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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."
Personally, I'm happy to slaughter the sacred cow of "scarcity." Imagine fitting all your porn on a 1GB hard drive. Now scarcity is not so cool.
traffic jams -> scarcity of alternative transportation
Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy -- it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
Given Peter de Jager's mugshot I think he has some authority on the matter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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?
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.
'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?'
Simple. Stupid fat f**ks read spam on their cell phones while driving and cause traffic jam.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Of course, there's also the issue that if I can't get to McDonalds because I'm stuck in traffic, I'll lose weight.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
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
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.
And does one person becoming so obese that they die going to prevent another person from doing it? Experience shows us that it does not. So no, obesity is not self-limiting.
As for driving "too fast", that is also solved by technology, and not at the cost of speed. In my grandfather's day, any fool who traveled 75mph for a period of 6 straight hours was a fool. His tires wouldn't hold up under the strain, nor would the fuel supply hold out. Today, I routinely visit my mother 9 hours away on a single fueling stop and often exceed 75mph on the freeway, and barely blink. Steering is no problem either, unlike for my grandfather, who had to contend with a car with the aerodynamics of a rounded brick and a steering system unassisted by any power.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
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.
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.
If you eat right and exercise, you die too. No way around that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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
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.