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Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


Image

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/12/world-population-goes-up-at-most-500-by-2150-but-can-already-feed-those-people.html

Eat well!

Last edited by spud100, 12/18/2018, 4:38 pm
12/16/2018, 8:57 pm Link to this post PM spud100 Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


Given that there are sufficient calories in the food we throw away to end world hunger, of course we can produce enough food to feed everyone. That some go without has to do with market efficiency’s drive to maintain artificial scarcity in the interests of profit, not because of lack of technical efficiency.

It will be interesting to see what market efficiency does to perpetuate the have-nots once we have access to the enormous material resources of the solar system and automated manufacturing techniques far more flexible, dexterous and smart than what is currently possible.
12/17/2018, 2:02 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


Market efficiency producing poverty - producing the "have nots?"

No - mean, or misguided idealism from Gov, or simply incompetent Gov policies do that.

Much more widely and deeply in the poorest countries, where the soil is richest for the demagogue preaching dreamy equality of wealth.

Thus, as the whole world gets richer, even though the tippety top richest will be amazingly more rich, ever more of the poor than before will be noticeably less poor.

Govs will experiment. In the Western Hemisphere, horribly cruel experiments were partly designed to "make the level of wealth more equal" worked like a charm. In Cuba and Venezuela, until they became terrible basket cases, they met the goals of the "dream state" heading toward happy equality.

More and more people in both countries who had any wealth lost most of it, and some of the poorest got some more scraps. A very messy, cruelly worse result - but more equal!

Market efficiency improvements and competition being allowed in China and India have made the big overall world improvements in rising the level of most of the worlds poorest.

Again - that was by moving away from forcing equality, and allowing market competition and resulting efficiency to emerge.

12/17/2018, 6:23 am Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


Governments and markets go together, so conveniently attributing all success to ‘the market’ while blaming all failures on ‘government’ is as ideological and unhelpful as socialists doing what is basically the same thing only with the blame/ attribution going the other way.

You don’t need to bring up Venezuela every time I talk about the limited ability and willingness of markets to eradicate have-nots. I am well aware of communist failures, thanks.

12/18/2018, 8:29 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
spud100 Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?




In his book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich stated, that the UK would be uninhabitable by the year 2000, Ex. Was he correct?? I pegged 1976, as evinced, by this video as the point of no return for the UK?

12/18/2018, 4:36 pm Link to this post PM spud100 Blog
 
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


Clearly he was not correct.

All these doomsayer’s predictions contain much the same flaw, for they all predict that “If things continue to develop as they have been developing, we can extrapolate out into the future and see disaster looming”.

The key words are ‘if things continue..as they have been”. Thanks to technological and scientific advance, things do not continue as they are, things change. To be fair to market competition it plays a major role in bringing about that change. Thanks to market competition and technological evolution we do not have fixed resources but an ever-changing pool of resources from which to invent new products and try new ideas. We will always have problems to solve but we will also have the hope that we find practical solutions in time. Ehrlich bet we would not, and his bet was wrong.

Having said that, while market competition is by no means bad it has been shown to have some pretty big flaws. That’s the thing with subjective statements like ‘markets are good’. They only make sense when compared to something else. Compared to Venezuela they are certainly good. If the resource-based economy turns out like Peter Joseph thinks it will, then compared to that markets will seem bad.
12/19/2018, 1:30 pm Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
spud100 Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


For me, it's not the Market's but the individual Marketers that are bad. They do form a borg-collective, that is indeed selfish and conspires with one another to screw everyone else over.
12/19/2018, 7:03 pm Link to this post PM spud100 Blog
 
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Yes but can we identify features of market competition that encourage this dubious side of human nature? I believe we can.

For a start, market competition is based on two mutually incompatible assumptions, which are a) resources are scarce and B) growth is infinite. They cannot both be true at the same time. In the past our technical capabilities were so limited it was not possible to gain sufficient access of available material resources to meet genuine needs so markets could operate as if resources were inexhaustible and scarcity was actual. But as we became more capable of accessing resources it became increasingly feasible to meet genuine needs. This should have resulted in a slowdown in growth as people reduced their consumption (satisfied, as they were, with what they already had). But the market had to maintain scarcity and infinite wants so it generated false needs through psychological manipulation, a ‘design to fail’ and throwaway culture, an increase in bullshit jobs (some 40 percent of jobs are pointless according to some surveys) and the decoupling of money from any productive purpose, such that a mere 0.8 percent of the money the UK bank printed for quantitative easing went to the real economy. In short modern markets generate unbelievable amounts of wasted time and resources because if we were really being economical we could easily meet our needs and the scarcity that markets depend upon would be revealed to be an illusion.

Secondly, market competition is based on gaining maximum possible returns for minimum possible investment, via whatever method you can get away with. This encourages exploitation of human weaknesses, the resource that cheats and fraudsters depend on. After all, if you can successfully pull of a fraud you profit from almost zero investment (some resources will be used in executing the fraud, but nowhere near as many as would be used in the r+d of an actual product).

Now, in Ayn Rand’s novels fraudsters never get away with it because in her fictional worlds all folk who act shifty look shifty, with mean eyes and ugly bodies, while all entrepreneurs look trustworthy, with clear, bright eyes, square jaws and fine, strong bodies. So you just have to look at someone to know if he or she is a cheat.

In the real world, a fraudster can look as handsome, speak as genuinely and appear to have all the earned trappings of success as any genuine businessman. As frauds evolve to be increasingly sophisticated and subtle it becomes increasingly infeasible for your average person to detect these cheats, and this makes it necessary for there to be professional regulatory bodies that monitor market activity on our behalf. Invariably, as governments are always part of a society engaged in market activity, it falls to this Leviathan to play a major role in refereeing competitive behaviour.

But, market competition is driven to commodify everything and so regulation becomes just another potential profit-making opportunity, and we have lobbyists spending big money in order to game the regulations in the favour of the businesses they represent, and people in government all too ready to accept bribes (they grow up in the same ‘grab as much as you can by whatever method you can get away with’ environments, after all).

Free markets therefore tend to end up as a devil’s alliance between big business and government.


12/20/2018, 5:19 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
spud100 Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


This is an old system in the USA Ex. Here is a cartoon from 1889, (by Thomas Keppler) giving us an idea on human nature, the USA, and what we are up against, in the real world. :-|
Image

On BS jobs, this is one reason I am such an idiot for (if doable) space mining. Thus, the money provided, would be like a fund or an annuity for the entire species. Your job as a human, would be to use the money to purchase goods and services, with, perhaps, doing half-week jobs for petty cash-just to show you are in? Not sure, just an idea there. Later on, AI will want their cut of the deal, when they are smart enough.

12/20/2018, 12:51 pm Link to this post PM spud100 Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Re: Paul Ehrlich must be having a bad Marx day if true?


Markets are not ethical or unethical.

They are simply, and only, a way for peeps to do biz.

Some peeps will lie and cheat. Others will never do so. Ethics vary tremendously.

Thus a great value, that you only need limited gov to provide, to clarify terms and secure an agreed copy of a particular deal.

If some scumbag sells a person in a current, today, Libyan open air slave market- thats a market deal. This Nigerian Woman discussing the current problem of the sale of Nigerian slaves in Libya, from a year ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOPU_7YLe-c

The young man who compares the buying and selling of he and his fellow Gambians as like the buying and selling of goats...

If greenpeace saves some whales and whatever else, over a year, when buying commercials and paying accountants - those and each slave trade are all market transactions.

The market itself is not the good or bad. It is a term for any dealing.

The market that "raises" so many out of desperation to less desperation is very wonderful - inasmuch as it was central to that salvation. Within it, bad actors will do bad, and some will accidentally help some people, and some will strive always to do good.

Some wonderful folks are near-saints. Yet - do we not know that "the road to hell" itself can truly, in some cases, be "paved" with such good intentions? Surely Ex President Obama did not intend that Libya have slave markets!

Devotion to ideals that sing to our souls and that we become fixated with - understandable, all ye fellow Catholics, ye descendants of our those who birthed our beginning, ye Jews, and also all ye Marxists. Faith can be such a rewarding feeling!

When ya got it, sometimes nobody can swerve ya, even unto death.
12/21/2018, 11:32 am Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 


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