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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."
If I get too fat, I die. If I drive way too fast, I have an accident and die.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
0'th post. It is interesting though, because I have always considered the elimination of scarcity one of societies goals. Where there is no scarcity there is no theft.
There are two types of people: those that can fill in the blanks,
traffic jams -> scarcity of alternative transportation
Of course, they don't compare to the problems of scarcity. As opposed to famine, plague, war, (real war, over necessities; not what we have now.) and back-breaking labor, a traffic jam is not such a big thing. Just put on some nice music, and enjoy the quiet.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
but what about an abudance of happiness, or love?
Those are states, not measurable quantities.
I love my wife more than anything else. My friend Em loves his wife, AFAIK more than anything else. How do you tell which one of us has "more" love?
Newsflash: society must adapt to changes in its environment. This includes technological changes that render previous assumptions obsolete. At the bottom of the article, the columnist mentions how digital paper might kill the newspaper business, or how easily copied CDs affected the music business. He didn't mention how that motorized carrage invention killed the buggy whip business. If your line of work is being made obsolete by changes in the environment, then perhaps it is time to change your line of work. It is futile to try to change the world, although that doesn't stop people from trying, at best all you can do is slow down the rate of change. I know it will be painful for the people who don't adapt, but that is the way of the world.
I read the internet for the articles.
Let's pretend the US didn't have a super abundance, of agricultural products (which incidently are produced in quantities far below their maximums). What if the US produced only enough food to feed each person in america a 1000 calorie a day diet. The result, of course, is massive starvation, the fatal kind as opposed to the misserable malnourisment kind, outside of the US. Here we have a double superabundance. First of agricultural capacity, and second of the food produced in a region.
I'm a little curious if the author providing the impetus for this thread is ready to jump on the misanthrope bandwagon, or if he didn't think his piece through as much as he might have.
This really points out that the problem is not 'abundance' per se, but over-use.
Just like cattle overgrazing a field, humans have become more and more of a risk to their own existence. If there were fewer humans, we would have many fewer problems.
I like to think of the American diet as a prime example of the over-use problem. As we continue our way down the path of least resistance, we have become much more sedentary. Then you add a diet designed to produce fat storage and you wind up with a lot of fat people.
What about overpopulation?
Sounds cruel, but medical technology is largely to blame for overpopulation, boosting the birth rate, raising the average life expectancy...
Plauges, STDs are all, to some extent, 'reactions' by 'mother nature' to bring us under control. Want to see a clearer-cut example? Forest fire fighting. Forests have been around for quite some time without us meddling with their natural processes. We step in, start fighting the small fires which thinned the forests out- and boom, all of the sudden, nobody can figure out why we've MASSIVE fires.
The problem is not so much technology itself as the misappropriation of it by people egged on by thel "won't someone think of the children" types. Won't someone think of the tree owls who are homeless after that last fire? We'd better meddle!
Please help metamoderate.
There's a good article to be written about this subject. Unfortunately, that one isn't it.
Why don't they talk about the Federation economy much? Because it's socialist. There's simply no other conclusion that can be drawn based on the information we have. Once you eliminate virtually all material scarcity, and population is clearly far greater than the available jobs, it's pretty much the only viable model left. And most of the "jobs" that people hold outside Starfleet are almost certainly voluntary. (IE, Daddy Sisko runs a cajun restaurant because he enjoys cooking for people, not because he needs to make money.)
Oh, and the Federation - or at least Earth - is actually a military-industrial state. Starfleet runs the show. But it's considered a benign dictatorship because most of the people receive a fine life gratis, and if they want to really DO something, well, they sign up for Service.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Not necessarily. Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are among the most densely populated cities in the world, yet also among the most prosperous.
Nonaggression works!
The price is going down because the food producers are paid a dollar a week and work much harder than you.
We'll run out of food when they have all our money and we're too fat to bomb the crap out of them to get it back. That should take awhile so you're more than welcome to over-consume and let your great-grandkids suffer the consequences.
In economic terms, this is a shortage. People want to "buy" more roadspace at the current price than is available. When there's a shortage, queuing costs dominate but the queuing costs benefit nobody. There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
That means some sort of usage fee -- tolls. The problem with old-style tolls is that the transaction costs were too high (i.e. there's always a backup at the tollbooth). What we need is anonymous, electronic cash-based tolls.
Electronic tolls also make it easy to charge an arm and a leg during peak times and "bargain rates" at other times.
There is a problem. How do you deal with people who are out of electronic cash? Don't really know because it has to be anonymous.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
In first world countries with the medical technology you are blaming, the birthrate is currently less than what is nessicary to maintain population levels. Several countries in Europe are losing population before imigration because the natives are not having kids fast enough to replace those that die, despite people living longer.
In truth medical technology lowers the birth rate. When you don't have good medical care you are best off having a lot of kids, but not caring if they don't survive (because many will not, and caring leads to psycological problems if they don't survive). When you have good medical care you are better off having a few kids that you put lots of effort into ensuring the survival of, they live, and get the attention needed to do well. Medical technology also provides birth control that works.
Or more to the point, the real problem is abundance of one resource with scarcity of another. If we had limitless amounts of time, we wouldn't be so concerned with the amounts of spam that enter our Inbox. If we had limitless space on the roads in which to drive (and rarely had to wait at a traffic light), we wouldn't care whether everybody and their brother had the tools for stacking the light change in their favor. (for that matter, nobody would buy the device anyway)
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
A technology which has, as its primary advantage, an ability to create abundance, carries within it the potential to create problems invulnerable to simplistic solutions. Like genies let loose from the bottle, they are almost impossible to control.
Maybe on a sociological scale they're impossible to control, but on an individual basis it's easy to control. My wife and I deliberately limit ourselves so that we're not running after things that don't matter.
I think the _real_ problem isn't that there's too much, but rather people want more. The fact that 3% of the world's population (North American) controls 60% of the world's wealth is a problem with our society's refusal to want less. Although I don't think much will change in the future, the individual can choose to give his/her excess to others who don't have.
And no, I'm not going to give you my excess spam...
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Yea, right, you are blaming it on a global scarcity?
Try blaming it on bad people with guns forcing the relocation of their rivals to places without food along with the same bad folk preventing relief supplies from getting to the helpless in rival groups as the main cause of hunger.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
What's he's talking about is this:
In America food is cheap but other things are expensive like housing and healthcare. There's a relative abundance of food here, and so you have the strange situation where it's more common to find poor people who are fat because rich people can afford health club memberships, personal trainers, and they're generally more aware of nutrition and health.
I don't know that the point is abundance is bad, but that abundance will likely have unintended consequences.
Sure, the first things a new technology does is have its intended consequences. After that however, if the "cost" to do something is dramatically reduced unintended consequences occur.
I don't know if the guy is a luddite or not, but his point valid. If you introduce a technology that dramatically reduces the cost to do something, it's probably guaranteed that additional consequences will occur besides the original reason why you invented the technology in the first place.
It may be wise to try to think through what those consequences might be. Once you've done that, you've got several options:
1) Don't release the technology (Boring)
2) Control the release, so society has time to adjust.
3) Introduce something that acts a counter balance, so the undesired consequences don't occur or are minimized.
4) Screw it, and just roll out the new thing already!
#1 - There so many reasons this is wrong, I won't go into it.
#2 - This almost never happens, maybe it should? I don't know
#3 - If strategy #3 was rolled out with a technology in the first place, things would probably go smoother.
#4 - This is what happens today, until eventually we go ooops (or somebody like the RIAA applies a lot of self-interested political pressure), and then we try to do #3 after the fact. This sometimes gets ugly.
But when all is said and done. #4 just pushes societal evolution. A disturbance enters or society; we struggle with it for 10-100 years; finally equilibrium is established around that new technology; rinse repeat.
#4 has actually worked great up until the industrial revolution. Since then the pace of innovation has been so great, that we don't have time to finish adjusting to the last change before we have to start adjusting to a new one.
That in itself is applying pressure on society to change. It is applying a pressure for society to become quickly adaptable.
So here's a piece for you to nibble on. What's more quickly adaptable? A democratic society or a totalitarian? I certainly prefer my good ol' democracy, but P.R.China has a government structure more like a corporation than Western countries. It can force painful societal adaptiations to occur quickly. Totalitarian governments can fail by being to rigid, too. But if they find the right mix of control, combined with encouraging a free market, they make a formidable force.
Might it be that democracy will fail, because it can't adapt to technological change fast enough? Time will tell.
An abundace of traffic is an scarcity of roads. And abundance of fat is an scarcity of self control. And abudance of spam is a scarcity of cattle prods.
It's all a matter of perspective.
Since the article makes only trivial observations and provides no insights, I guess it's up to us readers. So here's my long rambling attempt:
The article's advice that people should think about the consequences of new technology is sort of worthless, for the same reason mentioned that you can't replace abundance with scarcity because people wouldn't stand for it. If it were normal for people to think ahead about consequences, they wouldn't mind a healthy dose of scarcity that promised them better health, lower stress and greater security.
In the real world, people who stand to profit from something rarely let the impact on others get in their way. At most, they consider their legal liability. When the damage starts to become obvious, all responsibility is placed on the customers who "demanded" the product. Demand, whether real or advertising-generated, is blamed for all the long-term consequences. The fast food industry doesn't accept the blame for creating a nation of lard-asses with heart disease. They just fulfilled the demand and raked up the profits. Those lazy customers did the damage to themselves. And of course, people should eat sensibly.
On the other hand, if you leave a big pile of concrete rubble in your front yard, and some curious kids climb on it and get hurt, you're going to be held liable for their injuries. An unfenced hazard like that is what's called an "attractive nuisance." You don't have to spend billions on advertising to get those kids to wander over and check it out. Merely making it easy to get to is enough to make you responsible for it.
So why aren't people who operate on a much larger scale equally responsible for "attractive nuisances" -- especially when they're handing out billions of toys in Happy Meals? I'm not talking about frivolous lawsuits for spilled hot coffee, I'm talking about people who learn to love products as kids, use them as directed for years and then drop dead at age 50 from the health effects. Apparently the loophole is the fact that almost anything is okay in moderation, and companies don't actually suggest in their advertising that anybody should consume TOO MUCH of their products. But then, the person with the pile of rubble likewise isn't asking anybody to climb on it. The pile is perfectly safe if you merely look at it and imagine the fun you could have climbing on it. So where's the consistency in the law?
I think we're between a rock and a hard place. Liability for future consequences could cripple innovation, or limit it to large companies with litigation war chests. Which is the same thing. Making people responsible for whatever happens to them requires that they have an unrealistic level of expertise and caution. We want a safe world. We want a changing, progressive world. What a can of worms.
Yeah, like these guys.
For as DeBeers well knows, the converse is, "Any marketing process that creates scarcity steals benefits from any persons who are ignorant of abundance."
Oh yes, my mistake, I forgot about all of that starvation in Italy and Ireland, silly me.
Over populated planet? The evidence is against you. Food production has outstripped population growth throughout the recorded history of either. Not one place on earth are farmers starving while people in the cities they serve getting fat. Not even in North Korea (where everybody not "connected" is starving).
Then again, a Chinese-Socialist system that you seem to lean toward created a massive famine in China during the 1960's.
So, please, look at the real world and skip the propoganda.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Next in line for this treatment is VoIP. In four years or so, your average telecommunications company will either be adapting or be gone.
there is no spoon
Actually its not just a tendancy, it WILL happen eventally...
"On a long enough timeline, everyones survival rate drops to zero"
As far as reproduction goes, outside forces that kill off the parents IS self limiting. Two parents nees the resources for two people. They have six children (as a sidenote, in the past parents hade to create eight or ten children just to get six of them to live long enough to be useful, and thats assuming childbirth didnt knock off the female) and now their family uses the resources for eight people. When the parents die off, the families need for resources for goes down to six people, making room for the next generation.
The longer the parents live, the more resources they eat up that could be for their children and grandchildren.
Before you post, I am WELL AWARE of the intangible benefits of grandparents helping raise their grndchildren, being a product of it myself.
[The thing is: How many grandparents are doing this and not spending their later years playing golf in arizona and driving to the drugstore in their golf carts?]
Other intangibles: What is the stress in resources on an extended family (and a community) when grandpa spends a year or seven in the hospital recovering from a stroke on life support that in earlier times would have given him a quick out with less pain and suffering.
What about the stress on soceity taking care of people with debilitating illnesses that can barely take care of themselves, requiring constant care (RESOURCES), after some hero doctor has brought them back from their second or third (etc.) flatline?
Do YOU wanna spend the last 15 or 20 years of your life causing your family unintentional grief while youre barely strong enough to change the channel on the clicker and eating all your meals theorugh a straw? Mainly because as a soceity we've totally given up on the concept of being able to let go?
Its Death, people. its gonna get all of us. The WORST thign we can do is not dealt with it head on.
+--+--+--+
[News Note On all of this]
What about that woman in Florida that FLAT OUT SAID she didnt want her life to degrade to the level of being a really expensive-to-take-care-of-houseplant? Take her off the machines and she'd die naturally. She wouldnt even FEEL IT at a conscious level.
She's no longer has any consciousness.
She EXERCISED HER RIGHT as a Fully Coherent Adult to say "Do Not Do This To Me" and how much hand wringing and pain and resources are being WASTED on this bullshit?
The main reason for which being a politician saw an opening to garner points with the right-wingers by taking the emptional pain of her parents and turining it into a circus?
Ref: CNN for various articles on the stupidity
Parents who simply cannot face the facts that shes gone and thats that.
Its sad, but its the facts.
[/News Note O
s'wut i sed.
This is nothing new. See the Tragedy of the Commons. It all comes back to abuse of abundant resources held in common. Everyone suffers eventually. As much as people fear regulation of abundant resources, government-imposed limitations are sometimes the only way to prevent abuse.
It should also be mentioned that no resource is unlimited. Take spam for instance. There's a certain signal-to-noise ratio that needs to be maintained for email to be useful. Spam abuses the system in such a way that that ratio is thrown askew. There is a narrow, limited amount of noise that can enter the system before the system is crippled. Spam has passed that threshhold, and is now almost purely noise.
Many other problems of abundance stem from the fact that the prices we pay do not reflect the true cost. While you eat a cheeseburger for $0.99, hundreds of people that had a hand in that hamburger's production, from farmers to meatpackers to fast food workers all suffer to give you the cheapest possible meal. There's not an over-abundance of food...there's just an out-of-control industry that has reduced the forward-facing price so drastically that food seems limitless.
Abundance is a mirage. You can't make something from nothing.
In actuality, the medical technology is available to both the first and third worlds. In the first world, the overpopulative effect has been counteracted by education.
Despite the fact that the third world does not have anywhere near the heath qualities of the first, medical technology has succeeded in raising the birth rate to what it is now.
Huh? All of those people have jobs that they voluntarily work at, and for which they are paid. Nobody is "suffering"; division of labor and productivity increases allow us to produce more for less.
Abundance is a mirage. You can't make something from nothing.
Sure you can. The economy is not a zero-sum game. Look at the history of CPUs; while their prices (which reflect the amount of resources used to create them) have remained fairly constant, their quality has increased drastically.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The economy is not a zero-sum game.
Right, it's not zero-sum... it's negative sum.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources. Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
When something is abundant, it's free. Witness the Internet. Once software/movies/music gets out, it's available gratis. Anything that can be digitized (i.e. any information) can be made available for zero price. That scares the hell out of the Entrenched Capitalist, as well it should.
As far as information goes, creativity isn't a team sport. Ever hear of a fiction novel written by 12 people? Didn't think so. It may be true that developing ideas may require resources and manpower, but inspiration strikes individuals.
Maybe the legacy of the Information Age will be that eventually, only tangible goods and artificially scare information will carry a price tag. This is a Good Thing. It means everyone benefits from the collective thought of the creative, but you still have to work building things to make a living. We could have that utopia, or just sell information through Absolute DRM, which we're well on the way to having. It's obvious that The Powers That Be know this future, and are actively lobbying for it. It's long past time we sent our own legions of Smart People up to Capitol Hill to sell our vision of the future, too.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Well, that population limitation for one, but maybe I am being picky :-)
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Diamonds. SUVs. Hell, Harley-Davidsons for that matter. If prices are sufficently high, the item becomes a status symbol and even more desirable. Gas guzzling Amercan autos are major status symbols overseas, and logic be damned in the face of keeping up with the Jones.
I tend to think scarcity or overabundance isn't the problem per se, it's a mindset of wanting to attach dollar signs to everything; trying equate everything in terms of a common scale.
And for the most part, it works out okay until you start getting mailorder brides and liposuction... Can you really tell me how much loyalty is worth?
So no, we won't consume ourselves to death, but we will fail to notice the bridge is out while indulging our egos.
From what I've seen, poor people eat a diet that is largely devoid of nutrition.
Draw a walking distance radius around most poor neighborhoods. You'll find loads of convenience stores selling food products rich in refined sugar, refined starch and saturated fat. Not to mention the fast food outlets. [Then there's the alcohol, tobacco, lottery outlets...]
Convenience, cost, shelf-life and the natural tendency of the human animal to crave high-calorie foods tend to drive poor people's decisions to a greater degree than wealthier people.
I make more money than average and know what kind of food is good for me and still it's enough of a struggle to take the time and energy to drive 15 miles to where I can find fresh fruits and vegetables (frequently, because of the low shelf life) that then requires a fair amount of preparation time (washing, cooking, chopping, cleanup, etc.) We're all faced with the same problem of eating good food; I'm just saying that it requires increasing effort to make the proper choices as your income level decreases. You may know a diet rich is fresh fish is good for you, but you're not going to be buying it.
As far as exercise is concerned, there's no comparison.
Manual labor is hard work, but it's a lot more likely to give you a bad back, sore feet and repetitive motion injuries than what you do in a health club.
And again, being a desk jockey, I have the energy to go to a health club, but have done enough hard labor to understand where going to the gym after a hard day's work is more difficult. (Nevertheless, I do know some construction workers that put in a few hours at the health club before work. More power to them.)
Scrubbing floors on your hands and knees or digging ditches will burn calories, but won't give the same benefits as a planned exercise program.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Methinks creating a life-sustaining pod capable of traveling between solar systems would be a hell of alot easier than creating something that
- Can get close enough to the Sun to perform such a task without being destroyed
- Can acomplish such a task in a way as not to fundementally alter the gravitational centerpoint of out solar system
If you could get around that, perhaps it would be feasable...but it really does sound quite far fetched (no offense).Besides, by the time we have to worry about the sun burning out and/or exploding (unless something wildly unexpected happens) we'll have probably either become extinct or populated several more planets...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Right, it's not zero-sum... it's negative sum.
If you look just at the bad and not the good you'll always be losing.
This is a common failing of the barren critic, known as ecclesias.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources.
not driven by, burden with.
Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
I think Newton, Gauss, Einstein and all scientists and engineers might
have begged to differ
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
You know, old ecclesiases have been crying:
"there is nothing new under the sun"
every generation
bright youngsters of the following generation
Working for necessity's mother.