Education and Healthcare- Blog 7

This past week in class, we discussed how the global society is sort of standardizing education and health care.

 



I honestly was a little bit confused with the standardization with Education on a global scale, so I will be discussing health care.

 

There has been a transition from International Health Governance to Global Health Governance. The IHG has this sort of individual country mindset and it had the tendency to exclude some people.

The GHG, however tries to have a global mindset (hence the name change to global) causing it to be more inclusive, but in turn it has the tendency to be vague.

 

The downside to this new global health mindset comes in four parts.

• The first one is that globalization causes a greater health risk world wide. If I contract some misterious disease in Istanbul, for example, I may not show signs of the disease until after I get home, even maybe weeks later. That means that I may not have only spread it to the people in the airport, in the airplane, but I may have even infected people where I live.
• This also causes a higher previlance of non-government organizations. This means that these companies have no governemental backing and it is hard for governments to control them. This occurence may even weaken governmental power. Since these organizations are spread out all over the world, it is hard for a country to step up and make them change.
• Having global health mind set may also cause a worsening in socioeconomic, political and environmental problems. Again, because these organizations have such an overarching power, it may be hard for individual countires to fix their issues.
• Lastly, it would cause a decrease in the ability for countires to tackle world-wide healthcare challenge. Having so many coutries involved with this issues and so interconnected, it may be hard for countires to reach the standards that more well-off countires have set out for them.

To be honest, you could almost call me person that is almost anti-globalization. The problem that I have with globalization is that it makes it so easy to spread to disease. Like I said earlier, I took a trip to another country, it would be so easy to spread diseases. This is happenig right now with Ebola. It is not rampent world wide, but if there is one misstep in prevention, there could be a catastropie.

Although, one good thing about this is that there are organizatios like Doctors Without Boarders. Without them, a lot of people would have not gotten medical care. The link below is a map of where there have their locations. (I tried to find a map on google images, but this is a little bit more interactive.)

 

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/our-work/countries

 



Post 6- The Global Economy

Last week in class, we looked the global economy from a sociological perspective.
It was really interesting to see the effects that globalization have had on the economy.

We talked about Rodrik's 3 sources of tension and Robinson's four concerns. I like both perspectives on this issue, but I was slightly more intrigued with Robinson's ideas.
He was first concerned about "over accumulation." That is where we see the world culture being shaped by the west. The issue with this is that the Western world consumes A LOT of resources. He was probably concerned with this, because if everyone acted like the West, we would be in real trouble with the world's natural resources and environment.
He was also concerned about the "globalization," where there is a large buffer between the world's rich and the world's poor. Some research says that this gap is getting smaller, but there is also some conflicting research. Some worry that this gap will increase with an increasing global market.
Robinson though additionally about the power individual states and politics. He believes that because of so many multinational business transactions and trade deals, that it will sort of "liquify" country boarders and lessen the power a government has.
Lastly, he was concerned with sustainability and the well-being of the planet. Not only would western world-like behavior cause an excessive and dangerous amount of consumption. There are also poor people that are also not helping out with the environment. For instance in South America, there are a lot of people barely making it by day to day. Some people are desperate for money and really think nothing of the environment. A large amount of people have no money for land to raise cattle or grow crops, so what they will do is burn down rain forest so they have some land to work with. The issue is that the soil will not be very good for long and the people will continue to burn down the forest for more land; they have to do it for survival.

In my opinion, I really believe that the western countries should reevaluate the way they are displaying themselves to others. We should really cut down on our use of resources, energy, etc. That way, developing countries cannot justify what they are doing. I honestly do not think pointing our fingers at developing countries, because they are trying to get ahead of the game and if we limit them significantly on their consumption, they may never improve.

Here is an info-graphic that may help you visualize just a fraction of what the US and other Western Countries are consuming in terms of oil. This was very eye opening.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/world-oil-consumption-001.jpg

Blog 5- Modernization and Dependency Theory.. What fun!

In class last week, we talked extensively about the Modernization and Dependency Theories. When it comes down to it, the Dependency theory is just a rebuttal to the Modernization theory. (There are four points to each theory, but I am just going to touch on one point each.)

The part that intrigued me the most was that the Modernization Theory says that globalization will be shaped by the Western civilizations. It is what all countries try to strive for. One of those things they will try to strive for is democracy.

The counter part this is found in the Dependency Theory. It says that there will still be "Dual Societies." Which means that there will be countries like China, Brazil and India; part of their culture will be traditional and part of it would be modern.

To look deeper at these theories, let us take a look at China. In some aspects, it looks like it will follow the modernization theory. Based on the growth in their economy, it looks as though China is turning more and more into a capitalistic country. Some people may even think that this trend will continue and eventually China will become a democracy, because China really cannot continue on as a "communist" (by China's standards, but not by Marx's) with economy that has a lot of capitalistic tendency. Their economy is unlike no other country in the past. Most "communist" countries are mainly self sufficient, like the historical example of the socialist East Germany. Once East Germany had a lot of pushes to become "like the rest of the world," the self-relying GDR really fell apart.

However, there is still a big push for communism in China; for example the riots in Hong Kong. Right now, people are upset in Hong Kong. China wants to choose their leaders and Hong Kong citizens have the choice of voting for the selected individuals. People are upset, because this really hinders their democratic government. However, China sees this as a threat. Hong Kong is a part of China and it is definitely not communist. I personally think this issue that is happening now is part of the steps to make Hong Kong a part of the communist China. I think this really supports more of the dependency theory.

Now that I have confused you even more of this topic, try to formulate your own opinions of which theories matches globalization more.

In this link below, you will see photographs from the riots in Hong Kong. It really depicts the situation of communism and democracy (aka, a more western train of thought). I did not want to copy and paste these into this blog, so I do not infringe on any copyright laws.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/28/honk-kong-policeteargasprodemocracyprotesters.html