Unfortunately, Malthusianism was never abandoned at all. I graduated from high school only ten years ago, and Malthus is accurate, up-to-the-minute doctrine as far as my high school and university courses were concerned.
Well, a modern economy is pretty thoroughly different from the premodern one. When it took 90% of the population working in agriculture to feed the whole population (nonfarmer/farmer ratio of 1:9), and food transportation costs were extremely high, then even a minor shortfall in food production could induce famine conditions in short order. Now that the nonfarmer/farmer ratio in an industrialized economy is more like 97:3 (and moving toward that figure elsewhere) famine is decreasingly caused by shortfalls only, and increasingly by other factors. Fundamentally, though, it's about productivity.
And there's no obvious reason why productivity will be going down in most places in the world, nor why transportation should be getting more expensive. I think short-term oscillations in political fortunes are not a very good marker of these things.
Well, most of that food waste is at the consumer/household level. The distribution chain up to that point wastes very little (indeed, when it comes to things like meat scraps and produce trimmings, it's almost too thrifty.) A big part of this consumer waste is because food is cheap enough to not eat all of. So, do we make it more expensive to encourage less waste? It's an inherently hard problem.
Yep, it's amazing how long things like that go on. Of course, when the objective is "establish guidelines for the One Best Way to Eat", it's sort of a futile venture from the start.
Yes, that also does not help. Even in stable times, though, transportation costs are surprisingly higher than most people think - especially if they've grown up surrounded by ubiquitous high-quality roads and rail everywhere.
Especially lower child mortality rates. When people are reasonably confident of seeing all of their children grow to adulthood, they just have fewer of them.
Basic foodstuffs are remarkably cheap. Unmilled commodity wheat is usually only $100 to $150 per metric tonne. But that's what it can cost to transport that tonne for only a few dozen miles overland in a place with few or no paved roads. Add in the distribution costs of getting it to every specific consumption location, and you can see why it's so hard.
> As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
No kidding. I remember the "old" Food Pyramid. For decades, you saw that everywhere - in school, doctors' offices, wherever. "8-10 servings a day of bread, pasta, rice, corn, cereal. Carbs carbs carbs! Fats are the enemy!"
And now, it's "oh, maybe that wasn't such good advice for everybody, hm, okay....but you can totally trust our New Food Pyramid! Yay!"
By 2050, we'll have AI Luddites, who'll be able to predict that this time, no really this time for real you guys, automation is going to put everybody out of work and crash the economy.
Extreme poverty is defined as total consumption of goods and services of less than $1.90 per day per person, adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. Not terribly difficult to compare.
But they don't think of themselves that way, often because it's easy to smuggle in an indefinite number of rules under the cloak of good intentions.
"It's dangerous to allow buildings that are fire hazards, since fires spread fast in cities! People are in danger, we need rules."
"True, let's have a rule about that."
"Also some houses are unhygienic and don't have enough light and air. Let's ban all buildings that don't have enough of those."
"I guess so, if it's for health..."
"Actually, let's just ban all new housing that is not up to our extremely expensive and specific standards, arbitrarily set by unaccountable bodies, and capriciously enforced."
"Wait, but why?"
"You know, to keep people from dying in fires. Why do you hate fire safety?"
The Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters were mainly built in Utah, and many people assert that this choice of location was due to political patronage. The fact that these boosters were built inland, far from barge-capable waterways and distant from the launch site, meant that, rather than being completed as a single large piece at the factory, it arrived at the Kennedy Space Center as four pieces, which were then joined together with the O-rings in question. This made them vulnerable to a blowout of the kind experienced with Challenger; solid rocket boosters made in a single piece are generally much less vulnerable to this kind of failure.
Well, generally the game-theoretic proposals are for some kind of direct compensation for impacts - developers pay the residents directly for new impositions like shadows or traffic. But this really throws the whole notion of "master planning" and "expert opinion" out the window (as it's now a transactional system) which is why people who think of themselves as expert city planners do not like it.
Sure, the idea at least of Section 37 is effectively "local compensation". Too often it's "councillor's goodies for constituents money", and it's not much help when the Section 37 park gets built a kilometer away from the actual development. And often the locals don't want change anyways, so Section 37 stuff is not enticing. Makes sense in theory though.
And mostly, new construction is not for low-income people, just because it's new. Low-income people tend to live in older buildings that have depreciated.
I live in Toronto and this is pretty much how it goes. (The city works in spite of planning, not because of it, generally.) Planners come up with some grand region- or city-wide objectives, with lots of criteria and performance metrics, and then when it gets down to the gritty job of building new stuff, it's all "we don't like it, because it's not what currently exists!" No surprise that the really big development tends to happen on old industrial lands where there's not enough people around to really complain.
But of course, you can see how the incentives run. If somebody likes their neighbourhood the way it is, and doesn't want change, then if they don't complain about new developments to councillors and planners, they gain nothing. But if they do complain, then there's a chance they can get developments stopped. (Thanks, "community-based planning".) So the cost of complaining is quite small, but the rewards can be quite large.
Of course there's degrees of endorsement, there always is. I'm just responding to the notion of yours that "in a republic, the state is the citizenry." Well, no, it's not, and it doesn't need to be - and indeed, there's no real way for it, in fact, to be so. Certainly, it can represent certain preferences of the citizenry, through various mechanisms and political tools, but the state isn't the citizenry, it's an institution with particular powers and structures. That's not objecting to the concept of endorsement, it's just pointing out the distinction.
Yep. People frequently have a strong aversion to paying directly for things, unfortunately. It's the same way with parking - people feel like they're getting all these huge quantities of available parking for free, but they're still paying for it, just hidden in the prices of goods, the increased distances between places, higher rents, and so on. But it's just so easy to make laws saying "thou shalt provide enough parking for everybody", so that's what you get.
The good I am referring to is the service provided by the extra freeway space. Imagine an auto-body shop decided it would give a free engine oil top-up to anyone who drove up. You'd still need a car to take advantage of the deal, but it does mean that consumption of that engine oil will probably rise.
So if "the citizens", or some subset thereof, are unable to change the system, then they're assume, as a group, to be endorsing the system and its actions? And to be genuinely represented, indeed manifested, by its officials, even when those officials are aggressively at odds with each other?
Of course, that money is redeployed, which is good. The point is that, in the case of something like chronic pain, it is very difficult to measure the level of pain, but easy to measure the money spent on it. So, it can be challenging to compare.
Or, to go back to technology, take Facebook for example. Perhaps people would have liked to have a social networking site before, but it simply wasn't available. When it became available, many people used it and enjoyed it in their leisure time. Because it's free, and, while large, does not pull very large revenues per user, it doesn't show up as a major economic activity. And because it's used mostly as an end-consumer leisure activity, it is missed by indicators that don't measure this well. So there can be a substantial total increase in services enjoyed, and we might be missing it. Again - might. I cannot say for sure, but it's worth asking.
Oh, I'm not trying to commit the broken window fallacy. I'm just saying that, for example, if there was a disease that caused a lot of pain, and it was suddenly cured, the reduction in measured economic activity associated with managing that disease might outweigh the measured increased productivity and redeployment of resources and labour. (Maybe something like arthritis, say: usually worst after most people are retired and not measured as workers, doesn't take a huge number of people to manage, but causes a lot of pain.) Obviously curing a disease is an economic good. It's just that we're not terribly good at measuring consumer surplus, or leisure, or various dimensions of satisfaction - especially once you get past basic consumption indicators.
I suspect it's more likely that we're underestimating the consumer surplus from the internet than we are overestimating it. By how much, I don't know.
Well, you could say that the internet was not a totally unique thing in itself, but just another (big) forward step in the ever-improving telecommunications sector, which had already seen the expansion of telegraphs, radio, telephones, and so on, and would also have represented big improvements in communication capacity.
One must also ask, how much of it is consumer surplus. In just the same way as a disease going away reduces the economic activity associated with managing that disease, information technology and the internet have done away with many previously necessary activities, in the process of creating an overall improvement - potentially "shrinking" GDP, even while it delivers substantial benefits. What is instantaneous worldwide communication worth? What would it have been worth in 1967? It's so common and important now - but it's also very cheap, so it doesn't show up significantly in many calculations of economic production.
One of the big problems with people's expectations was, perhaps, a sense that technological progress would involve ever-greater energies, sizes, velocities. This certainly would have made sense in 1967, but what's been done since then has so much to do with using less energy to do more. There's so much to do in computation, biosciences, materials science, and so on - it doesn't look big and impressive necessarily, but it's still major progress.