Not really. It's not like you are workibg all your life to "earn" oxygen and water. Fortunately(for most of us) we are living in an utopia as far as oxygen and water is concerned. You get them for "free"/with minimal effort.
> First time I’ve read that providing clean water on demand to everyone at a sufficient pressure is “minimal effort”.
Let's look at it from this perspective: what percentage of your country's workforce is actively involved in providing clean water?
If it were such a huge effort to provide for relatively basic human needs, then I'd imagine we'd have more people working on that and less people working on advertising, entertainment, rent-seeking, making & marketing disposable novelty products, etc.
The gist of the argument is that while oxygen is available at no effort, clean, potable water without pathogens and contaminants is certainly not and is a modern miracle. It’s only been a little over 100 years since the discovery of chlorine killing bacteria and whatnot in water.
As for what portion of the population is needed to provide clean water, I don’t see how that is a useful or measurable metric. Certainly the discovery process of cleaning the water, the materials science in creating the pipes, learning about lead poisoning and changing that, and so on and so forth is a huge effort in my books.
Also, going forward, access to clean water is looking like it will be a source of conflict. It’s not in the timescale of the next 5 to 10 years, so people take it for granted, but certainly the grandchildren of today will have to deal with procuring this “effortless” resources.
One might even say the same for oxygen in developing countries where poor people have to live next to factories under a permanent cloud of pollution. They literally can’t go for a run because of a lack of clean air!
> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water
Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily. And it's not like the waters of the world are pure and safe to drink by default. There's plenty of parasites and diseases out there. How many hunter-gatherers do you think didn't have worms?
> People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily
The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air
Oldest anthropological sites in the world appear to have been used for religious ceremony (community building) and trade (economics). The economists aren't terribly off the mark.
This article seems to want to return to a pseudo-Rousseau view of the world where the wilds are religious.
Water isn’t the problem, it’s sanitation, as in having flushing toilets and sewers.
More people have mobile phones than have access to improved sanitation.
Without it, you die early of disease.
Humanity really didn’t even control their poop all that well until a couple of hundred years ago with the invention of the modern toilet and the S-trap.
