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The Problem With Abundance
GRW writes "Peter de Jager, "a speaker/writer/consultant on the issues relating to the Rational Assimilation of the Future", asks, 'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?' He answers that 'they are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.' His article is a thought provoking discussion of the unintended consequences of technological change."
For those calculus-savy, d*u^2/d^2*q That's been incorporated in the whole body of theory, to explain everything - from demand response to lower interest rates to risk management in capital asset portfolios.
Peter de Jager is, of course, the infamous "Y2K Guru", although he probably hopes we would just forget about that and move on...
Peter De Jager's Doomsday 2000 article published in 1993 in Computerworld is often credited with starting the whole Y2K phenomena. It was alarmist, but it was also a reasonable warning to industry at the time. In 1993, a lot of Y2K remediation was needed. But by late 1998, Peter De Jager was saying that Y2K would create minimal problems and became an opponent of Y2k hysteria fanatics like Ed Yourdon. He never beleived that Y2K would result in the whacked out scenarios taught by nut cases like Gary North.
No it WAS Jager
Stop spreading misinformation.
Check out his article, "The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons," on his old web site on the Well .
As Solomon (or somebody) commented a few thousand years ago, there is nothing new under the sun.
Catherine
Reminds me of a Pohl book (or was it a short story?) "The Midas Effect". The premise was a future in which there was rampant overproduction, and the poor had to consume like mad, while the rich got to live a simple lifestyle.
I've been thinking about this story for a while now. Scarily enough, it's becoming true for certain things. A huge house at the outskirts of your metropolitan area is cheap. What's expensive is a small apartment in the city (depending on your city, of course). Huge washer and dryers? Cheap. Small washer/dryer combo? Expensive.
Things are definitely becoming stranger and stranger...
Just to make sure we're clear, please don't confuse my argument. I'm not saying that people aren't starving, because it's certainly true that people are starving. I'm arguing that people are not starving because people like hamburgers, but instead, that poverty along with the policies of wealthy countries prevent those people from having any access to the surplus of calories that are produced (or could be produced in fields which intentionally lie fallow, which some studies include in the wastage numbers) each year.
f (paper)l ides.pdf (slides, see p10 for increased per-capita calorie production and lowered per-capita price to contrast with increased starvation over the same period from other sources)
m 02 v25n86.html6 2e07.htmi ew_food.as p
I suspect that you and I are in rather close agreement in being angry about the issue of global mass starvation. My take on the vegetarian argument (that beef is to blame and that if we all stopped eating beef, there would be no starvation) is that it's a red herring that distracts from much more important issues of economic globalization that prevent local populations from being able to produce their own food while living on arable land.
Plenty of referenced numbers:
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/research/FSRDTC-paper.pd
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/research/FSRDTC-s
Some recent references:
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/newsnviews/2002/s
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/x0262e/x02
http://www.mcknight.org/hotissues/overv
Some older references:
http://dieoff.org/page115.htm
Quotes from this article:
"Due to advances in agriculture of many countries, there is now a substantial world surplus of food"
Abelson, P.H. (1987). World Food. Science, 236,9.
An argument that simultaneously with the above statement, more people than ever are undernourished or malnourished.
Wortman, S. (1980). World food and nutrition: The scientific and technological base. Science, 209, 157- 164.
Regards,
Ross