Tag Archives: economics

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Consuming the future

nature_chainsVia New Scientist, scientists at the Ecological Society of America confirm my Agent Smithesque suspicions on the cause of our ongoing environmental crisis:

More specifically, all we’re doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available, just like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all the nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.

Making all this worse is the development of consumerism, which encourages even greater consumption of resources than would be the case if every new human being consumed as much as they have done historically, the NS article comments on the development of this trait:

According to Rees, the change took place after the second world war in the US, when factories previously producing weapons lay idle, and soldiers were returning with no jobs to go to.

American economists and the government of the day decided to revive economic activity by creating a culture in which people were encouraged to accumulate and show off material wealth, to the point where it defined their status in society and their self-image.
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In today’s world, such rhetoric seems beyond belief. Yet the consumer spree carries on regardless, and few of us are aware that we’re still willing slaves to a completely artificial injunction to consume, and to define ourselves by what we consume.

British philosopher John Gray (not the American self-help guru of the same name) has argued something similar in his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals, in which he lays out a thoroughly pessimistic critique of the notion of human exceptionalism, and his prediction of the imminent failure of environmentalist policies.

I don’t agree entirely with Gray on the inevitability of collapse and decay, but I certainly concur with James Martin‘s view that the 21st century will have to mark a change from focussing on limitless growth to sustainable growth (if such a thing is truly possible), as a precursor to a steady state economy.

The article raises another interesting point:

In an ideal world, it would be a counter-advertising campaign to make conspicuous consumption shameful.

“Advertising is an instrument for construction of people’s everyday reality, so we could use the same media to construct a cultural paradigm in which conspicuous consumption is despised,” he says. “We’ve got to make people ashamed to be seen as a ‘future eater’.”

I’m against moralistic ‘holier-than-thou’ criticisms of consumerism, but as “consumerism” as a concept has come about by the deliberate decisions of business people and marketers (and policymakers) seeking to promote ever greater economics growth and consumption, might it not be time to have a similar drive towards sustainability?

[image from Peter from Wellington on flickr]

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Go green: stop breeding

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baby and globeCOSMOS Magazine reports that the world’s wealthiest nations are experiencing something of a baby boom, standing in stark contrast to the general decline of birthrate in recent decades. In many respects this can be seen as a good thing, at least from an economic perspective; the “greying” of the population has produced a situation where the number of elderly people unable to work and in need of care and support has grown without a proportional increase in the numbers of young productive people able to keep the economy ticking over. [image by geraintwm]

But that classical economic viewpoint fails to consider other important factors, like the environmental impact of an increase in the number of children in developed nations. In a nutshell, large families are not environmentally sustainable in a country like Britain, where family planning researchers have begun to suggest that the best way for a young couple to “go green” is to restrict the number of children they have. Population is a global matter, certainly, but it’s estimated that a British baby will produce 160 times the greenhouse gas emissions of a baby born in Ethiopia. Or, to put it another way, each child born in the United States multiplies its parents’ carbon legacy by more than five times.

Statistics are all very well, but as any discussion of environmental responsibility shows, we struggle with making sacrifices for a nebulous and intangible greater global good – and personal experience suggests strongly that there are a sizeable number of people who get very offended by suggestions that they should restrict the number of children they choose to have. So, the two big questions are: should developed nations be instigating some sort of population control policy (while simultaneously assisting less developed nations with the education and medical support required to foster similar attitudes), and – if so – how should they incentivize such a controversial and personal decision?

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Welcome to the 3D economy

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Rep-Rap - self-replicating fabberJamais Cascio appears over at Fast Company once again, this time talking about the desktop manufacturing revolution, which seemingly becomes a less science fictional prospect by the week. The shift in plausibility is noticeable in the concerns raised: consider a still-distant technology like nanoassemblers or sentient AI, and you’ll get the species-killer existential risks – grey goo, say, or a hard unfriendly singularity. Ubiquitous fabbing is inevitable enough to be raising more realistic and (by comparison) small-scale concerns… like what the hell it’s going to do the economy. [image by Zach Hoeken]

Technologies that shift production from being atom-dominated to being bit-dominated tend to follow similar trajectories. With both laser printers and, later, CD/DVD burners, the first wave of “creative destruction” came when the prices dropped to the level where the devices were affordable by small businesses; the second, bigger wave came when the prices dropped to a level affordable by general households. Now, laser printers and CD/DVD burners are just about free in a box of cereal–and, for many of us, the production and consumption of text documents and music has moved to entirely digital formats.

If 3D printing follows a similar trajectory, we may not be likely to see a massive shift to entirely digital “products” any time soon, but we could well see a shift to more local–even desktop–production. There’s no guarantee, of course, that 3D printing system prices will crash in the exact same way as laser printers, or that individual households will decide that desktop manufacturing is appealing. Local manufacturing seems a good bet, however, for a variety of reasons. There’s a particularly strong sustainability argument around local manufacturing, from the rising tide of “localism” philosophies (from food to media), to the ability of 3D printing to extend the useful life of manufactured goods by making new parts (as Jay Leno does for his vintage cars). The sustainability argument will become especially powerful once cheap overseas-produced goods reflect rising costs for fuel and carbon. And local manufacturing via 3D printing, even if limited to simple consumer items, has the potential to disrupt incumbent manufacturing, shipping, and retail industries.

If we do see 3D printing follow the footsteps of laser printing, however, the results could be profound. Desktop manufacturing offers the potential for the ultimate “maker” culture, where commercial products are bought off of iTunes-like online stores and printed at home, while eager hardware hackers play with design tools and open-source hardware systems to make entirely new material goods. Lurking in the background, of course, is the potential for design piracy — what one writer termed “napster fabbing,” back in the era when Napster was scary.

It remains to be seen what actually happens, but severe disruption of the status quo is pretty much a given. What do you think – will ubiquitous fabbing usher in a utopian future of happy people making interesting stuff, or a world crammed with cheap and poorly-made junk?

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Games and economic misbehaviour

wolfram_fractalsGeorge Dyson has an excellent and compelling essay on game theory, economics, information theory, computer science, banking, finance, technology, and John von Neumann:

We are surrounded by codes (some Turing-universal) that make copies of themselves, and by physical machines that spawn virtual machines that in turn spawn demand for more physical machines. Some digital sequences code for spreadsheets, some code for music, some code for operating systems, some code for sprawling, metazoan search engines, some code for proteins, some code for the gears used in numerically-controlled gear-cutting machines, and, increasingly, some code for DNA belonging to individuals who serve as custodians and creators of more code. “It is easier to write a new code than to understand an old one,” von Neumann warned.

The monograph over on Edge discusses von Neumann’s intellectual antecendants and the development of game theory and statistical modelling. It also includes some interesting commentary on our recent economic difficulties. Definitely worth a read.

[image from kevindooley on flickr]

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The new terrorism: domestic, economic, environmentalist?

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burnt-out carVia Chairman Bruce comes news from Berlin, a city whose rapid rate of change and gentrification is escalating tensions between the far right and radical left… and those of no political affiliation at all. The last six months have seen a wave of car-burning:

During the past six months, more than 170 cars have been destroyed by fire in Berlin and police confirm conservatively that 93 were politically motivated attacks.

A mysterious, single page website, brennende-autos.de (Burning Cars of Berlin), shows the number of cars set alight and where the crimes occurred, revealing clusters in ‘‘richer’’ areas, or in suburbs where gentrification and redevelopment are changing the demographic of local neighbourhoods.

Mysterious indeed. Is the site run by the car-burners themselves? Their supporters? Their ideological opponents? Berlin being a traditionally bohemian city, it may just be someone’s idea of an art installation.

According to a spokeswoman for the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), there has been a measurable increase in left-wing extremist action, including the targeting of police and the property of businesses perceived to be involved in military or ‘‘imperialist’’ activities.

DHL, a company involved in logistics for the German armed forces, has been a recent target.

‘‘It is not just anti-militarism we are seeing … it is anti-imperialism, a catalogue of anti-things … anti-fascism, anti-gentrification. The people we are seeing are the so-called ‘autonoma’, people operating in groups without hierarchy, who are not well organised and so classical anarchy is in the background of their thinking,’’ she says.

[…]

Police cars, too, are being targeted. The favoured method is to use the slow-burn barbecue fire starters, which take time to smoulder and provide plenty of get-away time for the perpetrators.

That could have come straight out of any near-future urban dystopia or cyberpunk novel you care to name; as traditional party-based politics drifts further and further from being able to represent the fragmented ideologies of populations, angry people will find their voice whatever way they can.

And as economic pressures deepen over time, we’ll probably see similar events cropping up in other crowded and under-funded cities across the Western world… so if you’re not already following John Robb’s Global Guerrillas blog, now may be the time to start. [image by Jacob Davies]