Letters to the Editor
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Service economies have no real sustainability.
The food problem isn't so much a matter of quantity as quality. When millions of rural Chinese move into cities, their diets change, and they consumer more calories. One prediction states that 2/3's of the worlds people will live in cities by the end of the century.
The solution is two fold. Stop the urbanization of the worlds population, which is also the leading catalyst for terrorism. Terrorism is a city problem.
City dwellers effectively jump start the collective metabolism of society. Thoreau mentions this in Walden. It's not a matter of having more to eat, its having meat instead of grain and vegetables. The reason people are moving into the world's cities is almost baffling. In the last century cities were near the centers of industrialization. The internet has given people the choice to work and live just about anywhere they choose.
Perhaps the service economy requires us all to live on top of one another, but that is good reason to examine this economic model and make changes.
Since a service economy cannot produce growth, it has no real sustainability.
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??? Wasn't Malthus wrong?
But Malthus was wrong . . . right?
I mean, he said that scarcity of food would curb population. Experience since the 1800's teaches the opposite. Hungry nations grow faster than well-fed ones. In fact, in the best-fed nations, the birth rate is in danger of dropping below the replacement rate.
Someone please tell me if I'm missing something here.
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@aveutter
I agree we should see more telecommuting, but adoption of it is painfully slow. It is my distinct hope that the changing economic issues will modify people's attitudes.
Telecommuting is also efficient from any number of grounds. It uses less space (as less office space is needed), expands the recruiting sphere, and I find it decreases other expenses (such as insurance for the company).
However it's hard to snap companies out of their own mentality.
Even my current company, which allows some telecommuting and has some virtualized offices, doesn't really seem to be ready to make the leap. I'm working on encouraging them however, both from a green standpoint, but also a money standpoint, and a safety standpoint - far easier to weather a natural disaster without one point of failure.
I think where I live is a good example - a smaller, nice-sized town, just a 45 minute train commute to a major urban area (where my office is), with telecommuting as an option. I can get the best of all worlds - and be more efficient.
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Every so Often...
Old Malthus is brought out and dusted off for a little TEOTWAWKI fun. He was wrong 200 years ago and he's wrong now.
Hate to break it to the fear-mongers out there but we are a very long ways away from running out of food productive capacity as a planet. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations...
"...remarkable progress has been made over the last three decades towards feeding the world. While global population increased by over 70 percent, per capita food consumption is almost 20 percent higher. [Whoa! I bet Malthus never saw that comin!!!] In developing countries, despite a near DOUBLING in population, the proportion of the population living in a chronic state of undernourishment was cut in HALF, falling to 18 percent in 1995/97."
Hmmm...sounds pretty bleak, eh? Further, consider that food production took up a third of the American workforce a century ago, today only about 3 percent of us are actively engaged in growing food, raising livestock, etc. How can we explain this when our population has exploded? Well, better technologies, advances in food production techniques, and so on, are the likely candidates.
The bottom line is that we can support many more people on this planet. The problem is not food production and planetary resources (which will be vast in the future) the problem is distribution and allocation.
Let's not worry that our tomato has a salmon gene in it or whatever. Let's worry about finding better ways to get that tomato the the 500 million people in this world going hungry for no good reason.
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what makes you think anything is being 'sustained'
Malthus said generally speaking in any closed system that the population would outstrip the capacity of that population to feed itself. Which is more or less the same thing Marx said about diminishing returns. Neither of them is entirely right or wrong. Why? Because there are big pieces of the world which NEVER had the ability to feed themselves or, like in the massively populous countries like Egypt, lost the ability to feed themselves decades ago.
But what does this mean? It means Egypt and all the Egypts do the best they can to buy what food they need. Sometimes it works, like in Egypt, sometimes it does not, like in Zimbabwe or North Korea. But the 'production problem' as it were is really an allocation problem born of politics. In fact in much of Africa e.g Sudan, Somlia, Uganda, Congo, food is a weapon of war.
If you look at it rationally it's actually the countries that have no where reached their absolute carrying capacity that do the absolutely worst job feeding their own people. The countries that already outstripped their ability to feed themselves have for the most part attempted to figure out how to overcome that problem.
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Thai Solution to the Rice Crisis--Eat Less
(BangkokPost.com) - Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej has asked Thais to
consume less rice for the benefit of Thai farmers at a time of rising rice
prices.
Speaking during his weekly programme aired on television and broadcast on
the radio, the premier described the rice situation as something that will
go according to supply and demand, but said farmers could sell their rice
stocks at more than double the usual price to importers and encouraged
Thais to make a sacrifice by eating less rice.
According to Mr Samak, the government is currently negotiating with
neighbouring countries to import cheap fertiliser to help cut the cost of
production for paddy farmers. He also vowed to crack down on those
responsible for producing counterfeit fertiliser.
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termites
What's on the BusinessWeek bofo's agenda anyway? Are we aiming to infest the planet with people like flies on a turd pile? What's the advantage of that, exactly? Capitalists like an unending supply of cheap labor to hold up the bottom of their pyramid schemes, that's all.
So knowledge will increase. I hope so. Great. I'd still like to see the world's population take a big nosedive. Then we'll be smarter and have less competition for limited resources.
And what about the world's other species? Are they getting smarter too? So smart that they don't need native habitats like rain forests to survive? The great forests of the world are all largely demolished, never to return again while humans rule the world.
The whole "we'll breed ourselves out of our problems" position is pure horse shit. We've been trying that approach for some time now. Seems to me we've created a pretty big mess already. Yes, we've done some good things too, but no one has ever established that that happened because of our sheer numbers. The problems we've created, however, certainly are because of our numbers. The Malthusian skeptics have a lot of explaining to do before they deserve any more attention than any other shit shoveling salesman.