Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 55. (Read 288405 times)

The market (to be more specific, a human market actor) can, and will, provide a solution, if you let it.

Sigh...
Do try and read it this time?

They don't. Remember the slime mold?

The thing is, a lot of the properties that you consider economical are in fact based on general non-voluntary interactions and have nothing to do with economics unless a human takes interest.

The market is the sum of all voluntary human interactions.

Every decision is an economic one (even involuntary ones).

These are two different concepts, but it's important that you understand them both.

Perhaps it will help you understand if you mentally replace every instance of the word "profit" with "benefit."

In what way do genes have an idea about what is a better choice and how does that affect their development?

In what way do genes have an idea about what is a better choice and how does that affect their development? How does that cover the 'voluntary' part?

Since you now claim absolutely every is somehow economic i will not even try to sift through the rest of your post.
It's silly.

Voluntary implies a someone that can contemplate the choice.
Not all processes are voluntary, not even all human social interaction-like processes.

And the genetics are themselves acting in an economic fashion, selecting the outcome which is most beneficial. (hopefully - if it doesn't, the genes don't get passed on)

If you do not seek to better your situation, you die of starvation, or dehydration, wallowing in your wastes.

I do not live for profit. I profit in order that I may continue life. Remember that not all profit is money. Some is a full stomach, or a joyous heart. Some is an empty bladder, or a satiated sex drive.

Remember, not all profit is money.

Every choice you make is an economic decision. Chicken or beef. The Blonde or the Brunette. Walking or taking the bus. You are choosing the alternative that (you think) will give you the best outcome.

You mean those decisions which your genes (themselves the product of millions of years of economic decisions) make for you?

I'm gonna be a bit provocative here, but here I go:

Why do you care so much about humanity surviving in the long run??  You will probably be dead anyway.

For instance, there is a serious hypothesis that decline of fertility might worsen in coming centuries so that humanity might vanish "peacefully".  Is that really a bad thing?  Nothing is supposed to be eternal.

Complete nonsense (like the rest that depends on it being true).
There are many many non-economy driven choices a human makes.
Economy may consider these choices, but the maker of the choice does not need to intend it to be economical.

There are, for instance, many human behaviours driven by instinct and hormones.

Then we have social behaviour, of which economy is only a part.

We have drugs, we have environment.

Then we have emotion and reason and ideology etc.

All these are drives for human behaviour so what you say is nonsense.
Not every decision is an economic one.
Maybe i choose my fruit largely at random, maybe i just don't care.

The market could include the outcome of my choice, but the market does not dictate my choices. Not by a long shot. There is an influence, for sure. But there are many influences. Saying the market is all there is is a gross oversimplification.

I don't know how much you understand about average people but an average human being doesnt choose a life partner on basis of future return.

It's mostly a genetically driven biological process to ensure the existance of a population of genes. Thinking it roots in economics is silly.

Thinking in terms of profit is just a stupid bug that made us top predator. But it isn't anything special and it certainly is not the only way to live or think.

If for you profit is all you live for then i can tell you that you cannot generalize that to the world population.

Yeah, i've read through that some time ago but its pretty weak.
It points to some geographically fortunate regions and says "Hey look everyone, that's how you should do it!" ..
I wonder when he'll bring the news to the eskimos that they need to make a local fruit market, just like in Italy.. 

Sure, there is already a price to pay, but it is in no way as dramatic as it could be so it still makes a lot of sense to start changing.

Easing the Transition to an Alternative Economy

If we want to replace the present centralized economy of waste production and planned obsolescence, it’s an inescapable fact that a great deal of excess manufacturing capacity cannot be saved.  In my opinion it’s a  mistake to try to prop it up through expedients like the Detroit bailout.

Corporate capitalism has been plagued from its late-19th century beginnings with chronic crises of over-accumulation and overproduction, which would probably have destroyed it in the Great Depression (despite the New Deal) had WWII not postponed the crisis for a generation by helpfully blowing up most of the plant and equipment in the world outside the U.S. and creating a permanent war economy for absorbing surplus output.  But Europe and Japan rebuilt their industrial capital by 1970, and since then the chronic crises have been back with a vengeance. Before the current downturn, America’s overbuilt industry couldn’t dispose of its full  output running at capacity, even with everybody tapping into home equity and maxing out their credit cards to replace everything they owned every five years. And we’ll never see those levels again. So there’s no  escaping the fact that much of our plant and equipment, in a few years, will be rust.

The goal should be a shift from the present system of over-accumulated, centralized, oligopoly industry, and its business model of planned obsolescence and “push” distribution, to a decentralized economy of small-scale manufacturing for local markets.  This means, among other things, a switch from capital-intensive production methods based on product-specific machinery, to production with small-scale, general purpose machinery.  It means, in place of the old Sloanist production model, something like the present-day economy of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region:  networked small manufacturers producing for the local market, with a high degree of cooperative ownership.  Such an economy, based on a “pull” distribution model with production geared to demand on a just-in-time basis, will be insulated from the boom-bust cycles of the old national “push” economies. And we need a new model of user-friendly, modular product design aimed at cheap and easy repairability and recycling.

Your main focus, in my opinion, should be to ease the transition by eliminating present policies (market-distorting subsidies, privileges, and cartelizing regulations) that impede it and protect the old economy from the new one.

This means, for one thing, eliminating differential tax exemptions that favor firms engaged in centralized, large-scale, capital-intensive production:  e.g., the depreciation allowance, the R&D credit, the deductability of interest on corporate debt, and the exemption of stock transactions involved in mergers and acquisitions from capital gains tax).  Then lower the corporate income tax enough to be revenue-neutral.

It means, especially, eliminating the biggest subsidy to economic centralization, and to artificially large market area and firm size - i.e., subsidies to long-distance transportation.  The Interstate should be funded entirely by weight-based user fees on trucking, which causes virtually all of the roadbed damage.  All subsidies to new airports or to expanding old ones should be eliminated, including all federal guarantees of local bond issues.

Perhaps most important of all, it requires radically scaling back the present strong “intellectual property” regime.  IP (through patent pooling and exchange, monopolies on current production technologies, etc.) is probably the single most powerful cartelizing force, which enables each industry to be concentrated in the hands of a few players.  It impedes the transfer of skills and new technology from the old manufacturing dinosaurs  to the kinds of small, local producers we need.  It also serves as a powerful bulwark to planned obsolescence, imposing legal restrictions on the manufacture of cheap generic replacement parts.

Scaling back IP law (a good start would be repealing the DMCA, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the Uruguay Round’s TRIPS accord) would eliminate the barriers to the diffusion of skill and technology that currently prop up the old corporate dinosaurs of the software and entertainment industries, and facilitate their replacement by networked production on an open source model.  Please cut loose the MPAA, RIAA, and Bill Gates, and do so yesterday!

Finally, we need to eliminate all subsidies to large-scale agribusiness.  The result will be a flourishing sector of community-supported agriculture, replacing the old agribusiness dinosaurs as fast as new ground can be cultivated.

So kissing my girlfriend is part of the economic market?
And saying hello to the neighbour too?

The humans are participants in the market, but saying that they ARE the market is a redefinition of the word human.

For now we are getting the hang of balancing biological systems in relation to sustainability but again not thanks to the market but to the researchers who gathered the information about how we interact with our environment.
Energy is still a problem and the market itself cannot provide a solution. It can, however, make efficient use of what we have.

That's where you're wrong.

The market is the sum total of the voluntary interactions of the people. Nothing more, nothing less. The market is humans, and humans are the market.

The reason we overfished is because nobody owned the oceans. They weren't anybody's fish, so nobody felt responsible to make sure there were always fish to catch.

You know where the largest breeding heard of Scimitar-horned Oryx are? Not in Africa. On the plains held in "common," they've all been killed. The largest extant breeding herd is in Texas. On a private hunting reserve.

The market is a system created and used by humans as a way of exchange.

The market is a system created and used by humans as a way of exchange.
It has no morality of its own. By itself it doesn't care about rich or poor or sick or old.
So if this system moves in a way we don't like and we want it to act more morally then we need to make the changes ourselfs and cannot simply wait untill the need is so big that the market must follow.
We need to be proactive if we want to fix it without taking heavy damage.

What do you think the market is? It is humans.

No, because our knee-jerk reaction is to just move on to consume other stuff in the same way we did with the old stuff.
The whole market works this way.
It is why we have fished too much, simply because there was a way too big demand.
It was only after we created international agreements to limit fishing that it became more sustainable.
The market would have hunted for every single fish in the oceans simply because there is a large enough demand for food.
As i said, the only way to change the market is to change the participants.