sugar yields, these could be improved by increasing
production rates or decreasing processing of targeted products by producing strains (in the work of Niederholtmeyer et
al. 2010, produced sugars could be consumed by cyanobacteria, thereby decreasing their concentration in the extracellular medium).
Cyanobacteria can also be genetically modified for ammonium secretion (Spiller et al. 1986). Second, synthetic
biology can be used
to increase the abilities of cyanobacteria to use and process Martian resources (see below), as well as the
ability of other microorganisms to use resources produced by cyanobacteria.

We can genetically engineer organisms to exist on Mars

Verseux et all 16
Cyprien Verseux at the PNRA/C.N.R (google that). Ivan Glaucio Paulino Lima at NASA ARC/USRA in the Planetary Systems
Branch. Mickael Baqué at German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research. Daniela Billi works at the University
of Rome Tor Vergata at the Dipartimento di Biologia. Lynn Rothschild works at NASA. January 2016. “Synthetic Biology for Space
Exploration: Promises and Societal Implications”. Public Engagement in Synthetic Biology: “Experts”, “Diplomats” and the
Creativity of “Idiots”. (pp.80-85). Graphs and pictures excluded. EL

3 Engineering Microbial “Mars Worthiness”: Increasing Resistances and Abilities to Use On-Site Resources The harsh environmental conditions
faced directly on Mars’s surface (see Table 2) do not allow any known microorganism to grow efficiently: there are low temperatures, low
pressure (5–11 mbar) and a high UV flux including UV-C radiation. The atmosphere is mostly composed of carbon dioxide (95.3 %), little
nitrogen (2.7 %) and even less oxygen (0.13 %), and low moisture. Because of the temperature, pressure and
radiation issues,
microbial cultures must be enclosed in an appropriate culture system, providing shielding and an
environment suitable for metabolism and growth. Elaborated culture hardware providing Earth-like
conditions could be suggested, but they would be highly energy consuming, very massive and consequently
extremely costly to send to Mars (Lehto et al. 2006) even for small-scale cultures, and would have many possible causes of failure due to relying
on complex technologies (that being said, the potential of ultimately creating many of these facilities with in situ resources is being explored in
Rothschild’s lab). However,
culture conditions do not have to be exactly as on Earth: microorganisms have
specific ranges of tolerance for environmental factors. In particular, some thrive in extreme environments,
including some deserts considered as Mars analogues due to radiation, rock composition, drought and
extreme temperatures . Their resistance to conditions found on Mars’s surface have been extensively studied,
using low Earth orbit- and Earth-based simulations (e.g., Baqué et al. 2013; de Vera et al. 2013, 2014; Olsson-Francis and Cockell 2010b;
Rothschild 1990). The more the organisms can withstand conditions found on site, the simpler the culture
system can be. Besides, having resistant organisms would allow loss risk to be minimized (Cockell 2010; Olsson-
Francis and Cockell 2010a), both during the journey (the organisms’ tolerance to long periods of dehydration, possibly in a
differentiated state such as spores or akinetes, would allow a safe and freezing-independent storage) and on site: high resistance to
Martian surface conditions would provide safety in case of system malfunction during which cultures could be exposed to less
attenuated conditions (e.g., desiccation, low pressure, high radiation levels, altered pH and sudden temperature shift), both when stored and
grown. Synthetic biology could be used to increase the resistance of microorganisms to Martian
conditions, probably not enough to make them thrive at the surface but enough to reduce both
hardware needs and risks of culture loss. A strategy could be to express genes from other organisms
known to confer an advantage in coping with targeted stresses to increase microorganism’s fitness under conditions
found beyond Earth (Cumbers and Rothschild 2010). This approach has been successful in other contexts, mainly
with E. coli (see, e.g., Billi et al. 2000; Ferrer et al. 2003; Gao et al. 2003, and the 2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM team6 ). Once specific
genes have been shown to confer an advantage to the targeted stress when expressed in the
microorganism, they can be improved using various computational and molecular biology tools and
methods. This approach is becoming more and more efficient, with notably a sharp decrease in DNA synthesis cost, the improvement of
automated gene assembly methods, knowledge gained from systems biology, and the development of biological computer aided design
(BioCAD) and other computational tools. While expressing genes from other organisms (or overexpressing genes from the
organism itself) might confer a significant advantage in coping with some environmental stressors, this approach may not be suitable for
resistance features that are highly multifactorial, each individual factor having a relatively weak impact. For instance, there
is not a
single factor that confers Deinococcus radiodurans (one of the most radioresistant known microorganism) its extreme
radiation resistance, but a very wide combination of features including efficient DNA repair mechanisms,
anti-oxidation defenses and specific morphological characteristics (e.g., Slade and Radman 2011). For such
multifactorial features, dramatic changes in phenotype through computational genetic engineering are more
challenging. Instead, directed evolution provides an alternative approach that can allow complex modifications at an
organismal level without an a priori knowledge of mechanisms. To accomplish this, a parental population is subjected to iterations of
mutagenesis and artificial selection. Genetic diversity
is created presumably at random, and the mutated
population is subjected to selection for the best adapted progeny. To witness the power of selection to shape microbial
populations, look no farther than the battle between microbes and antibiotics. Microbial evolution is the
reason why doctors insist the patient comply fully with antibiotic regimens. If the antibiotic dosage fails
to kill even a few infectious bacteria that happened to be more resistant than the others, they may
proliferate and generate a new population of bacteria which will be more resistant than the previous
one. Repeat the cycle and you’ll need a different treatment . In the laboratory, similar processes can be
exploited to confer on organisms new or improved functions . The dynamics of directed evolution have been widely
studied in the last decades and have been used successfully to increase organisms’ specific properties (see, e.g., Conrad et al. 2011; Elena and
Lenski 2003), including radiation resistance in bacteria (Ewing 1995; Goldman and Travisano 2011; Harris et al. 2009; Wassmann et al. 2010).
One of the main issues when designing an optimization process based on directed evolution is the need for linking the optimized function (e.g.,
production of a compound of industrial interest) to the organism’s fitness: strategies must
be designed to make the cells of
interest thrive while eliminating the others. When increasing resistance, the process is more
straightforward: selection can be accomplished by applying increasing levels of the targeted stress and
selecting survivors. Directed evolution can be improved by automation (de Crecy et al. 2009; Dykhuizen 1993; Grace et al. 2013; Marlière
et al. 2011; Toprak et al. 2013) and recent methods such as, for instance, the so-called genome shuffling (Patnaik et al. 2002) and multiplex
genome engineering (Wang et al. 2009). Once
a microbial production system is well established and automated, directed
evolution to increase adaption to the Mars environment could be performed on Mars . It can be much faster to evolve
organisms on-site than it is on Earth, provided screening methods and adequate organisms are available there (Way et al. 2011). Indeed,
Earth-based simulations of some of the factors encountered on Mars (and their combination) are
difficult, expensive and cannot faithfully reproduce all their effects. Computational genetic engineering
and directed evolution are not mutually exclusive, in fact, they can be used in combination (Rothschild 2010). Engineered
organisms can be submitted to directed evolution for optimization and, conversely, data obtained from genome sequencing of evolved
organisms (so as to understand what mutations are responsible for improved properties) can give gene targets for design. An example of
strategy combining both is illustrated in Fig. 3. Briefly, natural
and evolved gene libraries are generated using directed
evolution followed by sequencing and/or comparative gene expression assays in the presence or
absence of the environmental stressor . Genes selected for the properties they confer (e.g., metabolic pathway
based on local resources or resistance to a target stress) are then engineered using synthetic biology to increase their
impact. They are finally adapted to the target organism, the “chassis”, which will be used for on-site resource production. Again, this scheme
is an example and different workflows can be considered. Of particular interest would be to increase resistance to long-
term dehydration (for storage, as cells enter a state in which they do not need to be fed, and resting stages are often more resistant to
environmental extremes), to radiation (ionizing radiation and UV radiation, especially for photosynthetic microorganisms due to the need
to access radiation from other parts of the solar spectrum; that being said, ionizing radiation is not extremely high when compared to
microorganisms’ resistance and UV can easily be blocked or filtered),
to a wide range of temperatures, to low pressures, to
large and brutal shifts in these parameters (in case of system failure), and to combinations of them. Then,
tolerance to a wide range of physicochemical parameters (e.g., high and low pH, presence of oxidative species) would
allow constraints on culture conditions to be relaxed. The growth-permissive limits of most of these factors have been
widely studied, even though little is known about their combined effects (Harrison et al. 2013), both regarding the limits and the involved
mechanisms. However, metabolism under low pressure remains poorly described and should be characterized and increased, as using a
pressure as close as possible to Mars’s ambient pressure (about 7–11 hPa, with seasonal variations; Earth’s is about 1013 hPa) would greatly
lower construction weight and cost of culture systems due to minimizing the need for reinforcing the structures to withstand inside/outside
pressure differences, and minimize the risk of the leakage of organic matter (Lehto et al. 2006). Some methane
producing
microorganisms have been shown to maintain low but detectable methane production, and thus
metabolic activity, at 50 hPa of pressure (Kral et al. 2011) and a few bacteria have shown growth under 7 hPa
of CO2-enriched anoxic atmospheres (Nicholson et al. 2013; Schuerger et al. 2013). However, these abilities are
uncommon: a wide range of microorganisms are unable to grow on semisolid medium at pressures below 25 hPa of ambient air (Nicholson
et al. 2010). On the other hand, the lowest pressures at which biological niches are naturally present on Earth is
about 330 hPa (at the top of the Mount Everest), way above Mars’s surface pressure of about 10 hPa
(Fajardo-Cavazos et al. 2012), and selective pressure on coping with such low pressures is virtually non-existent
for current terrestrial microorganisms . The full potential for growth at low pressures is probably far from
being reached. Thus, there might be much room for improvement by artificially evolving microorganisms to grow faster under low (and to
grow at lower) pressures. Consistently, adaptation
to low pressure has been shown possible with Bacillus subtilis:
after cultivation at 5 kPa for 1000 generations, one isolate showed an increased fitness at this pressure
(Nicholson et al. 2010). It should however be noted that a physical limitation to the pressure range that can be used at growth permissive
temperatures comes from the need to maintain a liquid phase. Besides resistance, increasing the abilities of microorganisms—especially
cyanobacteria if they are used for processing raw resources—to use resources found on Mars’s surface would allow yields to be increased,
while relaxing culture constraints and the need for materials imported from Earth. In particular, increasing
their abilities to leach
rocks and to get most of their nutrients from these within a wide range of pH, and to fix molecular
nitrogen at low partial pressure, would be highly beneficial. In that case, genetic engineering might be
more efficient than it is for increasing their resistance. Some clues have been given regarding the engineering of
microorganisms with increased bioleaching abilities (Cockell 2011). However, even though metabolomics has made great advances in the last
decade and synthetic biology strongly benefits from it (see for instance Ellis and Goodacre 2012 and Lee 2012), the complex
interactions occurring in cells are still hard to predict and model, and whole-cell scaled directed evolution will here
again be very useful. In that case, selection can be done by cyclically growing microorganisms and diluting them,
in presence of the target nutrient source, and letting the fastest-growing mutants become dominant.
Culture conditions in human outposts on Mars should thus result from a compromise between conditions that provide enough support for
microbial metabolism while minimizing costs, initial mass, energy consumption and reliance on materials sent from the Earth. Synthetic
biology can be used to push this compromise towards the most sustainable solution, while decreasing
risks of losing cultures—what could have terrible consequences if humans rely on them—and increasing
yields of the processes by increasing microorganisms’ abilities to use on-site resources.

Economic investment in space is key- it’s the only way to solve an existential threat
and make us nicer people
Verseux et all 16
Cyprien Verseux at the PNRA/C.N.R (google that). Ivan Glaucio Paulino Lima at NASA ARC/USRA in the Planetary Systems
Branch. Mickael Baqué at German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research. Daniela Billi works at the University
of Rome Tor Vergata at the Dipartimento di Biologia. Lynn Rothschild works at NASA. January 2016. “Synthetic Biology for Space
Exploration: Promises and Societal Implications”. Public Engagement in Synthetic Biology: “Experts”, “Diplomats” and the
Creativity of “Idiots”. (pp.89-92). EL

5 Societal Implications of Extraterrestrial Human Colonies Relying on Synthetic Biology The

societal ramifications of synthetic
biology are being discussed intensely and at the highest levels worldwide. For example, in the US, the
first report released by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bio-ethical Issues was focused on
synthetic biology (Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues 2010). This report identified five guiding principles: (1) public
beneficence, (2) responsible stewardship, (3) intellectual freedom and responsibility, (4) democratic deliberation, and (5) justice and fairness.
Neither these principles nor the abundant discussion of the topic in other fora will be detailed here; some aspects are covered in other
contributions to this book. Here, we rather focus on issues arising from the use of synthetic biology in support
of human space colonization. Some are simply related to the fact that the former is fostered, thereby raising
issues related to space exploration itself. Conversely, others come from the stimulation of synthetic biology by its
application to the space sector. Finally, very specific issues are raised by the potential development of
human colonies beyond Earth that rely on modified organisms. As humans settle in destinations beyond Earth, a
number of social, ethical and psychological concerns arise. There are those who doubt that investment should be made in space exploration:
why should resources be spent on such a futuristic plan when there are problems to be solved on Earth?7 But
investment in space
exploration is… an investment . Even a very rough assessment of the long-term economic benefits of
colonizing new worlds would deserve a dedicated paper, but an interesting analogy can be made with
colonization of America in the 17th century, or Australia in the 19th century.8 Thinking of money spent in space as
a net loss for other concerns on Earth can be compared to misevaluations of the value of these settlements by European governments, which
now appear as absurd (Zubrin 1995). On the shorter term, economic benefits can be assessed based on past experience.
Measuring economic returns from investment in the space sector is a complex task given that, to be
accurate, one should take into account technologies indirectly derived from space innovations , and even
technologies created by inventors inspired to pursue a career in science or engineering by space exploration. However, economic returns
can be estimated from results of technology transfers; the “Space Economy” was assessed at $180
billion in 2005 by the U.S. Space Foundation.9 That being said, benefits brought by space exploration are not best described in economic
terms. One of the most commonly mentioned arguments in favor of becoming a multi-planet species is
the risk of large-scale disasters such as an asteroid impact, which justifies the development of our
ability to reach and settle on other planetary bodies (see for instance Baum 2010; Matheny 2007). As pointed out in a talk
at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center by Michael Griffin, then NASA Administrator, “[ t]he history of life on Earth is the history
of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about
the survival of the species ” (Griffin 2006, p. 24). On a less extreme side, our everyday life has been greatly enhanced by technological
advances brought by the Space Age.10 It has led the development of a wide range of technologies such as
telecommunications, GPS, weather prediction, large-scale environmental analyses, and disaster
prediction and monitoring. To these can be added those that come indirectly from the space industry, such as artificial hearts
and other medical improvements, innovations in the automotive and home industries, or land mine
removal devices (see, e.g., Dick and Launius 2009; ESA and IAA 2005). Imagine our modern society bereft of the
contributions derived from space exploration ! And many more benefits are expected in the future, including
our reliance on clean energies, breakthroughs in transport technologies, low gravity manufacturing, mining in space, increased knowledge of
the universe, space tourism and stimulating challenge. In addition, humans have always been explorers , venturing forth out of
Africa and beyond. They have a primal wish to discover new lands, which drives inspiration, creativity and discoveries. This sense of
curiosity of what is beyond results in a sense of wonder and belonging to the greater spirit and purpose
of humanity as a whole. The philosophical impacts of space exploration have been less tangible but no
less momentous: space exploration humbles us by increasing our knowledge of the universe. It also fosters collaborations
and forges agreements among countries, and attracts youth into careers in science and technology .
More subtle consequences can also be expected. Space exploration may for instance shift our frame of reference
from Earth to the solar system or even to the universe, which is likely to change radically our vision of our planet of origin
and of the importance of preserving it. Different scenarios can be expected, which are not necessarily exclusive and may vary among
individuals. One possible outcome is a decrease in Earth’s perceived value—it would, after all, be just one
of the places where we can live—but the opposite is also possible: by contrast to Mars and other
planetary bodies, Earth may appear as incredibly hospitable and rich in diversity. Space exploration may
also increase our awareness of how vulnerable Earth is , switching the status of global disasters from an abstract concept
to a concrete risk, thereby fostering environmental protection policies and individual sustainable behaviors. It
is also likely to affect the perception people have of “home”; a good model to predict such reactions can be drawn from emigrants’ experience
on Earth. People
living outside their country generally develop a sense of belonging at a broader scale,
defining themselves according to their nationality rather than, for instance, their city. Few
people think of themselves as
earthlings; what would be the consequences of such an extended sense of belonging? What effects
would it have on global decisions? Would people consider interests at a larger scale? Then, adapting organisms to
conditions previously considered as inhabitable extends the limits of what we consider as being the
envelope for life. Such an artificial adaptation shows that this envelope’s limits are not defined by life’s
absolute potential but rather by the limited evolutionary constraints in presence of which terrestrial life was shaped. The vision we have
of the uniqueness of Earth as a life nursery and harbor may be affected, which may encounter resistance from people whose religious beliefs or
worldviews are incompatible with it. Similar but more extreme reactions can be expected if space exploration leads us to the discovery of life
beyond Earth (Connell et al. 1999; Race et al. 2012). Outpostson Mars and other planetary bodies may also create a
diversity of new cultures and sociopolitical forms . Their development will be facilitated by the freedom
and self-reliance of pioneers, by the current lack of legislative framework on site and by the lack of means of remotely enforcing
laws. New forms of society may emerge as an adaptive response to local environments and living
conditions. They may take an original form, as created in unusual contexts and driven by isolated people sharing very specific traits such as,
for instance, high intellectual abilities and a passion for science and engineering. Analogies can be found in human history. One of the most
obvious examples comes from the first steps of America’s colonization by Europeans: a relatively small number of people, gathered in a remote
environment which was original to them, and sharing strong features such as a taste for novelty, a high adaptability and a project-rather than
people-oriented mind gave rise to a society with a set of values differing from that of their countries of origin. With
the colonization of
another planetary body, remoteness, novelty of the environment and strength of the shared features
will be pushed to an extreme.

Space exploration spills up and leads to more tech innovation in all sectors
Verseux et all 16
Cyprien Verseux at the PNRA/C.N.R (google that). Ivan Glaucio Paulino Lima at NASA ARC/USRA in the Planetary Systems
Branch. Mickael Baqué at German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research. Daniela Billi works at the University
of Rome Tor Vergata at the Dipartimento di Biologia. Lynn Rothschild works at NASA. January 2016. “Synthetic Biology for Space
Exploration: Promises and Societal Implications”. Public Engagement in Synthetic Biology: “Experts”, “Diplomats” and the
Creativity of “Idiots”. (pp.92-94). EL

Synthetic biology could, as discussed in this paper, become a powerful tool for human space
colonization; it could thereby hasten the benefits mentioned above. If this scenario occurs, it will also lead to the
reverse: space exploration will become a driving force for synthetic biology. Little in human history has been such a powerful
drive for science and technological breakthroughs as space exploration. In the past 60 years, technologies
were developed that we didn’t imagine before and would certainly not have expected in such a close
future. If the next part of the story relies on synthetic biology, a wealth of game-changing innovations is to be expected in this field. The
establishment of human colonies relying to a large extent on modified organisms will require dramatic
advances in synthetic biology, as permanent access to many compounds taken for granted on Earth will depend on our ability to
generate them on site. With the additional constraints to generate them from a limited set of starting
compounds (on-site resources) and possibly under unusual environmental conditions, the limits of synthetic
biology (noteworthy metabolic engineering) will have to be pushed to a new level. Its miniaturization and automation will likely
be extensively improved as well, due to the need for minimizing mass and manpower requirements in space missions. Space synthetic
biology will likely inspire a new generation of biologists, as the space race inspired many physicists and
engineers, providing the brainpower needed to support this innovation wave. By enhancing the pace of achievements in synthetic biology,
space exploration can greatly speed the consequences—promises and perils—expected to come from the former. These range from
extrapolations by media of talks from synthetic biology public figures, such as Craig Venter and George Church,
where all plagues are cured by drugs produced by chemically synthesized microbes and all cars are
powered by eco-friendly fuels , to apocalyptical “green goo” scenarios where the world ends after bioterrorists lose control of their
creations. There is however a continuum of more plausible scenarios in-between these fantasized
extremes, with society-impacting breakthroughs and catastrophes that can realistically be foreseen in the relatively short term. These are
largely discussed elsewhere (see for instance Aldrich et al. 2008 and other chapters of this book) and won’t be detailed here. Unexpected
applications can also arise on Earth from the fact that synthetic biology is specifically driven by space
exploration. Extensive effort is made by space-related institutions to ensure that the developed
technologies are transferred to the civil world; in the case of space synthetic biology, what does this imply? Our
abilities to design organisms able to grow under modified environmental conditions will increase the efficiency of microorganism-dependent
industrial processes which are often limited by the absence of microorganisms that can efficiently catalyze the appropriate chemistry under
conditions (e.g., high temperature, high concentration of a reagent or product and specific pH) needed to optimize the process, and relax the
need for providing energy-consuming culture conditions. In other words, pushing
the bounds of terrestrial life can result in
economic benefits, as the more hardy synthetic biology-enhanced life forms may be able to improve,
or even revolutionize, the bio-based manufacturing sector . Then, tools and methods developed to
engineer the production of specific compounds starting from a very limited and constrained set of
substrates could both decrease costs (starting from cheap substrates) and valorize specific products (starting from
waste or troublesome compounds, such as glycerol which is largely generated as a by-product of the biofuel
industry—see Pagliaro and Rossi 2010). Industrial processes could be more easily combined so that the end
product of one becomes the substrate of another , creating a balanced “ecosystem” of biotechnological processes. In
addition, transferring to Earth our abilities to design biological systems to live “off the land” in harsh
environments and relying on a minimal set of resources could bring much more inspirational
applications: generating resources in agriculturally poor countries. Rocky deserts could start to be
considered as fertile lands , gathering all elements needed to sustain prospering human civilizations and to generate valuable
resources. The public’s opinion of synthetic biology might also be fundamentally altered by its use as a tool in space pioneering. On Earth,
practical applications of synthetic biology are often challenged by the public’s opinion. Whether the
benefits of a given use justify the perceived risks is not always clear and varies according to each
individual’s values. On other planetary bodies, however, alternatives are often not available and the use
of synthetic biology may turn from being a luxury to being a necessity. For instance, a healthy diet can be
obtained by traditional agriculture methods on Earth but is unlikely to be entirely produced on Mars
without engineering organisms to produce some needed nutrients while relying on local resources. Besides, much of the
opposition to synthetic biology is driven by fear of potential negative consequences, be they rational or not.
Opposition may thus be reduced if applications are carried on far from Earth, making feared consequences much
less likely to affect the layman. The public image of synthetic biologists might also change. Currently, it is mostly based on a very
limited number of publicized researchers, and synthetic biologists are sometimes depicted as narcissistic
scientists working not for the benefit of the society or for knowledge, but to feel empowered or for
“playing God”. In the context of space exploration, this image may switch to that of pragmatic scientists
doing the necessary to support the expansion and long-lastingness of our species.11 There is, however, a major
concern raised by the use of synthetic biology in space: contaminating extraterrestrial bodies with terrestrial life. This could jeopardize the
search for potential extraterrestrial life and life precursors, extinct or extant. Measures should
be taken to evaluate the
planetary protection-associated risks of BLSS such as those described above (in addition to those of human-
associated microbiomes and microbes present on all imported materials; see for instance McKay and Davis 1989, DeVincenzi 1992, and Debus
and Arnould 2008) and strategies should be developed to mitigate them. Current international treaties and policies related
to planetary protection12 provide a basis, even though requirements need to be extended to be
relevant for manned missions (Horneck 2008). This risk is present even when synthetic biology is out of the
equation, but increasing the abilities of microorganisms to withstand the explored environments increases the risk of contamination in case
of microorganisms’ accidental release. Issues associated with a targeted release of microorganisms, as could be considered for geoengineering,
won’t be discussed here; first, because the concepts mentioned in this paper assume that used organisms are contained and will not be
purposely released and, second, because the ethics of implanting terrestrial life on other planetary bodies, Mars in particular, have been
extensively discussed elsewhere (see for instance McKay and Marinova 2001).
 Food
Cap solves food
Bandler 17 (Aaron, staff writer for The Daily Wire, 3/18/17, “This AMAZING Chart Shows Just How
Capitalism Has Alleviated Global Hunger”, https://www.dailywire.com/news/16621/amazing-chart-
shows-just-how-capitalism-has-aaron-bandler, AZG)

capitalism has sharply curtailed the scourge of global hunger. The chart, provided by Human Progress, shows
A truly remarkable chart has surfaced that reveals that

thatthe number of undernourished persons sharply declined from nearly 960 million to under 700 million: There is clearly still
work that needs to be done to ameliorate global hunger — as a little under 700 million malnourished people is still too high — but a decline of over 260 million malnourished

people in a span of over 20 years is nevertheless amazing. This Human Progress chart actually disproves two leftist myths: capitalism is causing hunger, and overpopulation
threatens essential resources. For instance, businessman Drew Hanson argued in a February 2016 Forbes piece that "capitalism will starve humanity by 2050," citing misleading statistics and claiming that capitalism would dry up
the world's resources as the population continues to increase. "How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?" Hanson wrote. Another leftist who claimed something similar is

environmentalist fear-mongerer Paul Ehrlich, as he actually argued in favor of population control. But economist Julian Simon believed that a rising population would result in more
resources , not less, and Simon was proven right: Simon and Ehrlich made a bet in 1980: if Ehrlich was correct, then commodities price would drastically increase with population growth, as a dearth of resources would
naturally lead to less supply. However, as population has increased from 2 billion to 7 billion over the past 100 years, the commodities

prices have actually decreased, according to The Federalist. This is because, as economist Phillip Verlerger once said, "Technology moves so quickly today that
any looming resource constraint will be nothing more than a blip. We adjust." Indeed, the beauty of capitalism is that its respect for individual liberty

and private property allows a free and prosperous people to produce goods that balances their skill set with
market demand , creating a system that while imperfect, has created wealth that vastly improved society and made it easier to
lift the poor and the hungry out of poverty. Even as Western societies have started to embrace the welfare state, capitalism has still managed to touch the globe through free
trade and globalization, allowing those who have never tasted freedom to have a chance at improving their living situations. Despite what the Left would have you believe, capitalism is the most

humane system on the face of the Earth and is the true answer to alleviating global hunger and
poverty , as the Human Progress graph illustrates.

Cap solves food – tech

Follet and Tupy 16 (Chelsea, Cato Institute Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.,
and Marian, editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and
Prosperity, 2/17/16, “Capitalism Is Feeding a Hungry World”, https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-is-
feeding-a-hungry-world/, AZG)
Hansen fails to mention that living on $33 a day is not poverty by historical standards. Throughout most of human history, almost everyone lived in extreme poverty. Only in the last two centuries has wealth dramatically increased.

the old and discredited idea that humanity won’t

Early adopters of capitalism, such as the United States, have seen their average incomes skyrocket. Hansen then repeats

be able to feed itself as the population grows. Thomas Malthus first made that argument in 1798. Malthus’ mistake was to ignore human beings’
ability to innovate their way out of problems. But, as Julian Simon found in The Ultimate Resource, people are excellent problem-solvers, and the free market helps to
coordinate solutions to most of our everyday challenges. A challenge (feeding a growing population), led to
technological innovation (the Green Revolution and GMOs) and that led to a solution (higher agricultural
productivity and falling food prices). Far from leading to starvation, capitalism has ensured that the supply of food rose to
meet growing demand. If humanity does face starvation in 2050, it will not be because of capitalism — it will be because anti-
capitalist views like Hansen’s have prevailed.
 Poverty
Capitalism solves poverty – aggregate data
Arie 6/27 (Benjamin, writer for Conservative Tribune, 6/27/18, “Extreme Poverty Has Dropped From
94% of World Pop. to 9.6% Thanks to Capitalism”, https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/extreme-
poverty-has-dropped-from-94-of-world-pop-to-9-6-thanks-to-capitalism/, AZG)

Capitalism improves people’s lives and has changed the world for the better — but you won’t find many leftists admitting it any time soon.
Instead, free-market economics are often blamed for causing the world’s ills, instead of curing them. Take one look at how close openly socialist Bernie Sanders came to being the Democrats’ nominee in the last presidential
election to see that capitalism is bizarrely demonized instead of celebrated. It’s the same story in many European countries, while even our neighbors in Mexico appear poised to elect a far-left and socialist-leaning candidate as

It turns out that worldwide

president on July 1. “The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer,” is the claim of anti-capitalists everywhere. But is it true? Not according to the facts.

poverty is declining at an incredible rate, and Western-style capitalism is the main reason. “The speed
of poverty alleviation in the last 25 years has been historically unprecedented,” explained the Foundation for Economic Education, a pro-
freedom think tank. “Not only is the proportion of people in poverty at a record low, but, in spite of adding 2 billion

to the planet’s population, the overall number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen, too,” FEE continued.
The numbers speak for themselves. “In 1820, 94 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty,” pointed out Alexander Hammond, a researcher for HumanProgress.org. “In 1990, this figure was 34.8 percent, and in

Most of human history, if we’re being honest, was

2015, just 9.6 percent.” We think of the 1800s as “olden times,” but in the large scheme of history and human events, it really wasn’t that long ago.

marked by poverty and suffering by the vast majority of people on Earth. Lifespans were short and
existence was brutal. Death, frustration, and sadness was the norm, not the exception. Just 200 years ago, almost all of the world’s population was resigned to live in poverty with no way out. There were a
handful of elites — mainly the aristocracy — who were able to live relatively well, but even that “luxury” living was rough and uncomfortable by our modern standards. Then something changed — capitalism

spurred advancement, and it wasn’t limited to just the elite. “In the last quarter century, more than
1.25 billion people escaped extreme poverty. That equates to over 138,000 people being lifted out of poverty every day,” FEE explained. “If it takes you five minutes to read this
article, another 480 people will have escaped the shackles of extreme of poverty by the time you finish.” “In order to help the poorest, consider the impact free-market capitalism

has had in the last 200 years in alleviating extreme poverty,” the foundation continued. “The Industrial Revolution
turned the once-impoverished Western countries into abundant societies. The new age of globalization, which started around
1980, saw the developing world enter the global economy and resulted in the largest escape from poverty

ever recorded.” To put it simply, the rich may be getting richer … but the poor are also getting richer. The foundation pointed to India as a prime example of how Western principles and capitalism are accelerating
people out of poverty at a rate that is historically unprecedented. “ Since its economic liberalization reforms in 1991, India’s average income has

increased by 7.5 percent per year,” FEE explained. “That means that average income has more than tripled over the last quarter century. As wealth increased, the poverty rate in India declined by
almost 24 percent.” “ It is the people at the very bottom of the social strata who are getting richer faster ,” the foundation

summarized. At a time when it’s in vogue to bash capitalism and embrace disastrous socialism, it’s important to step back and look at the bigger picture. Life is getting dramatically,

measurably better in almost every part of the world, and Western capitalist principles are at the center
of that renaissance.

Cap solves poverty – innovation and growth have helped everyone

Bandler 17 (Aaron, staff writer for The Daily Wire, 3/18/17, “5 Statistics Showing How Capitalism
Solves Poverty”, https://www.dailywire.com/news/14525/5-statistics-showing-how-capitalism-solves-
poverty-aaron-bandler, AZG)

Here are five statistics showing how capitalism solves poverty. 1. The number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide declined by 80 percent from
1970 to 2006. People living on a dollar a day or less dramatically fell from 26.8 percent of the global population in 1970 to 5.4 percent i n 2006 – an 80 percent decline. It is a truly remarkable achievement that doesn't receive a lot of media coverage because it

"It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship

highlights the success of capitalism. ," American Enterprise Institute

it was the free enterprise system

(AEI) president Arthur Brooks said in a 2012 speech. "In short, Poverty included 94 , American style, which is our gift to the world." 2. worldwide

percent of the world's population in 1820. In 2011, it was only 17 percent. What is even more incredible
is that the global poverty rate was 53 percent in 1981, causing the most rapid decline from 53 percent to 17 percent to be "the

reduction in poverty in world history. Since industrialisation the share of people "" the onset of – and as a consequence of this, economic growth —
living in poverty started decreasing and kept on falling ever since ," wrote Oxford University's Martin Roeser, who compiled the aforementioned data. Roeser's chart illustrates

those in the lower and middle income brackets saw increases in pay of 40 percent from 1988 to
this: 3. Globally,

2008. Global inequality of life

According to the Adam Smith's Institute's Ben Southwood: Those in the middle and bottom of the world income distribution have all got pay rises of around 40% between 1988-2008.

expectancy and height are narrowing too – showing better nutrition and better healthcare where it
matters most. The world is 120 times better off today than in 1800 as a
What we should care about is the welfare of the poor, not the wealth of the rich. 4.

result of capitalism. The Foundation for Economic Education's (FEE) Steven Horwtiz, citing author Deidre McCloskey, noted that the 120 times figure comes from multiplying "the gains in consumption to the average human by the gain in life expectancy

The market has made education, art, and culture available to more and
worldwide by 7 (for 7 billion as compared to 1 billion people)." " competitive process also

more people ," wrote Horwitz. "Even the poorest of Americans, not to mention many of the global poor, have access through the Internet and TV to concerts, books, and works of art that were exclusively the province of the wealthy for centuries." Horwitz added

capitalism has also resulted in people spending "a much smaller percentage of our lives working for pay "

and has produced higher life expectancy "by decades." Mortality rates for children under
due to the increased value of labor 5.

the age of five declined by 49 percent from 1990 to 2013. Capitalism This is according to World Health Organization (WHO) data, a decline termed "faster than ever."

results in lower child mortality rates by producing better access to medicine and standards of living. In sum,

the wealth and innovation spurred by capitalism has done more to help the poor than any government program ever could. Singal is simply wrong
to suggest that "capitalism is not designed" to solve poverty.

Capitalism solves poverty – prefer a long-term view

Ebeling 17 (Richard, BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership and the
president of the Foundation for Economic Education, 11/13/17, “Our Ancestors Escaped Crippling
Poverty Because of Capitalism”, https://fee.org/articles/our-ancestors-escaped-crippling-poverty-
because-of-capitalism/?utm_source=zapier&utm_medium=facebook, AZG)

The capitalist, system has done more to improve the material condition of humanity than any
free enterprise, or

other economic arrangement in all of history. recorded Yet, “Capitalism” is constantly condemned and accused of being the cause of humanity’s woes, while in reality, nothing is fur ther from the truth. In a
mere two hundred years, the economic condition of humankind has dramatically transformed. In 1820, the world population was barely one billion people and had only grown to 1.5 billion by 1900. Now, in 2017, the global population has increased to over 7.4 billion people. Has this huge
increase in world population led to abject material misery and human despair? Not at all; instead, it has been very much the opposite. In 1900, global Gross Domestic Product stood at around one billion dollars, while today it stands at nearly $80 trillion. In 1820, world per capita GDP was
estimated to have been about $1,000; by 1900 it doubled to $2,000 per person on average. By 2017, per capita GDP is approaching $16,000, an eight-fold increase in little over a century and with a world population seven times larger than a little over a hundred years ago. The Escape
from Poverty Due to Capitalism Now, of course, this growth in material betterment based on the global per capita benchmark has not impacted on all people, everywhere, to the same degree or at the same time. But this is because not all countries evolved or introduced many of the
essential institutional ingredients that are necessary to foster such amazing economic improvements. It began in parts of Europe and then North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from there it spread to other corners of the globe in various degrees. Even today,

wherever the institutions of individual freedom, private property,

capitalism has barely touched some parts of the world. Yet, and the rule of law,

restrained government exist, the human engine of creativity and entrepreneurship has opened the way
to replacing poverty, disease, and cruelty of pre-capitalist systems
a potential horn-of-plenty, the political that were almost everywhere a few centuries ago. As economic

The real sustenance of the poor has been economic growth

historian Deirdre McCloskey said, “ which raised real , the Great Enrichment,

incomes in the past two centuries by 3,000 percent a factor of thirty. Look again at the figure: a factor of 30, or about .” This transformation of the human condition is slowly but surely enveloping

the world. This is an improvement that carries within it the possibility for the end to human poverty in its most appalling f orms before the close of the twenty-first century. Yet, Capitalism is blamed for whatever the critic finds intolerable on this planet. One of the burning issues of our

the free market has done more to rid

time is the challenge of income inequality and the fact that some are “rich” while others are “less well off” and still others are “poor.” The fact is, competitive system

humanity from inequalities than any other system.

“unnatural” Throughout human history Before Capitalism “the Few” Plundered “the Many” most of ,

economic privilege, and social status have been the result of

political power, conquest and control. the physical prowess of

Plunder and enslavement were the methods for

of the productions of others the wealth of them possession of the means for and luxury in those earlier times. It was truly the case that “the few”
were able to rule over “the many” and live off what they produced through the threat of physical force. Superstitions and crude ideologies served as the complementary rationales for systems of enslavements and compulsory servitude. Kings and princes, pharaohs and priests used

These were societies of a “one percent” living

psychological and cultural tools to manipulate the minds of others to accept the rule of the power-lusting few as pre-ordained and inescapable. persistent and

over the rest of the population.

lionizing by our standards of living, the politically privileged and powerful
Of course,

lived lives of unimaginable material poverty very few of us would be ; yet, their lives were better than most of their slaves and subjects. I would suggest that

willing to trade places for the rough and short lifespans of the monarchs
, no matter how humble our current economic position, and noblemen of just a few

individuals were coercively kept in class

hundred years ago. Such political and economic social orders were grounded in “unnatural” inequalities based on political power and privilege. Most a caste or

position in society that had nothing to do with innate characteristics that might have enabled them to attain a better circumstance for themselves if they had had the freedom to better their lives through peaceful and voluntary interaction with others. Liberal Capitalism
Brought Freedom and Betterment This all began to change with the emergence of political and economic liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; government power was increasingly restrained. There emerged the idea of “the rights of man,” under which, those who held
governmental positions were to be “servants” for protecting the individual rights of each human. A new ideal gained influence, that of equality before the law for all. This ideal was reflected in the words of the American Declaration of Independence. It implied that, when each individual
stands with equal individual rights, with political privileges and favors for none, each person is at liberty to try to find his place in society. He or she may then rise to that unequal circumstance to which his inclinations guide him, in free and voluntary association with others who also all
possess the same rights to their life, liberty, and property. A growing number of people were increasingly liberated from the government controls that, up until that time, hindered freedom of commerce for the benefit of the elites. Each individual was becoming freer to pursue his own
interests and purposes as he defined them. However, the “rules of the game” are such that each person could only improve his circumstances by applying his unique talents and resources to serving others as the means of earning an income and bettering his life. As Adam Smith said, as if
by an “invisible hand,” though each individual pursues his own interests, the institutional setting cumulatively results in the mutual and growing material and cultural betterment of all. The Middle Class Emerges from “t he Poor” From the nineteenth century and into the twentieth,

there emerged in modern Europe something that was very limited in the preceding centuries: a “middle
class.” It came from the “lower classes,”
From where did this emerging and growing middle class come? from the from those who in earlier ages were the servants and slaves of kings,
bottom of economic existence. With secure property rights, relatively low taxes, and reduced government regulation of commerce, those with an entrepreneurial spirit could take their chance by opening and running enterprises.

The nineteenth century was a great period of innovation, industrial experimentation, and mass
production. Capital investments in new and better forms of machinery needed
Free enterprise enabled savings to be put to work in industry.

more human hands to run them The demand for labor grew;to produce the growing number and types of products that were flooding to the market. workers were drawn to the cities

Wages rose
where the new industries were taking root, away from the age-old forms of work in the countryside. slowly but surely in the industrial centers, enabling a man or a woman to earn income never imagined in the rural areas under the eyes of the landed

As incomes rose for a growing number of people, the need for skills and education
nobility that “lorded” over them.

motivated these new industrial workers to improve their talents. Private institutions of learning arose, offering to teach both basic literacy and “mechanical” training in the

the British population was

form of, what today we call, vocational schools. Economic historian E. G. West, in his book, Education and the State (1965) estimated that, between 1790 and 1830, about two-thirds to three-quarters of entire

made literate fully through for-profit and non-profit private schools. This, in turn, generated the market demand for what became known in Great Britain as the “ penny press,” inexpensive newspapers to quench the growing thirst for knowledge and information

The demand for workers in

about world events, as well as the scientific and technological advances that were popping up in rapid succession like mushrooms under a gentle rain. Gains from Investments in Physical and Human Capital

the industrial and manufacturing enterprises in the nineteenth century raised wages from their stagnant, rural levels. The profits that these
enterprises earned by supplying goods that this expanding workforce desired in their role as consumers created the financial means to increase investment in better machinery. Investing in tools and equipment (the physical “capital” of the market) generated greater productivity that
reinforced the upward movement of wages. Productivity increased per man hour – what the economist calls the “marginal product of labor,” the increment of additional output by one additional worker within a firm, increased. Thus, capital formation that was raising labor productivity,
as well as worker investments in “human capital” (the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities) combined to lift more people out of poverty as the worker’s productivity increased. A growing number of industrial workers were, indeed, competing for jobs with an increasing population;

The net effect was to raise wages and a reduce

but capital formation in better equipment brought about an increase in labor productivity at a faster rate than the growth in the working-age labor force.

the “gap” between the living standards of the rich, the expanding middle class, and the poor. Rather
than poverty versus plenty separating “the many” from the “the few,” the distinction has over the last two hundred years

been reduced to degrees

increasingly This has been the market
of wealth, comfort, and luxuries among people in society. the cumulative outcome of the competitive process within economy. The horn-

private enterprise provides

of-plenty produced by a great equalization in the quality and a vast and growing variety of goods and services available to all,

standard of living. The Past’s Material Inequality vs. Growing Equal Availability for All Three or four hundred years ago, the housing accommodations that separated the nobility from the “commoner” were castles with servants versus thatched huts that the
occupants usually shared with livestock. Queen Elizabeth I in the 1500s had a luxurious wardrobe that consisted of a small handful of dresses, while the multitude mostly wore rags handed down from the dead to the living that too frequently carried vermin that could spread plagues. The
landed lords’ diets were limited to whatever was grown or raised on their estates, while the “tenants” who were tied to the land ate a much smaller amount of monotonous meals, often verging on starvation, depending upon the luck of the seasons. Both nobleman and commoner rarely
traveled during their lives and certainly not much further than the narrow confines of the regions in which they had been born. Today, in the more market-based economies, the differences between the wealthy, the middle class, and “the poor” often lie in how many rooms are in one’s
house or apartment, with usually more than one television around the home; household kitchen appliances all have the same basic qualities and features. Most households possess one or more cars to transport family members wherever they desire to go. Travelling is now a common
practice, with over 3.6 billion people – a number equal to almost half of the world’s population – moving about the globe by commercial airliners in 2016. Also, a huge majority of the world’s people – rich or poor or those somewhere in the middle – have access to the Internet and cell
phones (except where oppressive governments attempt to interfere). A wide variety of food is available within a narrow range of prices for virtually everyone in widely market-based societies. The rich may be seen at supermarket-discount stores, and the middle class and the poor can be
seen leaving the checkout counters with carts full of items at the higher-end food stores. All have the same items at fairly reasonable and reachable prices from suppliers encompassing the world, so seasonal availability of various perishable goods is almost a thing of the past. Market
Competition as the Great Positive Social Leveler The British economist, William H. Hutt (1899-1988), pointed out in, Economists and the Public (1936), “As a matter of fact, to the economist studying society, competition appears, prima facie, to be the great leveling force. One would have

competitive capitalism has raised a vast number of people

thought that the onus would have been on its opponents to show that this was not so.” Over a few generations,

into material and financial comfort This has come about

, especially those who otherwise would have remained in the depths of the poverty that had prevailed for thousands of years.

through rising incomes and the lowering of the real costs of goods and services brought to the doorstep of almost everyone in the West and increasingly more and more

This has been made possible to the extent that societies have been fairly free
billions of people around the rest of the world. , so secure individual rights
under equality before the law has allowed the “natural” inequalities among people to more fully emerge. Given these differences – heredity and circumstances of birth, inclinations, and motivations for self-improvement – every individual implicitly tries to do the best they can in the

The competitive market process places the

context of their comparative advantage in the division of labor. talents, abilities , and the drive of each person at the
service of everyone else. Those who end up in a more modest place in the market in terms of income, benefit from all the successes of their financial “betters” in the marketplace, since the latter’s financial rewards are dependent upon the
extent to which they have satisfied the wants and desires of others in society. Private Charity and Assistance to Those Less Well Off

Their poverty args are misleading – yes, poverty still exists, but capitalism has made
the lives of impoverished people better on an incalculable scale
Follet and Tupy 16 (Chelsea, Cato Institute Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.,
and Marian, editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and
Prosperity, 2/17/16, “Capitalism Is Feeding a Hungry World”, https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-is-
feeding-a-hungry-world/, AZG)
3) Citing the 2014 US Census, Hansen notes that 15 percent of Americans live in poverty. (The Census defines poverty as an income of less than $12,071 a year for a single-person household, or $33 a day). But, what does it mean to

be poor in America? As economist Steve Horwitz writes, “ poor U.S. households are more likely to have basic appliances than the
average household of the 1970s, and those appliances are of much higher quality.” In 1984, for example, 83 percent of all
households in the United States owned a refrigerator. By 2005, 99 percent of poor American households owned a refrigerator. The evidence of an improving standard of

living for poor Americans is abundant and available. Hansen fails to mention that living on $33 a day is not poverty by historical standards.
Throughout most of human history, almost everyone lived in extreme poverty. Only in the last two
centuries has wealth dramatically increased. Early adopters of capitalism, such as the United States, have seen their average incomes skyrocket.
 World Getting Better
Capitalism is making the world better – their pessimism mirrors Trump
Gillespie and Norberg 17 (Nick, journalist and former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, and
Johan, author and historian, 3/6/17, “Capitalism and Neoliberalism Have Made the World Better: Q&A
with Johan Norberg”, transcribed from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZqSqLDhxI, AZG)
People think that the world is in chaos people think that the world is on fire right now and for all the wrong reasons I think that's partly because of how we consume information but also because there is a segment of politician to try to scare us to get because then we clamor for safety we
need the strong man away I am Nicolas Gillespie with reason TV and today we're talking with Johan Norberg he's a Swedish econ omist and social theorist and his most recent book is progress in progress I mean you lay out an absolutely convincing case that most things are getting much

much better what are the things that are getting better and what's guiding that kind of progress well basically the world is getting better a society economy culture politics is not getting better so it was really a book about how I get depressed
- all the time especially when I follow the news about what politicians do and how they try to stifle Liberty this is a book about what people do what mankind does when we have freedom to explore strange new ideas and exchange the results and then what we see is like I mean in the

neoliberalism capitalism reduced chronic undernourishment

last 25 years we've invented that have been considered as sort of run amok what has happened well we've

around the world by 40% child mortality and illiteracy by half and extreme poverty from 37 to 10% by so every

minute that we're talking 100 people right gonna pop down you said though that you know politics it's not getting better and there's a lot of reason to believe that certainly in Europe we're seeing from it from a libertarian point of view we're seeing a rise of nativist kind of xenophobic
groups to kind of turn to a fascist right which that's a kind of a fascist lasting using countries as varied as Hungary and Italy and France is what's going on with that and is it how is it connected to these other improvements yeah in a way I wrote this book not because I'm happy about the

world but because I'm terrified about what's going on because people think that the world is in chaos people think that the world is on fire right now for all the wrong reasons I think that's partly because of how we

consume information but also because there is a segment of politicians try to scare us because then we clamor for safety we need the
who to get

strong man in a way so I think that people who are afraid they aren't tolerant they aren't liberal they don't accept people moving across borders trade going on in and national where they afraid of but you know and and and the book is fantastic and we've talked

about it in the past but if a lifespan like your grandparents lifespan at birth was thirty and you're living to be 71 what would Y would you be susceptible to somebody saying oh everything's getting fucked up why are people suckers for
tales collapse of society
that say you know we're like we are one you know blown the circuit breaker from a complete yeah it doesn't Bryce me too but in a way I think it's because we have so
much to lose we now have this comfortable lifestyle but the world seems a bit strange we don't understand really what's going on and I think that it's partly two sides of the same coin and because
people who live comfortable lives they only think about what they've got to lose when I go to Vietnam when I go to China when I go to India I meet optimistic people who think about all the new business models technologies that can improve their lives when I go to the US and Europe
people are so depressed and so scared about what's going on and then they're following the news and then they see they don't notice that homicide has been halved in 20 years they notice one serial murderer on the loose summer and then with social media we see it all the time
combine that with terrorism the financial crisis in a new geopolitical situation people are confused and when they're confused they're scared and they want a strong man who gives them well I think you're you know your book goes a long way to explaining and painting and it's not even

Trump is obviously a master of injecting a negative

it's not what is now in America known as alternative facts it's the actual facts but I was thinking while you were talking about Donald

pessimistic narrative in which the only solution is him as the great men coming in and solve
everything after decades of declines in crime
and it was fascinating and violent crime property crime crime every sort of crime and there have been some minor up ticks in the past couple of years and it's not

he was able to campaign on being a law and order candidate

clear if it's a trend yet but which was the type of candidate you had in the late 60s and early 70s when crime actually

was rapid rapidly growing and it was ubiquitous particularly in cities but then I guess the question is you know who why would anybody buy that because it's you know you've know in your own life that you're walking around a city like Washington DC even 20 years ago there were large
large part so that you just couldn't walk around in and now it's you know people have you know gourmet dog biscuits tours in places that you would have blood cr acking it ends up I mean is that what the role that politics is playing now is it it kind of feeds off the success that's happening

if you go back to the Industrial Revolution that was the moment

outside of politics or beyond politics and then it's trying to pull it into its orbit when the way we discovered

in history when we discovered poverty when we discovered child labor and began to complain about
those things and asking politicians why can't you deal with those things not because those things
increase but for the first time they actually decrease so people began to think that I can live a decent comfortable life so if there are problems like that it's somebody's fault this is a huge problem

you take it for granted now it's an exception and

that we have to deal with I think that's going on with with things like crime as well when would it's like you have to live your life and you just get on with it

then you want someone to be in charge of it and deal with they don't be a feel of populism they they can give you all those pie-in-the-sky things we'll deal with that and you would agree that
something similar it might not be exactly the same but something similar is showing up in Europe as well and that it's not an accident that it's in relatively wealthy countries that we see this that's right it's the kind of collapse anxiety when you have a good life and it's kind of a luxury good

right and in the sense of for poorer countries don't quite you know they can't afford to be dilute themselves yeah yeah the old things if you don't have food you have one problem if you
have food you have thousands of problems right that's a I never heard that saying before but I'm getting I'm going to use it for the rest of my day at least want to rest of my life with rest named entity well you
know because we're at this students for liberty conference which brings in 2000 students from all over the world who are interested in kind of classical liberal and libertarian ideas where do you find them or when you talk to young people or how do you do young people have a good
grasp of the history that is necessary to contextualize current problems to move towards a more libertarian future or you know are they pessimistic I really think that children are future have that I've heard before that's the old xanga and definitely when it comes to trusting politicians
because you have no one trusts politicians everybody hates what's going on in Washington or or Brussels but there is more of a tendency among an older court to think that all those politicians fail so let's just elect an even stronger guy who can solve these problems with an even bigger
solution whereas I find more of cynicism when it comes to that among the young particles they've seen how technology and their own ways of organizing solutions to their problem is something that's being done voluntarily in in society rather than then through politics and when you look
at this rise of populism around the were up in the

The world is getting better because of capitalism

Tupy 18 (Marian, editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global
Liberty and Prosperity, 4/8/18, “10 Years After the 2008 Financial Meltdown, How Has Capitalism
Performed for Humanity?”, https://fee.org/articles/10-years-after-the-2008-financial-meltdown-how-
has-capitalism-performed-for-humanity/, AZG)
Things Are Still Getting Better, Especially for the Developing World It is hardly original to acknowledge that all human institutions, including liberal democracy and free enterprise, suffer from their share of imperfections. But,
perfection is not for this world. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant observed in 1784, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” That said, it is very important to remind ourselves that,

open societies continue to do very well. In spite of all of their problems and
compared to the alternative political and economic arrangements (Russia and China spring to mind),

shortcomings, open societies remain in the richest, safest, healthiest, and happiest places on Earth. And while we may spend
inordinate time and effort navel-gazing, immigration patterns clearly show that millions of people from other parts of the world would be happy to make a new start in our neck of the woods. To be sure, critics and opponents of
open societies have made some electoral gains in the West, including, most significantly, in the United States. But no Western nation embraced autarky or dictatorship, which suggests that the intellectual consensus surrounding
the superiority of liberal democracy and free enterprise continues to hold. That is surely a marked improvement on the political and economic disasters that followed after the Great Depression broke out in 1929. Depending on the
measure used, the global spread of economic and political freedoms has either plateaued or suffered a slight reversal. Still, instances of democratic retreat (Turkey) are often offset by instances of democratic awakening (Nigeria).

the developing world escaped from the

Likewise, economic disasters (Venezuela) tend to be offset by economic success stories (Peru). In contrast to countries in the West,

Great Recession relatively unscathed, and progress on most measures of human well-being continued unabated. These
improvements are too numerous to mention, but suffice it to say that the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which aimed at poverty reduction, better education,

greater gender equality, reduced child mortality, improved maternal health, combatting disease, and
higher environmental quality, have met with considerable success. Good News Getting Good Press Crucially, the concept of human progress is finally getting the press it deserves. When the
University of Maryland economist Julian Simon performed the role of global Mr. Optimist in the 1980s and 1990s, his was a lonely and thankless task. That is no longer the case.
NEG
 A2-Colonization

Space exploration doesn’t solve any of capitalism’s problems on Earth, it just spreads
them to other planets.
Kriss 3/8/17 (Sam, Writer, "Stop Joking About Fleeing Earth for Newly Discovered Planets", Atlantic, 3-
8-2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/space-travel-wont-save-you-from-
capitalism/518853/, DOA: 7-28-2017) //Snowball

Capitalism, as David Harvey once remarked, never solves its contradictions, it only moves them around. If it becomes
impossible to make profits in Europe, you set up plantations in the New World, where you can work people to death for free. If you’re worried
about socialist uprisings in your own country, you can move the production process to south-east Asia, where client states can brutalize their
populations without the people that matter ever having to care about it. For
centuries the capitalist mode of production has
chased itself in tightening circles around a planet that’s starting to wear away under the strain, thinning
out the biosphere, removing the conditions necessary for biological life out from under its own frantic legs. It’s run out of room; there
are fewer and fewer places in which to lodge the permanent crisis. The only direction left is up and out. And so the idea
starts to take hold that human destiny is to conquer the stars, that the darkness beyond our planet isn’t
the home of gods or aliens, but infinite lifeless space. An empire waiting to be founded. And if we don’t
create it soon, the empire we have now will kill us all.

The unspoken promise is that things will be different on the seven new exoplanets: With all that room, you’ll
have the freedom to build something entirely new, live the way you really want to live. It’s the promise of
NASA’s poster: You’ll want to see this, it’s not like anything you’ll have seen before.

But things won’t be different on those distant planets. They’ll be exactly the same, just worse, always
worse. The logic of this model of space colonization assumes a society that expands constantly, pushing
itself into every empty space it can find, because if it stops for even a moment, it’ll die. It’s a society that needs to
spread itself infinitely, not for any articulable reason, but simply because that’s what it needs to do. And it’s a society that is
always under threat of breaking under the weight of its own contradictions and always at war with the
livability of life. In other words, the exact conditions we’re all living and dying under now. It’s capitalism; it could only ever be
capitalism, turning itself into all the monsters it could once only imagine. Purified from any residual traces of the soil
from which it rose, liberated from its parasitic dependence on Earth and its human labor by a glut of new planets, space capitalism could
transform itself into something truly monstrous: a black and segmented carapace, vast beyond thought; nested jaws gnashing through the
galaxies in a lifeless, merciless greed.

If you’re worried that reactionary leaders, climate change, and nuclear weapons have the power to
destroy everything on this planet, the solution isn’t to conjure up a future in which they could destroy
everything on all the other planets too. Our problems have to be solved, not fed, before we risk
spreading the blight to rot away the entire sky. As things stand, going to TRAPPIST-1e will not save you from
your fear of Donald Trump or anything else. That tourist poster needs updating; already, there should be a big gleaming gold skyscraper
jutting out between the untouched hills, because he’s going with you, clinging to the hull of your spaceship as it crosses those 40 light years of
black nothing, his hair finally freed from gravity and fanning into a predator’s frill.

Space exploration doesn’t solve any of capitalism’s problems on Earth, it just spreads
them to other planets.
Kriss 3/8/17 (Sam, Writer, "Stop Joking About Fleeing Earth for Newly Discovered Planets", Atlantic, 3-
8-2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/space-travel-wont-save-you-from-
capitalism/518853/, DOA: 7-28-2017) //Snowball
Capitalism, as David Harvey once remarked, never solves its contradictions, it only moves them around. If it becomes
impossible to make profits in Europe, you set up plantations in the New World, where you can work people to death for free. If you’re worried
about socialist uprisings in your own country, you can move the production process to south-east Asia, where client states can brutalize their
populations without the people that matter ever having to care about it. For
centuries the capitalist mode of production has
chased itself in tightening circles around a planet that’s starting to wear away under the strain, thinning
out the biosphere, removing the conditions necessary for biological life out from under its own frantic legs. It’s run out of room; there
are fewer and fewer places in which to lodge the permanent crisis. The only direction left is up and out. And so the idea
starts to take hold that human destiny is to conquer the stars, that the darkness beyond our planet isn’t
the home of gods or aliens, but infinite lifeless space. An empire waiting to be founded. And if we don’t
create it soon, the empire we have now will kill us all.

The unspoken promise is that things will be different on the seven new exoplanets: With all that room, you’ll
have the freedom to build something entirely new, live the way you really want to live. It’s the promise of
NASA’s poster: You’ll want to see this, it’s not like anything you’ll have seen before.

But things won’t be different on those distant planets. They’ll be exactly the same, just worse, always
worse. The logic of this model of space colonization assumes a society that expands constantly, pushing
itself into every empty space it can find, because if it stops for even a moment, it’ll die. It’s a society that needs to
spread itself infinitely, not for any articulable reason, but simply because that’s what it needs to do. And it’s a society that is
always under threat of breaking under the weight of its own contradictions and always at war with the
livability of life. In other words, the exact conditions we’re all living and dying under now. It’s capitalism; it could only ever be
capitalism, turning itself into all the monsters it could once only imagine. Purified from any residual traces of the soil
from which it rose, liberated from its parasitic dependence on Earth and its human labor by a glut of new planets, space capitalism could
transform itself into something truly monstrous: a black and segmented carapace, vast beyond thought; nested jaws gnashing through the
galaxies in a lifeless, merciless greed.

If you’re worried that reactionary leaders, climate change, and nuclear weapons have the power to
destroy everything on this planet, the solution isn’t to conjure up a future in which they could destroy
everything on all the other planets too. Our problems have to be solved, not fed, before we risk
spreading the blight to rot away the entire sky. As things stand, going to TRAPPIST-1e will not save you from
your fear of Donald Trump or anything else. That tourist poster needs updating; already, there should be a big gleaming gold skyscraper
jutting out between the untouched hills, because he’s going with you, clinging to the hull of your spaceship as it crosses those 40 light years of
black nothing, his hair finally freed from gravity and fanning into a predator’s frill.