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NASA-Funded Study Investigates Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Snirt writes "A new study (PDF) sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that 'the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.' Cases of severe civilizational disruption due to 'precipitous collapse — often lasting centuries — have been quite common.' They say, 'Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.' After running simulations on the survivability of various types of civilizations, the researchers found that for the type most resembling ours, 'collapse is difficult to avoid.'"
Before, it was a local government/economy, even a large one, which failed locally. Now? It's interconnected, the dominoes are all lined up for pan-global crises.
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
Read it, MFs!
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
Reinstate Bernanke, and he will print us out of it. Don't worry.
ATM we enjoy cheap stuff because of China's cheap labour and lax environmental laws. Once the Chinese workers and people start earning higher wages and standards of living closes in to that of the western world next will be Africa as the new China.
After that????
Booom!!!!
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
"... the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution"
No kidding. The depletion of cheap and plentiful supplies of petroleum alone will cause the global marketplace to seize up like a 55-yr-old American's heart after decades of being a couch potato. Too many people today are eating food produced by a highly-mechanized, energy-densified agriculture system. Too much of it runs on cheap petroleum. And cheap petroleum has arguably already run out. The energy input to produce each calorie of food, must either stop or rise to reflect the scarcity price. In too many instances, the former option will be chosen.
are unsustainable. Who would have thunk it?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Civilization as we know it won't collapse. Stuff never collapses anymore... stock markets, housing markets... nope! we're free and clear now!
Any decent engineer could probably put together a PID loop or two (possibly cascaded) to keep stability in the system, but what would you use as a control mechanism?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
NASA is dead.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Is Hari Seldon when we need him?
I don't want NASA using their funds for Social/Political Simulations. Not their job and a complete waste of NASA money. Fire the writers and buy another Rocket, or a fuel tank, or something that has something to do with Aeronautics and Space, not make believe liberal arts studies. Let some other organization waste their money. NASA is for Space Engineering/Science Research, not for some third rate Social Pseudo Science study.
I foresee the imminent fall of the American Empire, which encompasses the entire world, and a dark age lasting 30 thousand years before a second great empire arises. I also foresee an alternative where the intermittent period will last only one thousand years. To ensure my vision of a second great empire comes to fruition, we should create two foundationsâ"small, secluded havens of all human knowledgeâ"at "opposite ends of the internet".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Someone named Cassandra?. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book called Collapse about it. Greenland colonization attempt, anasazi Indians etc. When the collapse avoidance is still possible, the new course requires sacrifices from the current top dogs of the system. Not being sure whether the top-dogginess will persist in the new course, they stay on original course to disaster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The trick with good times is when they don't last. What we see, more so in this cycle that most, is centralization of power and responsibility/regulation (there has never existed a more regulated society than the modern West).
The cost of this is extreme - by some estimates, most people pay 30-60% of their earnings for the year to support such a structure (if you don't understand the average 22% cost of goods as embedded income taxes, google for the Harvard economics study). When we have an extreme downturn, like now (we need 350,000 jobs per month added for 10 straight years just to get back to "Bush era" employment numbers), people can't afford it. Just this week we have the example of Obama saying that people should cancel their phone service to pay for his healthcare scheme, but that's just a glaring example of a pervasive problem.
Only so many people will allow their homes to be confiscated to pay for the ostentatious lifestyle in DC and on Wall Street, while they're having trouble putting food on the table for their families. If trends continue, the USD will lose its place as the national reserve currency (debt-to-gdp is over 100% now; Bretton Woods was agreed upon when the USD was still backed by gold) which will cause a rapid loss of buying power. And the more the US outsources, the less will be there when the USD loses its value. At some point, they can crank up the printing presses to fund poverty programs, but when people stop accepting dollars, there's nothing else to do but to implement wage and price controls and/or seize the means of production. The odds of a revolt go up with each step along the way.
The shame of it is, we can see this coming, and we can recognize that we need decentralization and de-escalation of power, but the political system does not allow for it to back itself down. Even the very name, "lawmakers" is telling - "law-removers" isn't in the lexicon.
Jefferson himself predicted the situation, and even recommended revolution as the solution. I'd rather see a peaceful and economic one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I found these two quotes most interesting:
"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."
"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
I think we can see that we are already in an early state of collapse. Environmental change is a strong driving force to destabilize society. We can see that the elites have their heads firmly stuck in the sand on the issues of over-consumption of resources and unequal distribution. Jared Diamond has covered these issues well (particularly in "Collapse").
I personally am pessimistic that we will be able to avoid collapse due to the political and economic power of the elite.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Our hard drives get bigger, the programs grow fatter. Everything grows as big as it can, and will use all the space and time has.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
lucky 4 me i won't be around that long;-}
http://www.theguardian.com/the...
I hear good things about outer space. Maybe you should check that out sometime when you're not busy.
and increasingly unequal wealth distribution
I always knew that civilization would end because of greed.
We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!
Whoo, that was too much sarcasm. I have to lie down now.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If it's 100,000 years from now, I won't lose any sleep over it.
Interesting article. There's always someone to play the cynic.
I am pessimistic but not that cynical.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I cannot imagine how we could have a real collapse of our civilization, unless you really stretch the word definition. Even in the most catastrophic scenarios like a nuclear war or a dinosaur-scale meteor hit, enough people should survive to gradually rebuild it to the current level.
And the risks mentioned here, like resource shortage, conventional war and economic problems cannot even lead to that sort of "collapse". The words you might consider are "crisis", "depression" or maybe "decline".
It would take a true cosmic scale disaster to destroy our civilization at this point, something that would make life impossible anywhere on the surface or under it in a very short time. Even then, if we had an early warning, we could try to relocate enough people off the planet.
If you want your research to be taken seriously, please avoid sensationalist overstatements like this.
The evolutionary economists compare us to seals. The biggest seal gets to mate with all the females. So, the lion seals kept getting bigger and they developed heart and other problems as well as the tendency to crush the females under their weight.
We do the same thing. How many people do you see go into serious debt to buy BMWs, Mercedes or some other luxury car to look "bigger" - more important? Even if you have the cash, buying a luxury car is a terrible waste of capital.
The same goes for the McMansions. People rationalize it was "moving up" or it's an "investment" or what have you, but it boils down to looking "bigger."
iPhones are/were the same - and now smart phones have become the norm; when for most, a $35 pos would be more than adequate (Do you REALLY need to check email every 10 minutes?).
Bigger cars, jewelry, bigger, bigger and more and more energy and resource use.
Basically, our consumptive economy is to prove that we're a little better than the next guy.
When you look back about 100 years ago, what were the popular books? Books on character and how to get it.
Now, it's how to get rich quick.
We are becoming more like animals. You look at the primate studies and the only difference is we can talk and they have more hair.
What's obvious has been obvious for a very long time. The only disagreement is when.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Right, the disaster is coming. OMG I CAN'T BUY CELLPHONE CASES FOR $3 ANY MORE. KILL EVERYONE.
What is more likely is that you top 1% fat cats in the US earning more than 34k a year will have to come back to reality and live on $1,200 a year like the rest of humanity.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1--You-need-34k-income-global-elite--half-worlds-richest-live-U-S.html
Oh wait, you mean inequality between people in a single country? Easy fix, we declare the virtual republic of Rich-i-stan and put the top earners there but no one else. Poof - instant equality and problem solved.
A climatologist, likely with a political agenda, a math grad student, and a political science BA, put together a model that shows that if growth trends continue in a finite system, the system breaks. No shit sherlock! Except that such growth trends do NOT continue. Any increase in resource consumption results in an increase in price. Any increase in production results in a reduction of price. If the system gets to a point where consumption outpaces production then the price rises, and it can rise a lot! This results in people using less of the resource and finding alternatives.
Any such models that are built without the input of an economist should be automatically discarded as being total BS.
Peter
This is one of those scenarios in which it would be better to not have all of our eggs in the same basket. For instance, it might be possible to avoid a complete catastrophe if, in advance, we managed to set up a self-sustaining colony on the Moon or on Mars. However, unless we're very careful, that could easily be such an expensive endeavor that attempting to achieve it would only hasten the collapse of our own civilization. Ho-hum.
It is an interesting idea, to model sustainability, but the paper isn't particularly convincing in the way it models things. They start by admitting it's not clear why various societies have collapsed, then create a model which may or may not be related to reality, but matches their political viewpoints.
They chose only a few different variables to look at. If all you do is look at inequality and resource use, the answer you get is going to be in terms of inequality and resource use. This is similar to if you have a rocket flying through space carrying a flea; and the only variable you examine is the flea jumping, you are going to find a huge correlation between the jumps of the flea and the trajectory of the rocket. In other words, they might be right or they might not, but this way of studying it won't give you any good conclusions.
To understand my point, (if you've read the paper), consider if they had been Ayn Rand disciples instead of modern democrats. It would have been just as easy to create the model in terms 'producers' and 'leaches,' and deriving whatever conclusion you want from that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Equality is really only seen in hunter-gatherer tribes small enough not to require some sort of hierarchical governance or specialization in various crafts. What disrupts societies (wealth-wise) is actively inhibiting its members from receiving the compensation that their particular skill sets command. And one of the prime methods of interference is wealth redistribution.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just this week we have the example of Obama saying that people should cancel their phone service to pay for his healthcare scheme, but that's just a glaring example of a pervasive problem.
So not what he meant. If you like your phone service, you can keep your phone service.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Sooner or later we're getting one of the above, at some point economic growth will become at best neutral and the top scientists will spend their entire careers simply understanding the work of their predecessors. The question is whether our massive interconnectedness means we'll have more redundancy and be able to withstand inevitable setbacks, or if we'll just have more links in the chain that we don't know how to repair and be at risk of a fairly sudden and drastic collapse.
I stole this Sig
. If the system gets to a point where consumption outpaces production then the price rises, and it can rise a lot! This results in people using less of the resource and finding alternatives.
Ahh. The magic of the self-correcting markets. Why bother to manage or regulate anything? Nature will take care of the whole thing for us!
The problem is that the "alternatives" you mention invariably include mass starvation, which always leads to disease and the disintegration of functioning infrastructure and social norms. Then steep population decline.
This is what classifies as a collapse.
So you're not exactly disagreeing with the premise.
Toss in psychopaths leaping to the head of masses of unhappy people in order to "lead" them, (which always happens), and a catastrophic event or three, and... welcome to the next dark age.
We're well into the process right now. Might as well pull up a chair to watch and learn, because our society is so utterly blind and willfully programmed, any chance of mitigating or avoiding the scenario passed us by years ago.
The reason for all these surveillance and population control measures as sold under the bogus rubric of the "War on Terror" are so that the elites can survive the fallout. It is a bitter consolation to know that they won't. They never do.
Of course, they always think they're special and that *this* time, they'll be all warm and cozy in their bunkers.
The model is nice in that it seems to catch the trends for a agrarian or hunter-gather dependence on natural resources that can be replenished (animal and plant species). Probably a decent model for human history prior to the 1850s.
The problem is that the natural resources that we are consuming now are NOT renewable (fossil fuels, minerals, metals). Once they are gone, they are gone, and there will be no recovery. And there is no incentive to conserve as as these resources become more rare, they become more valuable. Who can afford to stockpile them? The elite, of course.
In the end we're all screwed, but the elite will be insulated from the consequences for a while and will be wondering why the commoners are raising such a ruckus at the gates with their torches and pitchforks.
Whoever survives this crash will be back living on an Earth with a carrying capacity limited by renewable resources (hint: think of world populations of (maybe) a few hundred million, not 7-10 billion).
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I think the model wrongly assumes that elites draw down essential resources faster than commoners. In pre-modern society, that appears to have been incorrect. In pre-modern civilizations, it was over-farming and the reduction in soil fertility which was subject to draw-down, and not "resources" more generally. (For example, there is reasonably good evidence that soil degradation contributed to the collapse of the western roman empire). Elites do not consume much more food than commoners. As a result, I'm not sure it would make any different how stratified society is. Take the chateaux of the Loire Valley as an example: they're extravagant, but they're not built out of materials (such as stone) which became exhausted anywhere or threatened civilization.
In pre-modern societies, elites subsisted off the surplus labor which was left over after commoners had provided for their own subsistence. According to best estimates, this "surplus" labor available for exploitation by elites was never more than 20% of the total commoner labor available. Most labor in pre-modern societies was used in simply providing enough food for everyone to survive. In ancient Egypt, more than 90% of the population spent all their working time devoted to agriculture or household work, and similar ratios existed in other civilizations. As a result, the total consumption of elites in pre-modern society was never a large fraction of the total production of society. Some elites may have had extremely extravagant lifestyles compared to commoners, but that is because such elites' numbers were extremely small, generally much less than 1% of the population.
Another important consideration here is the difference between reduction of population, and the collapse of some political order. Insofar as I can tell, soil degradation often leads to a gradual reduction in population over centuries until some political order suddenly cannot be sustained. Often, ancient civilizations were empires in which some center had a large army and long transportation networks. The empire dominated a group of subject peoples on the periphery, and extracted the products of their surplus labor beyond subsistence and transported those surplus products to the center. Usually, the subject peoples disliked being so dominated. It seems possible to me that soil degradation could lead to a reduction in the size of the surplus, and thus the size and power of the army of the empire, until the arrangement suddenly could not be maintained. Take the western roman empire as an example: soil degradation and population decline had been happening for centuries, until the army weakened and a barbarian tribe invaded and suddenly overran and destroyed the empire.
Of course, the main criticism of the paper is that it's wildly speculative. There is no data whatsoever in the paper. This is excusable because there is very little "data" in the modern sense left over from pre-modern civilizations. Pre-modern peoples were extremely good at telling stories and writing epics, but poor at keeping records and statistics of commoners' well-being. For this reason, and other reasons, the causes of the collapses of many civilizations (such as the meso-American civilizations) are not well understood, and the explanations are highly speculative and different from each other. Many researchers speculate that the American civilizations collapsed because of long-lasting mega-droughts, which obviously would not fit this model of resource draw-down.
Usually, when constructing a model, it's at least necessary to verify that the model agrees with past evidence. Even then, the model may not be predictive at all; however, constructing a model which agrees with past evidence is often a first step. Unfortunately, the model in this case is just wildly speculative. There are virtually no examples of egalitarian civilizations prior to the 18th century, and so no data on how egalitarian civilizations would have fared. There is no data on soil fertility, consumption by elites, resource draw-down, total populations of civilizations, etc, which this model refers to. Instead, the model is along the lines of "this seems plausible".
Some irony there somewhere.
Gently reply
Bring it on.
We can't put you in space, but we can study the fall of nations!
Of course, that novel also speculated that the deceased personality would still inhabit the body, despite the brain transplant too.
That depends on how much of the personality comes from the endocrine system.
When the patents expire, expect a candybar smartphone to be as trivially cheap and as trivially available as a simple 12 button corded handset once was.
I don't see how patents will ever expire on cell phones so long as carriers continue to mandate migration to new air interfaces. Analog and D-AMPS have already disappeared in favor of GSM, UMTS, and now LTE, and once LTE Advanced begins deployment, I expect carriers to sunset GSM as well.
Your analysis is nothing short of brilliant.
What if you needed a power drill, for a short time. So you went to your backyard, with a bucket and shovel and got some dirt. Then you went to your Mr. 3D Printer and emptied the dirt into its input material hopper. You then pressed a button that has an image of the power drill you need. Ya, it will only last a few times, but that's all you need it for.
but how to grow your own food? That's a big one if industrial civilization were to collapse. Food from comes from farms, not supermarkets. And you'd be surprised how many people don't know that.
mfwright@batnet.com
When one serious problem in FFWD occurs, the other 3 can fall fast.
Just because we are technologically adept and "powerful", does NOT mean there are not more powerful forces that just tip the boat enough to put the gunnel under.
Down the power system, have a 20-30 year drought or a major epidemic and suddenly "systems" fall apart.
Well that should make anarchists like Kevin O'Leary happy.
Twinstiq, game news
... does any of this have to do with NASA?
NASA job is not this. It is to get man and machine off this planet for exploration.
I quote this.
> but how to grow your own food?
People would move back to the country if cities become unsustainable. What method to produce food depends how far civilization collapsed. Steam powered farm tractors are pretty low tech, and abandoned cities would be an abundant supply of steel to make them out of.
I am always disappointed by the comments of otherwise intelligent people on slashdot in response to these articles, as this point was first brought up by the club of rome and more recently Jared Diamond - the response I see here makes it clear we will have a collapse - everyone is in denial, nobody wants to change a thing, everyone is going to use up non-renewable resources as fast as they can to get some perceived short term advantage over some other group - I want my car, I want my house in the middle of nowhere, I want to have as many children as I can - blah blah blah Exponential growth is impossible on a finite planet, space travel will not save us nor will any breakthrough technology - at best genetic engineering can buy us a bit of time - we need birth control, we need people to live in cities and share resources and we can't have a handful of people allocating a civilization's resources for their own self interest - and I will be cursed on /. for saying this.
I thought they are into space exploration...
....The article says we have 15 years before collapse.
Darn, that's right when I will be ready to retire. I will be too old to survive in the post-revolutionary environment, and all the money I saved up to retire on won't be worth anything.
Furthermore, there really isn't anything I can do about it. Nor you, for that matter. This collapse isn't the fault of any single person, trend, or policy. There are too many morally reprobate sociopaths with too much power for us to prevent this from happening.
I was just hoping I might have a little more time. :(
... will cause the collapse of civilisation, but then, it would be a 'hate crime' to tell the TRUTH, wouldn't it...
Our civilizatin wouldn't be the first to collapse, and disappear. Roman civilization rose and fell. Chinese same. Several civilizations in the Middle East. So, no, I wouldn't be surprised if our civilization would go to hell, and be replaced by another in a few centuries. And as every new civilization in history took civilization further than the previous one, the next guys will be wiser than us, richer, smarter, and better off. Until they go too.
no, I don't have a sig
What is NASA doing since they aren't going into space? Hire a bunch of wack jobs, get high, and make totally stupid statements.
NASA. Naked Ass Sucking Agency?
Using corn for fuel causes you to run out of tacos. Don't even start with rice or potatos. You will have WW3.
"Alright so the budget this year is somewhat bleak. Regardless of the fact we privatized spaceflight (contrary to our projected economic model) we have no budget to conduct any space missions. We need an excuse to perpetuate our funding people! "
"How about a worthless and biased economic study that has nothing to do with space and doesn't require Federal Economic experts, you know, like the Federal Reserve, or the Treasury? "
"Genius! Just make sure you somehow game the system to be the opposite of Civilization IV's governmental hiarchy so people don't get bored and fail to realize career government work is the farthest thing from Capitalism. I want absolute monarchy, anarchy, depotism, communism, and facsism to somehow be safer than Capitalism. "
Yep, and it was crap the last time. For those of us old enough: overpopulation, environmental crisis, the collapse of capitalist societies and others are just boring memes that we've heard before.
Predictions of Global Malthusian Collapse have been proven wrong repeatedly, but only because many intelligent and hardworking humans have labored to prevent it. We defer a certain amount of gratification now, to invest in technologies, infrastructure, and institutions; we use our foresight to plan and avoid inauspicious outcomes.
My fear is that at some point, society as a whole will come to take all these things for granted. We'll pat ourselves on the back and say, "Malthus was and always is wrong because, uhh -- reasons", and we'll stop investing in the future. Because hey, I really need more shinies right now, and my voters are going to the polls right now, and the boss wants better numbers right now. And that's when tomorrow gets Fucked.
Malthusianism is only wrong because we work hard to make it wrong.
However being resource rich doesn't matter much when all the manufacturing jobs are being done by people in other places.
The problem is one of the continued and rampant upward flow of monetary wealth and the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living - read: "everybody who is not moneyed should be employed in drudgery for drudgery's sake". One day those exploited workers who are still alive will down tools and give the fat lazy cunts the biggest finger the world has ever seen.
I look forward to that day.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
15 years from now is 2029. In 2043, we are supposed to encounter Ray Kurzweil's Singularity. Those dates are awfully close from a historical perspective. If we reach The Singularity, presumably we will become smart enough to surmount problems.
Boy, what a great theme for a SF novel. A great race. Will we reach collapse or singularity first? Photo finish.
The government should be studying civilization, but if this is where NASA decides to spend money, we need private businessmen funding any space related science. Maybe we can get the USDA to fund the next Mars mission.
Where do you think they got the local labor, and how much do you think they payed them. Yeah, Rome may have sent in the engineers to design stuff, but the holes still needed to get dug. And the locals probably didn't get a lot of choice about who had to dig them.
The victors write the history books. And they never ever admit they were murdering, raping, lying, conniving monsters.
No doubt study will generate more grant money, delay forced entry into a tough employment environment for grad students. We are all becoming France.
If you're wondering why there's no Mars or moon mission on the horizon, this is why.
Thank god for people like Julian Simon. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
This is s thought provoking paper featuring a theoretical model that pre-sages a breakage in industrialization. Like all such models, this should be looked at as theoretical. Theory is simply a good educated guess until tested. This theory will take a while to test empirically, because the period is so long. After all, we are still unsure of the Kondratieff long wave economic theory that is only 55 to 60 years long because the theory's period is longer than a generation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave). The article hits all the political hot buttons of our age: environmental sustainability, income in/equality, and population. Is this model really a theory, or a sales job for a particular political agenda?
The concern over resources is real, as the world population is exploding, and the amount of resoures per capita continues to rise. Which will arrive first: A collapse over resources, or the Singularity?
Won't somebody think of the children? Especially here, where its actually important?
or were they just spending year end money?
You can't make stratification argument at the time of lowest workforce participation. We have the highest historic rate of subsidized idleness. The idleness and the subsequent loss of skills and productivity is much more dangerous than the increased resources available to the top. We may reach a point of collapse, but it will be the bread and circus that does it -- not an overindulgent Versailles (as the study tries to claim).
"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level"
Translation:
You need to listen to us. We're smarter than you because we can build computer models that produce the exact result we expect from the limited sets of inputs we put into them. Although we don't really understand how the computers themselves work.
"and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
Translation:
Vote for people who will give us and people like us more power to become the very elite we are telling you cause the collapse of society to begin with!!
Nice trick.
Nice to have a NASA study to state the obvious, but anyone who pulls their head out of the corporate media propaganda septic tank long enough to take a look at the state of the world can see the fact that humanity and the planet can no longer afford or sustain the massive waste and excesses of industrial corporate capitalism or the blood sucking elitist gluttons and fascist totalitarian institutions who keep us entrenched in it.
See W. M. Flinders Petrie "The Revolutions of Civilisation" Harper & Brothers 1911
Amazing how we keep rediscovering the obvious
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Super-Rich_Can_Save_Us!"
http://onlythesuperrich.org/
"Just as Atlas Shrugged portrayed self-interested successful capitalists working to create a "Utopia of Greed" that is free from government, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! portrays an altruistic group of super-rich individuals working to "re-make government" and where "the rebellious rich take on the reigning rich."[4] The novel's protagonist is inspired by Warren Buffett. On August 14, 2011, Warren Buffett wrote an influential op-ed entitled, "Stop Coddling the Super-rich",[5] which argues that the super-rich should bear more responsibility and pay their "fair share" of taxes."
Daniel Quinn wrote about such cycles of collapse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Other ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Jane Jacobs suggested alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
On self-renewal: http://books.google.com/books/...
Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
To do before collapse (1999 proposal to NASA): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
AC wrote: " Thank god for people like Julian Simon. http://www.wired.com/wired/arc... "
See also: http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
Still, markets can fail due to unpriced externalities (like pollution or military costs of defending oil supply lines) or unaccounted-for systemic risks (like derivatives or programmed trading leading to market collapse). Example, from Greenspan:
"Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
So, there are limits to what unregulated markets alone can do.
The gift economy, the subsistence economy, and them democratically planned economy can all provide alternatives for times when the exchange economy fails.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Did they just remove the PDF from their servers ? Did anyone make a copy of it I could read ?