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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."
traffic jams -> scarcity of alternative transportation
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.
There will always be theft, simply because even though I have mine, you have one to, and we can both get more free, if I can have more with you having none, I win.
Theft isn't entirely about scarcity, it's about competition and jealousy and all sorts of other things.
- Sig this!
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.
So all those wars in our history books (such as the warlords in Africa, Napolean, Japan invading China) were wars over necessities? I guess all wars before a Bush was president were justified.
Hate to break this to you, but war has a long history of only being about the people in power.
There's a good article to be written about this subject. Unfortunately, that one isn't it.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.