Comments on: Radical Retrenchment

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By: Jim - USA

Jim - USA — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:21:35 +0000

America’s biggest single problem is gross misallocation of resources. The biggest wasters are novelty markets, endless division of product masquerading as variety, and low-grade entertainment.

Go through any shopping mall, or any store for that matter, and look at the insane varieties of novelties and junk consumer products. Within thousands of consumer categories, there are millions of stupid variants whose features and differences have no real value, hence they squander resources and energy. Do I dare bring up the doubly insane varieties of stuff geared exclusively to young women??? How many pairs of shoes do they need??? What’s with all the accessories??? Don’t get me started on the insanely-complicated cars we drive! Because of robotic assembly lines, we actually have very few distinguishable platforms yet, they are multiplied out a thousand different ways with little more than badge engineering to ostensibly distinguish them. All waste and malfeasance!

The answer is to consolidate consumer products. Make three types of cars and three types of pickups for the consumer market. Big, medium, and small. Six auto companies in each major industrialized nation can build only one of the above platforms. Build them solid and easy to maintain. The Blair Fashion catalog is all any sane woman needs. There’s enough jewelry already in existence to fill the needs of a sane woman for decades! It’s stupid to continue to waste unbelievable amounts of energy to dig the gold and platinum out of the ground to be converted into jewelry. It’s time to shut down the diamond cartels that have caused incalculable evil in Africa. Establish jewelry recycling and resale! Women, you only need 3 or 4 pairs of shoes!!!
Men only need work clothes and dress clothes and we can get by on that. We can all do very well without 90% of the variety and novelty. Think of the trillions in real wealth that could be created and infrastructure restored from all the lost energy and resources wasted on novelty, fads, low-grade entertainment, and consumer junk.

Bring some sanity back and we’ll have wealth, energy, and financial health coming out our ears! All of the energy and resources wasted on shopping mall crap and onerous government regulations could have been used to build a huge moon colony and sent us to Mars long ago!

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[...] I do not mean to denegrate the good work done by the folks in the departments named above. But I believe that a powerful and unified department with a single mission is what’s called for if we ever hope to make the kind of rapid, radical change necessary to address the future challenges we face. [...]

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By: Dan Staley

Dan Staley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:56:12 +0000

Most UNEP-WHO programs aim at modernizing rural third-world ag to reduce the birthrate, as the birthrates are driven by two things: culture and labor. Culturally, the kids take care of the parents but there is a child death rate so you need to buffer against that. Laborally, lack of mechanization means manual labor. As in most places in the third world, rural farmers are peasants and the opportunities are few, so the kids tend to migrate to the cities.

By: joshuadf

joshuadf — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:03:22 +0000

Spencer, that is an excellent question. I’m not sure where I first came across that assertion–perhaps as far back as undergrad (which I can’t believe is over 10 years ago for me now). I may be off base since it’s really a question for a demographer with some hard data to back it up. However, I do think it is compatible with the urbanization trend–more people are born in rural areas and then most move to cities as they realize the opportunities are very limited on the family farm or village. I guess this is a question of fertility growth vs census growth.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:08:32 +0000

Josh,
I’m curious where you heard about farmers in developing countries having children for labor purposes?

I finished M. Davis’s Planet of Slums. His research stated that most population growth is happening in cities.

By: joshuadf

joshuadf — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:01:57 +0000

spencer, that is exactly true, just look at a population pyramid for almost any developing country: very heavy on youth. I want to be clear this is not any sort of government policy, it’s instinct on the part of subsistence farmers. As “plenty of hands” transforms into “too many mouths”, however, you see massive slums surrounding cities (in the 19th Century, you saw lot of immigration to America from similar transformations).

I agree 100% about social services, but I want to see it as part of economic justice. One of the main goals of Jubilee 2000 and successors is to free up debt service money for education and other social services, not to mention the AIDS catastrophe. There are sadly many many educated Africans dying daily.