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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."
What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?
By saying this he is trying to say that having an abudance of something is a bad thing, when this is not necessarily the case. Having an abudance of money might be a bad thing, but what about an abudance of happiness, or love?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
In Star Trek, they have replicators that can create pretty much anything anyone could desire, and they no longer have money (except when they do). So... why do some people in the Star Trek universe have bad jobs? Why would anyone pick that? I can understand explorers, scientists, even farmers continuing in their work because they enjoy it, but why is someone going to pick to be a guard on the penal colony planet for the most dangerous criminals? It can't be the pay, because the pay doesn't matter when you can have anything.
Is this the guy who made a name for himself yelling about the sky falling at Y2K? As I recall, the sky didn't fall at all. I'm sure he'd like credit for that.
I guess he can't find another "crisis" so he's decided we have too much stuff.
Ecologists say essentially the same thing, but with different words. I attended to an Ecology class when I was in college, and I nicknamed it Apocalypse class, because every day our professor told us a different way to deplete natural resources which would lead humankind to extinction. And this usually had something to do with the fact that human population is always growing. I though it was interesting, but scary.
My neighbor's
If I get too fat, I die. If I drive way too fast, I have an accident and die.
They're sort of self limiting. For example, in theory, being stupid is self limiting. Someone is too stupid, they do something stupid, and die, however there are just too many variables to be taken into account. Some very clever people die young, just like some fat people who drive way too fast live to see 100 (albeit a smaller amount of the population than those who look after themsleves and drive carefully).
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
traffic jams -> scarcity of alternative transportation
Bogus. If more people would get off their asses and onto a bicycle or even walk we would have far fewer traffic problems. Instead, we want large hulking SUV's to haul us back and forth from work and the store.
Try a little experiement. On your drive/ride/walk home, pay attention to the number of people in automobiles. You will find that the fast number of folks are purchasing large SUV's and large automobiles just to haul their lonesome ass around, when they could be buying smaller Smart cars and such. Or like I said before, choosing a bicycle.
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In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto
Any form of change will have at least some unintended or unpredicted consequences.
:o)).
While a reduction in scarcity may be unintended, I find it hard to consider it automatically undesirable. Scarcity in terms of food is bad, by and large. Even though an abundance has its own issues, obesity is arguably less of a problem than starvation (though obviously, the middle ground is probably to be preferred).
(Now, if there were a scarcity of lawyers and politicians, that could be a good thing
It doesn't appear that the author is railing against technology, but there are people who will read it that way. "Technology is bad!", they will say, and point to any number of unintended problems that have arisen. What these people seem to miss is that the solution to those problems is further progress (and technology), not stopping in one place and burying our heads in the sand (or clamoring for a idyllic past that never existed).
Given that, for the most part, the problems caused by these unintended consequences are often less harmful than the problems that the technology addresses, I'm willing to accept the consequences, assuming that a goal is further advancement to address those problems, and so on.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
There is certainly a larger problem here -- the very mechanisms by which we were to be freed from the ravages of nature (esp. sewage, refrigeration, washing-machines, elevators ...) have enslaved us to convenience through a kind of hypnotization. We now must have convenience, for if we don't, we can't do anything. Think about what happens when the power goes out: our sleep-walk through existence is rudely disturbed, much like when a magician's victims find out that they have been barking like dogs. This is a much worse bondage.
Economics IS the study of scarcity. Or more accurately, how humans develop social systems to cope with or mitigate scarcity. (When you boil it down, trade and money are just tools of controlling resource allocation or power over resources.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Where do you find overpopulation?
The most overpopulated parts of the world happen to have the lowest technology levels, I do believe.
GPL Deconstructed
we can save people who should by natural law be removed to make space for the next guy.
What is this "natural law" you speak of? Other than the laws of physics, I know of no natural laws out there.
Perhaps you are thinking about "survival of the fittest", which people often misinterpret so that they believe that only the fittest individuals should live and the rest should die. That concept works only in generalizations - that a more fit individual will have a greater likelihood of surviving, but that like all probability, nothing is fixed. The most fit individual in a population could be the one gored by an ox, leaving the less fit to move on.
Yes, technology is used to increase life expectancy, allowing people to live that would have died a thousand years ago. But there's no "law" that states that person should have died - it just happens that way. Humans work toward extending their lifespans and saving others - that's a part of our "human nature" that we have due to evolution. Saving people with technology is just as natural as being killed.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
The problem is that city's and to a larger extent suburbs are designed for cars. I ride my bike to work most days, and I have to do it in traffic because there is no place for bikes. So riding a bike to work is more than just riding a bike to work. I put my life at the mercy of half asleep drivers that are paying attention to other cars and not me.
Subjectively I think I am more likely to be involved in a collision with a car when I'm on my bike then when I'm driving. And I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to be seriously damaged when on the bike.
So lack of bike routes, combined with the fact that most people live too far away from their jobs to make biking practicable (again a subjective observation based on experience in DC, Baltimore and Memphis), means that you won't be seeing a massive shift to bikes any time soon. Plus people are lazy.
i don't like my old sig.
"The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. But my greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth." -- Brigham Young 1848
No. What it means is that we've managed to change what qualifies as fit to be something independant of the environment.
Starvation in the US. There are reasons other than global scarcity, and civil war.
He makes such statements as, "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr" which is entirely false, as anyone who's studied the wave behaviour of traffic can attest to.
Then he makes the assertions, "Nor can we solve obesity by reducing the shelves in the supermarket, or Spam by making it difficult and costly to send e-mail."
Really, if you reduced the number of high-fat foods in super markets and made it so that email did cost more to send, would that not both reduce the fat in most people's diets, as well as make it harder for bulk mailers to send email cheaply? Wouldn't that solve those problems?
This article spends its entire time chasing its own tail around before making unsupported assertions!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It's not even a matter of purchasing a vehicle for fuel efficiency, it's a matter of common sense. The folks who howl at the top of their lungs to try and defend their house-on-wheels purchase miss the point entirely or just don't want to admit (or just don't care) that what they did was incredibly, inexcusably stupid and suggests they have the IQ of a dead muskrat while on car lots.
If you don't NEED (or want) to go stomping through 3 feet of water, up 25 degree rocky inclines, and through 2 feet of snow on a regular basis, you don't NEED an SUV. Even the losers who whine about driving in 6 inches of snow with their SUV just don't get it. There's plenty of 4WD and AWD cars out there that are cheaper, faster, safer, easier to maintain, and handle light and moderate offroad and bad weather duty just fine. My one friend had a 4WD Tempo for about a year. It handled wet, grassy hills, snow, ice, and mud just fine.
If you NEED a vehicle for the family, a minivan is safer, cheaper, equally as versatile, and better on gas.
If you NEED to haul a boat or something similar every great once in awhile, borrow or rent a truck or SUV WHEN YOU NEED IT. There's no sense in driving a truck/SUV/van like a car for 90% of your mileage.
There are certainly the rare few who can justify an SUV/Van/Truck purchase - I know some. They have jobs that require the power of a Dodge Ram or the versatility and all-weather capability of a Suburban (actually, I know a guy who has a Durango solely because he lives in the boonies in a steep-sloping valley and doesn't usually get plowed out for days - he drives the Durango occasionally if it's the only vehicle available and to keep it from locking up in the summer, then drives it most of the winter).
Face it SUV-owners: most of you are fad following losers with no imagination or individuality. I recall a mere decade ago when SUVs were the prime requisite of mud-stomping hicks and were frowned upon by the "new elite businessperson" in favor of Lexus, BMW, and Mercedes sedans. They're a fad - I've yet to question one person who could successfully justify his/her SUV purchase. Stupid. And I will (and occasionally do) maintain that in the face of anyone who can't give me a good reason for their decision.
Oh... and I'm not against them so much for their gas-wasting ways, though that's definitely one reason I don't like them. I'm against them because the people who are dumb enough to buy them without cause aren't smart enough to drive them safely. Bigger vehicle = more responsibility. But, they mostly drive just as recklessly as everyone else anyway. In fact, I kept track for awhile, and I saw nearly twice as many people in SUVs driving recklessly (significantly over the speed limit, rapid lane changes, pulling out in front of people, etc.) as in cars. Although that could certainly be regionalized, I doubt it.
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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.
Yep, you're completely correct, of course. I read another post here some weeks ago which described your solution and called it "peak demand pricing".
While that solution makes abundant sense, it is not likely to fly politically any time soon. My impression is that most people view transportation/roads as a right rather than a service. Until that changes, we're stuck with traffic jams.
AB SO LUTELY! however it should be duly noted that one might make an argument that this strange twist in human history (the poorer folks growing fatter than the rich) is the cause of America's strong political stability.
I mean, for all the debate, boredom and laughter/tears over the 2k bush/gore floridiot fiasco something that would have certainly happened in less than three months in most other countries would have been violence and possibly armed struggle over the same. instead, we counted, and argued, and debated and judged and a hundred other boring methods. why???
obesity has washed the poorer citizens of America into sheeplike obedience. they have sold out to mcdonalds and their taste buds. obese people lack stamina, speed, and often, after a prolonged spell, the willpower or urgency to change their fortunes. obesity is a choice, first and foremost. poorer people could eat healthier, but that is rarely the path of least resistance.
as a result, the working masses have been placated. i can't honestly see anything wrong with having the choice to be thin or thick and choosing thick. throughout history, rebellions and revolutions have been born in the depths of famine. the french revolution started (the bastille) when the price of bread went through the roof, while simutaneously, the price of wine remained constant. yep! the third grade history books don't mention that the famous mob of Paris was blind, stinking drunk (on empty stomachs).
poor people the world over would kill to be fat and not starving! just their leaders know that if that kind of cultural blight happens to their countries that a) they would be at risk of revolution if america removed the fat and b) obesity is a legitimate problem
personally, i think it will be solved just because there's never obese people in Star Trek ;) just kidding!
really though. this issue is close what makes america tick.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Actually, you'll note we're using up other countries' oil first, under the ruse of protecting our own for "environmental" reasons. Once it starts to get scarce, we'll really open up Alaska, the coast of California, et al.
Actually there just isn't that much oil left in North America. The US peaked oil production in about 1970, Alaska just managed to hold the curve flat to about 1985.
There aren't likely to be any new Prudhoe Bays or Permian Basins to be discovered.
The last area of the world to peak in production will be the Middle East.
My own bet is we'll never run out of oil. The hellish demand will cause the development of oil-producing bacteria (or hell, produce gasoline directly!) Or some other chemical thing, who knows?
The problem is the energy has to come from somewhere. Even if we come up with magic bacteria they are going to have to convert the energy from some other form into either crude or refined products.
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