Mike, I agree in general with general your point here.

A few comments:

The Club or Rome report...

...and related simulation which led to many of these predictions has been discredited, and even at the time was held in low esteem by many. It was a naive simulation that did not allow for any technological improvement.

Even Malthus, in later editions (1806, rarely cited), recanted the notion that population always grows faster than food supply.

Julian Simon, an economist who wrote "The Ultimate Resource", a book about how people are the ultimate resource and find ways to make things cheaper or find replacements, would certainly agree with you.

Especially:

And to an extent, I agree with Simon's main point.

Both the Club or Rome and Julian Simon are described here:

Some typical counter-arguments to Simon are here:

http://www.jps.net/zpg/

I probably agree much more with Simon's point of view than ZPG's (Zero Population Growth's), with some key exceptions. One major point is that IMO Simon does not deal well with diminishing biodiversity as one irreplaceable resource.

The places where I differ most from laissez faire economics as Simon more-or-less advocates is in evaluating market players, external costs, and chaos.

Market players: If a person does not have any money (a unskilled person starving in poverty, unable to work), then the market will not meet their need because they can not participate in the market. You may argue that other market players make take it upon themselves to solve this problem through charity problem through charity http://www.hungersite.com/ or variants of charity (taxation and redistribution via welfare or education or jobs training or economic development). That is true, but it is not a *direct* working of the market.

Also, because markets take time to work, even if the market might come to help someone eventually, if they need help now, then non-market intervention may be justified. Well-educated, well-fed, well-informed individuals in a well-working community with access to capital are a net resource. It takes investment by society (including parents) to make them that way. Otherwise, people can be a non-resource (deficit?). Even when everything goes well, accident or illness or a bad choice can cost someone much of their productivity. Unfortunately, in today's USA, for example, politics leads us to spend money to lock up people instead of to spend money for prenatal care, educational daycare, parental leave, and community services like after-school centers.

External costs: In various cases, one can make something at a profit (gasoline for example) by passing "external" costs onto others. External costs for example are related to pollution, work place accidents, consumer accidents, defense costs, health risks, disposal problems, social fragmentation costs, esthetic costs like a loss of a view, and moral/spiritual anguish. You may argue one can sue for damages, or create laws related to fines for external costs, but again this is not a *direct* working of the market. It was only after long difficult fights that people have the limited protective laws they have today. (It used to be when you went to work for a company, you assumed the risk of injury by free choice.)

This issue of external costs gets more subtle when it relates to unknown costs (perhaps requiring research to discover). Then the issue is not a directly measurable cost, but a vaguer risk. For example, according to the World Watch Institute, every person on the planet has 500 chemicals in their body that did not exist before 1920.

Yet, on the other hand Simon would say less people die of pneumonia. It is hard to weigh some of these risks.

Chaos: Current theories of systems theories and chaos show that many systems (like markets) exhibit chaotic trends. For example, if one keeps piling grains of sand on a pile, they tend to stick, until every once in a while a whole bunch fall together as a landslide. (See Per Bak, "How nature works")

This chaotic property of economic systems can result in grave harm to individuals and societies, and in the case where some of those individuals or societies control weapons of mass destruction, extreme damage to society and environment. Consider here the implications of financial meltdowns in the newly created Russian "market". This chaos factor is also related to the unknown and the need for paradigm shifts -- the "ant nest breaking its branch and falling in the river" scenario Doug discussed.

So, for markets to be humane, there must be charity for those unable to participate in the market, and there must be laws governing activities with external costs, and there must be regulations to prevent chaos. Notice I am applying a word "humane" which is value laden to the design of an economic system. As moral creatures, I would argue we must. The only question is what are our non-economic goals, and how can we structure our economics best to achieve them? For example, in "Small is Beautiful", E.F. Schumacher talks about what "Buddhist Economics" would be like -- where the most important value of the work was the spiritual uplift of the worker.

It is part of the "scarcity" model of economics that we assume we must have the most "efficient" system, where efficiency is defined very narrowly (and probably in an economically successful person's best interests...)

Quoting Mike Taylor...

Probably true, as far as actually running out of energy.

However, fossil fuel use has many external costs relating to health risks, defense spending, tax losses, ecological damage, and social disruption. These are not paid by the energy companies, but by certain specific disadvantaged individuals or wildlife, unknowing consumers, and society. The major reason to shift to alternatives sooner than the "market" is planning for has to do with these external costs. However, the "market" is not able to correct for these, because it is not profitable.

Quoting Mike Taylor...

I agree with your general sentiment (subject to the limitations above). Markets work to an extent and have certain limitations. I think you are correct that the implications a OHS/DKR run by an elite will not solve world problems better than a network of people involved with the market. I think a very good question you implicitly raise is, given the market, where can an OHS/DKR fit in?

We already have charities and lawmakers interacting with the market. The issues is, are the charities and lawmakers making good choices? If not, why not? Can an OHS/DKR help with this? For example, government investment in research tinkers with the market. What should the government invest its (our) research dollars in? How can this process be above vested or special interests?

I think an OHS/DKR related to world issues will have great value in several areas.

One is organizations who are involved with handling either the charity or regulation required to make markets work humanely.

• Congress

  http://thomas.loc.gov/

• government agencies like the EPA

  http://www.epa.gov/

• non-profits, like World Watch

  http://www.worldwatch.org/

• NGOs like the Millennium Project

  http://www.millennium-project.org/

• Voluntary Simplicity -- avoiding the market

  http://www.awakeningearth.org/simplicity.html

• Space Settlement -- putting the market in a bigger space

  http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/

• International Aid -- helping where there is no (or a tiny) market

  http://www.globalprojects.org/humcdrom/

  http://www.villageearth.org/ATLibrary/cdrom.htm

• Nanotechnology -- eliminating/restructuring the market (for manufactured goods)

  http://www.foresight.org/

Quoting Mike Taylor...

I'm not sure the users of an OHS/DKR have to agree, any more than the users of a mailing list have to agree (beyond the agreement of civility). A key value of an OHS/DKR is to allow points to be made, discussed, archived, and revisited, so a group understanding can evolve. Obviously, the group must have some common interest, if they are to stay as a group. That group may not all agree, but at least they all have access to a rich source of information for making decisions independently or collaboratively.

A separate issue from understanding is action. Since different people have different (economic) interests, even when part of the same group, their individuals actions may differ even given the same information. I think this is fundamentally not resolvable. I think of the issue as many overlapping senses of "self", where being "selfish" means one thing when thinking of you as an individual, another when thinking of yourself as a (part of a) family, another when thinking of yourself as (part of a) a community or various groups. These roles often conflict even in one person. So, in that sense, even an individual using an OHS/DKR for their own decision making faces a difficult task.

Sincerely,

Kurtz-Fernhout Software

Paul Fernhout
pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com