Space Solar Power Review Vol 4 Num 4 1983

way of paradoxes, as people gain more wealth and leisure, pressure on social resources increases. Too many people seeking unspoiled vistas will spoil them; wall-to-wall beach houses destroy the beach both physically and socially. Those who came first become the object of resentment by those who want to come later — and there are many more of them. We then do have a zero-sum game: for some to win, others must lose. Yet a major ideological appeal of market economies is the claim that a properly working market improves the welfare of all. To worsen the problem, many of the standard paths to social advancement have become cruel traps. Since higher education was perceived as the path to status and income, the marginal value of education was considerable. As more and more people obtained degrees, the marginal value declined although the requirement remained. Early degrees crowd out later ones. Educated losers in zero-sum games may not be content to accept losses passively. Even hard work has limited rewards: given some pyramidal ratio between high-middle-low status managerial positions, high status jobs are relatively limited. Many are called but few are chosen, which leaves many dissatisfied. In short, material goods may or may not be finite but at least some social goods certainly are. The rhetoric of growth continues and market symbols continue to demand respect, but in practice even market societies are turning to distribution by political means. What Hirsch calls “reluctant collectivism" is increasingly accepted. Land use planning, coastal zone management, educational equal opportunity, antidiscrimination requirements in jobs and housing, environmental legislation, public health care — all indicate social disenchantment with traditional market solutions. Despite recent claims of a rebirth of the market there is little evidence of more than partial arrest of this glacial movement. Increased interest in decentralized government does not seem to challenge the fact of collectivization, only the locus of the activity (18). That such trends exist in every industrial society, not just the US, lends still further credence to the proposition that we face a genuine decline in the relevance of pure market solutions to modern social problems. Those who due to lack of wealth are marginal or noncitizens of the market society may be full citizens of the political society. Their votes count. On the international level, controversy over both the seabed regime and Moon Treaty stems in part from G-77 perceptions that if poor nations are effectively denied or limited in access to policymaking, if they have no guarantee of sharing in the profits, they will suffer relative to the rich nations. They seek to use political power as a substitute for economic power by defining a general interest and establishing a claim to share in the fruits of the “common heritage of mankind.” Space industrialization raises the most fundamental political issues — power, wealth, status — and is inevitably a political issue, both domestically and internationally (19). The Moon Treaty: Collectivist Free Enterprise? The Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the United Nations produced the Moon Treaty draft accompanied by certain interpretations and understandings accepted by committee consensus (any one of 47 COPUOS member nations could have prevented agreement). One key understanding is that the Treaty is not intended to bar exploitation of natural resources in space (20). The Treaty itself explicitly refers to need for an international regime to “govern the exploitation of the natural resources of the moon” (Art. 11, para. 5) and specifies (Art. 11, para. 7) the purposes of this regime to be

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==