vimothy
yurp
There is a problem to consider though isn't there -- certainly one effect of having a birth rate of under 2.1 per woman is that there are less people every year to support the older generations.
Is this the end of the Reagan/Rove right?
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There is a problem to consider though isn't there -- certainly one effect of having a birth rate of under 2.1 per woman is that there are less people every year to support the older generations.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, of course people in less-developed countries have lots of kids partly as insurance for their old age, but it's one of those things that should become less of a problem as a country develops and standards of living improve. That is, if they improve - quite a corollary in the face of Mugabe/AIDS/Taleban/Nigerian oil gangsterism/huge shipments of Chinese guns ad nauseam.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Huge continent, of course, so not really useful to be as unspecific as that.
crackerjack
Well-known member
Oi! The end of the world thread is over here:
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=6370&page=25
This is the one where we talk about opinion polls n stuff.
They've been narrowing in the last few days (RCP average down from 8 to 5), but this doesn't seem to be reflected in the commentary,. all of which still takes an Obama victory as read. Is this because McCain is simply shoring up the bass and getting swamped where it matters?
According to CNN, 'toss-up' states are down to 6, with New Mexico and Virginia classed as 'leaners', enough to give Obama victory, assuming he doesn't lose any won by Kerry (which he almost certainly won't). He'll likely nab Colorado, probably Florida, maybe Missouri and even North carolina. Ohio will, I reckon, stay GOP, thanks to Joe the Plumber, who will vote 87,000 times.
anyway, Powell has gone for Obama as predicted. I've just read one usually optimistic Rep say it will help Obama "quite a bit".
Thoughts from the Americanos? Apparently Fox have already started on "yeah, we never liked him anyway". Good.
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=6370&page=25
This is the one where we talk about opinion polls n stuff.
They've been narrowing in the last few days (RCP average down from 8 to 5), but this doesn't seem to be reflected in the commentary,. all of which still takes an Obama victory as read. Is this because McCain is simply shoring up the bass and getting swamped where it matters?
According to CNN, 'toss-up' states are down to 6, with New Mexico and Virginia classed as 'leaners', enough to give Obama victory, assuming he doesn't lose any won by Kerry (which he almost certainly won't). He'll likely nab Colorado, probably Florida, maybe Missouri and even North carolina. Ohio will, I reckon, stay GOP, thanks to Joe the Plumber, who will vote 87,000 times.
anyway, Powell has gone for Obama as predicted. I've just read one usually optimistic Rep say it will help Obama "quite a bit".
Thoughts from the Americanos? Apparently Fox have already started on "yeah, we never liked him anyway". Good.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
When I say the illusion of private property, I'm talking more about land-ownership than the ownership of goods. The idea that an individual can purchase and therefore has sovereign rights over a piece of property seems to be a foundational myth of capitalism, which is simply defined as a system where the very means of production are owned privately by individuals.
Under capitalism, labor itself becomes a commodity. When capitalism fails, and that will happen when the system breaks down to the point where individuals can no longer continue to claim ownership over means of production, the hope is that we can build a system where labor is not a commodity, private land ownership is no longer possible, and everyone has an equal stake in the means of production general. I personally believe this would be a far more egalitarian political situation, where everyone really did have an equal chance of achieving individual goals. Capital will no longer be the fuel/lubrication that allows the entire machine to move.
Just look at the article Oliver linked to if you want to be reminded that the intellectually deserving and ambitious are rarely the ones who make it to the top under capitalism...
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Good point, but the problem is population growth need not be exponential in order to have exponentially negative effects on ecosystems...the population, even as it stands now, and even if it stagnates in number for the next 100 years, is simply too large to continue relying on fossil fuels and unrenewable resources for energy.
Incidentally I just saw something on TV that said the U.S. came in 28th place in terms of having low infant mortality rates. This is a couple of years after the average life expectancy for young people starting going down for the first time since the early/mid-20th century...
Mr. Tea said:
Agreed! Actually I think Gek and I got into this once (the idea that after industrialization there will be a new era) and I basically found myself saying that science (a new kind not funded by multi-national corporations) would lead the way in rebuilding civilization. This idea scares a lot of people, and even more fear science in the hands of government more than they fear science in the hands of corporations...
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Oi! The end of the world thread is over here:
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=6370&page=25
This is the one where we talk about opinion polls n stuff.
They've been narrowing in the last few days (RCP average down from 8 to 5), but this doesn't seem to be reflected in the commentary,. all of which still takes an Obama victory as read. Is this because McCain is simply shoring up the bass and getting swamped where it matters?
According to CNN, 'toss-up' states are down to 6, with New Mexico and Virginia classed as 'leaners', enough to give Obama victory, assuming he doesn't lose any won by Kerry (which he almost certainly won't). He'll likely nab Colorado, probably Florida, maybe Missouri and even North carolina. Ohio will, I reckon, stay GOP, thanks to Joe the Plumber, who will vote 87,000 times.
anyway, Powell has gone for Obama as predicted. I've just read one usually optimistic Rep say it will help Obama "quite a bit".
Thoughts from the Americanos? Apparently Fox have already started on "yeah, we never liked him anyway". Good.
Haha, well, we're talking about what's going to replace the Rove/Reagan right!
I'm so incredibly psyched to see Colin Powell speaking the truth like he did on Meet the Press this week, especially considering he's close personal friends with McCain!
Fox News is just, well, pathetic at the point. I turn it there during CNN or MSNBC commercials once in a while, and or course all they're reporting on is that young boy who was kidnapped by a Mexican cartel because his idiot grandfather stole millions of dollars worth of meth from them...either that or wildly inaccurate polls. No economic analysis.
vimothy
yurp
Er, what I mean is that the countries that haven't done that well, seem to be doing better. General trends have been good, or at least improving:
[+] After four decades of political and economic stagnation that kept most of their 800m-odd people in poverty and gloom, the continent’s 48 sub-Saharan countries have been growing for the past five years at a perky overall rate of 5% or so. If they maintain this pace or even bump it up a bit, Africa still has a chance of taking off. Now, with commodity prices likely to fall, world markets sure to shrivel and Western aid set to plateau or even dip, Africa, though more isolated from the global economy than other parts of the world, is bound to suffer from its ill breeze. But maybe not as badly....
IdleRich
IdleRich
OK, that's roughly the definition of capitalism that I was expecting. The reason I ask is that I can't see that the present crisis, credit crunch thing, whatever is going to come anywhere near to causing a shock that will mean that things as fundamental as that are going to be reevaluated.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
You're right, I don't think this crisis will get us there either. Thanks especially to the State's dutiful bailings out. What's most interesting to me about this latest crisis is the ideological tectonic shift that's probably unique to the U.S. Ideology is another fundamental support beam for capitalism, after all...
vimothy
yurp
Ceteris paribus, yes. Perhaps in the 'real' world, it's not quite that simple (growth could also come from, say, discovering an exploitable natural resource), but that's the basic trend. Think of how telecommunications gives rise to more efficient logistical supply chains for businesses. That's a productive efficiency derived from both organisational and technological innovation, basically, from making new useful stuff, whether that stuff is technology in the usual sense of phones and broadband and whatnot, or technology in the broader sense of new combinations of any inputs (staff, resources, etc) to produce an output.
I really like the Paul Romer (of New Growth Theory fame) article from the CEE on growth. It's probably a bit long, but fuck it:
I really like the Paul Romer (of New Growth Theory fame) article from the CEE on growth. It's probably a bit long, but fuck it:
Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that make them more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material (see natural resources).
Take one small example. In most coffee shops, you can now use the same size lid for small, medium, and large cups of coffee. That was not true as recently as 1995. That small change in the geometry of the cups means that a coffee shop can serve customers at lower cost. Store owners need to manage the inventory for only one type of lid. Employees can replenish supplies more quickly throughout the day. Customers can get their coffee just a bit faster. Although big discoveries such as the transistor, antibiotics, and the electric motor attract most of the attention, it takes millions of little discoveries like the new design for the cup and lid to double a nation’s average income.
Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.
In a branch of physical chemistry known as exploratory synthesis, chemists try mixing selected elements together at different temperatures and pressures to see what comes out. About a decade ago, one of the hundreds of compounds discovered this way—a mixture of copper, yttrium, barium, and oxygen—was found to be a superconductor at temperatures far higher than anyone had previously thought possible. This discovery may ultimately have far-reaching implications for the storage and transmission of electrical energy.
To get some sense of how much scope there is for more such discoveries, we can calculate as follows. The periodic table contains about a hundred different types of atoms, which means that the number of combinations made up of four different elements is about 100 × 99 × 98 × 97 = 94,000,000. A list of numbers like 6, 2, 1, 7 can represent the proportions for using the four elements in a recipe. To keep things simple, assume that the numbers in the list must lie between 1 and 10, that no fractions are allowed, and that the smallest number must always be 1. Then there are about 3,500 different sets of proportions for each choice of four elements, and 3,500 × 94,000,000 (or 330,000,000,000) different recipes in total. If laboratories around the world evaluated one thousand recipes each day, it would take nearly a million years to go through them all. (If you like these combinatorial calculations, try to figure out how many different coffee drinks it is possible to order at your local shop. Instead of moving around stacks of cup lids, baristas now spend their time tailoring drinks to individual palates.)
In fact, the previous calculation vastly underestimates the amount of exploration that remains to be done because mixtures can be made of more than four elements, fractional proportions can be selected, and a wide variety of pressures and temperatures can be used during mixing.
Even after correcting for these additional factors, this kind of calculation only begins to suggest the range of possibilities. Instead of just mixing elements together in a disorganized fashion, we can use chemical reactions to combine elements such as hydrogen and carbon into ordered structures like polymers or proteins. To see how far this kind of process can take us, imagine the ideal chemical refinery. It would convert abundant, renewable resources into a product that humans value. It would be smaller than a car, mobile so that it could search out its own inputs, capable of maintaining the temperature necessary for its reactions within narrow bounds, and able to automatically heal most system failures. It would build replicas of itself for use after it wears out, and it would do all of this with little human supervision. All we would have to do is get it to stay still periodically so that we could hook up some pipes and drain off the final product.
This refinery already exists. It is the milk cow. And if nature can produce this structured collection of hydrogen, carbon, and miscellaneous other atoms by meandering along one particular evolutionary path of trial and error (albeit one that took hundreds of millions of years), there must be an unimaginably large number of valuable structures and recipes for combining atoms that we have yet to discover.
Take one small example. In most coffee shops, you can now use the same size lid for small, medium, and large cups of coffee. That was not true as recently as 1995. That small change in the geometry of the cups means that a coffee shop can serve customers at lower cost. Store owners need to manage the inventory for only one type of lid. Employees can replenish supplies more quickly throughout the day. Customers can get their coffee just a bit faster. Although big discoveries such as the transistor, antibiotics, and the electric motor attract most of the attention, it takes millions of little discoveries like the new design for the cup and lid to double a nation’s average income.
Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.
In a branch of physical chemistry known as exploratory synthesis, chemists try mixing selected elements together at different temperatures and pressures to see what comes out. About a decade ago, one of the hundreds of compounds discovered this way—a mixture of copper, yttrium, barium, and oxygen—was found to be a superconductor at temperatures far higher than anyone had previously thought possible. This discovery may ultimately have far-reaching implications for the storage and transmission of electrical energy.
To get some sense of how much scope there is for more such discoveries, we can calculate as follows. The periodic table contains about a hundred different types of atoms, which means that the number of combinations made up of four different elements is about 100 × 99 × 98 × 97 = 94,000,000. A list of numbers like 6, 2, 1, 7 can represent the proportions for using the four elements in a recipe. To keep things simple, assume that the numbers in the list must lie between 1 and 10, that no fractions are allowed, and that the smallest number must always be 1. Then there are about 3,500 different sets of proportions for each choice of four elements, and 3,500 × 94,000,000 (or 330,000,000,000) different recipes in total. If laboratories around the world evaluated one thousand recipes each day, it would take nearly a million years to go through them all. (If you like these combinatorial calculations, try to figure out how many different coffee drinks it is possible to order at your local shop. Instead of moving around stacks of cup lids, baristas now spend their time tailoring drinks to individual palates.)
In fact, the previous calculation vastly underestimates the amount of exploration that remains to be done because mixtures can be made of more than four elements, fractional proportions can be selected, and a wide variety of pressures and temperatures can be used during mixing.
Even after correcting for these additional factors, this kind of calculation only begins to suggest the range of possibilities. Instead of just mixing elements together in a disorganized fashion, we can use chemical reactions to combine elements such as hydrogen and carbon into ordered structures like polymers or proteins. To see how far this kind of process can take us, imagine the ideal chemical refinery. It would convert abundant, renewable resources into a product that humans value. It would be smaller than a car, mobile so that it could search out its own inputs, capable of maintaining the temperature necessary for its reactions within narrow bounds, and able to automatically heal most system failures. It would build replicas of itself for use after it wears out, and it would do all of this with little human supervision. All we would have to do is get it to stay still periodically so that we could hook up some pipes and drain off the final product.
This refinery already exists. It is the milk cow. And if nature can produce this structured collection of hydrogen, carbon, and miscellaneous other atoms by meandering along one particular evolutionary path of trial and error (albeit one that took hundreds of millions of years), there must be an unimaginably large number of valuable structures and recipes for combining atoms that we have yet to discover.
IdleRich
IdleRich
But growth also measures new useless stuff as well doesn't it? Obviously there are the usual caveats regarding how you define useful versus useless but doesn't the need for growth lead to creating new needs that we didn't have before? In the situation where all that is created is stuff to satisfy hitherto undreamt of needs is that growth necessary or even worthwhile?
(I'll read the article when I get a chance).
vimothy
yurp
With the phrase "useful stuff" I'm referring to the higher order goods that make the "useless stuff" that everyone consumes, that is: growth is about being more productive (by definition); we become more productive by getting better at making stuff; we get better at making stuff by using what we've got in more efficient ways -- and this includes developing (capital) technology, buying (capital) technology, devloping human capital (health, education, etc). Ultimately, everyone has the same inputs (people and land), though how they combine the two and the value that they can extract from that combination varies hugely.
vimothy
yurp
'Growth' is about being more producitve. Whether what is produced is 'useless' or not is something else. We can certainly measure, for instance, stuff like household consumption, capital investment, whether housing or stocks are over-bought/consumed, etc. But I'm not sure that I'm that bothered with deciding whether individual goods are useless or useful, or even whether the general trend is to 'useless' goods. I suppose I'm suspicious of that line of thought...
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
I knew you would say that, but why exactly?
