13 karma · joined July 12, 2019
In a free society, someone can spend their money on an extra toy if they want. Nothing wrong with that. It's a strange expectation to impose on others this notion of "spending only on the common good." It's not black and white what the common good is, and that is why an educated free market is a good proxy or mechanism for figuring that out.
Rather than top-down centralized planning.
A more appropriate example is not an island that constrains population, but a population where new people are born and make investments into new businesses and new ideas. You can certainly have people transition more towards savings over time as they enter their prime career earning potential, without it impacting the rest. This is because there will always be other people who are willing to start businesses.
So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.
Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17
On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication.
Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."
And only public housing would collapse the entire economy. Plenty of countries tried this, most notably the commies in Russia and in eastern Europe.
Not only that, but he construed a framework in which anything opposing the proletariat, including "class antagonisms" that could be literally anything, should be opposed with force or the threat of force. Things like religion, private property, or anything that is not for the revolution is necessarily considered against the revolution.
When the foundation of a worldview is steeped in violence and using violence to get your political way, it's no surprise that the implementation of that worldview results in bloodshed and power vacuums.
https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-sm...
There's also the possibility of much faster speeds even in areas without 5g, since the competition will make 3g speeds a really bad look.
You also haven't considered that as you move people into cities you need to scale up infrastructure in the city itself. Living spaces, transportation around the city, supply lines for supermarkets. Everything needs to scale. It's not black and white that moving everyone into a tightly packed city is going to make a meaningful difference to global emissions.
What would make a tremendous difference is turning the entire grid into a green smart grid powered by solar, wind, geothermal, etc. That would change things regardless of where people live, because the sources of energy are decentralized and can exist basically anywhere that natural resources like solar and wind exist.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/zeppelins-stopped-flyin...
If the goal is to continue to survive as a species, there are much more effective strategies to implement.
If anything it would disadvantage citizens.