David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the stated
intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3% PA IIRC. I
think yours does too.

oh, i know, it's an attempt to moderate the so called
business cycle because there isn't a sufficient amount
of a safety net for people. the larger problem is that
the safety net is really people wishing that they didn't
have any responsibility for taking care of themselves.
which to me is a wider sign of how rotten the current
system is, but that's a whole different topic.

as you have seen over a lifetime that even such
attempts at moderating the business cycle are largely
driven by entrenched interests in keeping the status-
quo. when there are large events that gets thrown
out the window (wars, natural catastrophes). so it
is largely an artificial mechanism that breaks given
the right lever.


Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is 'bad'.
They have accepted that the people want higher standards of living (or at
least as high as they have now) and that living standards are inextricably
linked to growth. There are plenty of examples to support this where very
fast growth or economic shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider
population.

surely, however, there's also a fair bit of evidence
that efforts to limit the destruction only makes it
last longer. so instead of taking the hit up front
and getting on with things after shaking out the weak
businesses we drag all these weak business along.
eventually they do go under.


Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion across
the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased population and
found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of course technology
fuelled this expansion by enabling faster extraction, transport and
utilisation of resources.

it will change as values change. values will
change as resources become more limited. that's
the nature of the beast. prices rise as supply
becomes limited. people either produce their
own (food, water, etc.) or conserve or find other
sources. what drives the whole system is the
many individual choices made, how they add up.
when we start bumping up against hard limits
like fresh water and food supply then people
will start valuing water conservation and not
wasting so much food. this type of gradual shift
is already happening and will continue to happen.


Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require materials. Thus
as it currently works the system must continue to extract fuel, metals,
fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever increasing rate. Many of these
resources are limited and will be consumed sooner or later. Thus, the
present system embodies the seeds of its own destruction.

the system also has seeds of its own transformation.
we are the determiners of value, not the system, the
system works because of the choices that people make.
when prices rise then choices get made differently.


The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where maintaining a
standard of living does not require constant growth, ie the two are
decoupled. So far nobody has done it.

the profit requirement is only limited to
being able to cover overhead of running any
business. the more efficient a business is
the more likely it keeps going. the smarter
any extractive business is, means it knows
it has to shift into renewables and recycling
or becoming a service provider. many companies
have research arms geared towards finding
better ways of doing things and finding other
uses for waste materials.


What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that climate
change isn't real or that science and technology will save us. The fact
that the core system was developed and succeeded in an environment that no
longer exists, and can only continue to succeed when those conditions exist
is widely ignored.

it comes down to energy and not much else.
all resources consumed can be recycled given
enough energy. the only tax is entropy.

the limitation on the overall system is if
the sun gives us enough energy to do everything
we want to do given the materials at hand. when
cheap oil and other fossil fuels run out then
the shift gets made to recycling and renewables.
there is a good chance by then we'll have viable
space colonies.

widely ignoring how things change won't make
any company likely to last long. companies,
like the people that run them, have an interest
in keeping going, in continuing, so they'll pay
attention to changes. many can even drive the
pace of change faster than a government or an
individual can. like, in my lifetime i'll never
buy several hundred million watts of clean energy
or be a force to recycle huge amounts of materials
that used to be aimed at landfills or incineration,
but a large company can do that and many are.

the system can correct itself. it is gradually
doing so. if embedded subsidies for destructive
practices were removed and shifted towards supporting
cleaner alternatives then the change would be even
faster.


songbird