We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Freedom’s fruits “The truth about market liberalisation and economic growth is not that it increases inequality, nor that it hurts the poor: just the opposite. Rather, the truth is that some large parts of the poor world are pulling themselves out of poverty while others are not.”
– The Economist
The quote is taken from an article in the Economist marking that publication’s 160th birthday. The Economist, even though it occasionally annoys me with its smart-ass tone, has been a fairly consistent voice of pro-free market liberal good sense since it first went to print in the Victorian age. It is worth clicking on the link and looking at the related articles in a whole series which the Economist devotes to celebrating liberal ideas.
And by “liberal”, I mean the word that would have been worn as a badge of pride by William Gladstone, Adam Smith or Milton Friedman, rather than those collectivists in drag in the U.S.
Happy Birthday, Economist!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Much as I respect the Economist as a liberal institution, and I have subscribed for 30 years, it is still (at least occasionally) infected by internationalist nonsense. There was a good example in the latest issue, where they conceded that Alberta’s oil sands had the capacity to rival Saudia Arabia as an oil producer, but put forward Kyoto as a serious impediment. basically producing a barrel of oil in Alberta produces 25% more CO2 than Saudi oil.
Given the geopolitical and security implications of oil supply, I find this objection simply ludicrous.
But then I think the whole global warming, so called debate, is merely an opportunity for the truly ignorant to demonstrate how little they really know.
Thank you. The Economist quote is a mirror image of what P J O’Rourke says in Eat The Rich. “Economics is not zero sum. There is no fixed amount of wealth. That is, if you have too many slices of pizza, I don’t have to eat the box. Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.”
There is no fixed amount of wealth
Within an open system yes. Within the context of the planet Earth over an arbitarily long period of time, it is not an open system.
That’s certainly not a problem at the moment but long term it could well be, which is why we need to find new areas to expand into.
“Within an open system yes. Within the context of the planet Earth over an arbitarily long period of time, it is not an open system.”
Nonsense. I do believe that similar predictions of doom were made more than a century ago and expired sometime in the 1970’s.
Human beings are the only resource that matters and there is no limit on either our ingenuity or our adaptability.
I think (and since I do not know much about economy (at the moment – just give me time to dig into the book suggestions by Andy Duncan) I could be very wrong), that the myth about a fixed amount of wealth is one of the foundations of socialist/marxist economy? It gives them (the State etc.) a perfect reason for stealing other individuals wealth anyway, because if someone is rich, someone else is poor because of that.
Dave O’Neill: That is preposterous. Have you never heard of substitution? The fixed wealth fallacy is on a par with flat-earth theory. I do not say that to be unkind or insulting but it a quite literally absurd notion and perhaps the oddest thing otherwise intelligent people cling to regardless of the fact they are awash with evidence to falsify the theory if they just take the time to look.
The Earth is not a closed system; it is part of a Solar System. If the economics of shortage justified the expense (i.e. made it economical) because we could not substitute some material or other, we would be mining the moon today because we certainly have the technology to do that. In any case as technology improves, we have ever more ways to extract what we need from the Earth, be it genetic engineering or new materials science or improved engineering.
I do wish there were fewer of us, but that’s a purely aesthetic judgment. I like wilderness and lonely places and frontiers, and there are getting to be too many of us restless bipeds around to maintain them.
Beyond that, though, we seem well able to provide for everyone. Any local shortages there are tyrant-related, not technology-related.
Dave O’Neil writes:
Within an open system yes. Within the context of the planet Earth over an arbitarily long period of time, it is not an open system.
Flippety Gibbet, Dave, what can I say? I’ll try not to repeat Mr Carr and Mr De Havilland, but this really is nonsense. Even assuming we were trapped on Earth for hundreds of years, before we managed to crawl to the Moon, a planet full of billions and billions of tons of resources, and then Mars, hundreds of billions of billions of tons of resources, and then the asteroid belt…no, I’ll stop there.
As the immense Mr Lomborg says in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, we will stop using oil one day not because we run out of it, but because we don’t need it any more. When the Saudis are begging us to buy more, we’ll have moved on to super-light solar-powered vehicles, with 99% per cent efficient light batteries, or power beamed to us over wireless networks, or water-powered fuel cells, or whatever it is some clever Anglosphere citizen has invented. There are hundreds of years worth of oil left on Earth, and that’s just the known resources.
And contrary to the Malthusian self-immolating urges of the eco-idiots, more of these resources are discovered each year. To this we always receive the get-out-of-jail global warming plea (one of the reasons, I believe, why global warming was invented by the eco-idiots, to create an unfalsifiable back-stop for all counter-arguments). But even if this global warming nonsense is true, and we’re not in the middle of an Ice Age inter-glacial over which we have no control, our ingenuity will cope.
This planet Earth is a ball of trillions of tons of wonderful resources, many of which we’ve barely begun to tap. What about all those chemicals, and all that heat power in the mantle, we’ve not yet even touched (excepting the water heating system of Iceland :), or solar radiation, or maybe somebody will do something with the billions of neutrinos passing through our bodies each second, or catch the solar wind particles? If E really does equal MC squared, then with the virtually limitless energy of the Sun, that means mass is virtually limitless too, if we can harness the technology necessary to swap one from another, without the messy nuclear fusion bit, in-between. The possibilities are endless.
And then think of miniaturisation. Everything we invent tends to get smaller, and use less and less physical resources. We even have typewriters now made of laser beams, powered by tiny power sources (here’s another one).
And please don’t give me that Gaia hypothesis about the sanctity of the Earth, if that was a temptation. One day, in a couple of billion years’ time, the Sun is going to expand into a Red Giant, which will destroy Gaia’s Earth. And it is only if we allow true liberty, necessary for the mental freedom to allow innovation, that we’ll have built the necessary technology to get off this planet and begin again elsewhere.
Even if people do believe in Gaia, or some other kind of primeval festal religion, Gaia put all those resources on Earth for us to use, or as many of them as we could. They’ll be no use to the helium-filled swelling mass of the Red Giant Sun, when it swallows them up. As most of it’s iron anyway, the end-point of most nuclear reactions, the Red Giant won’t even be able to burn much of it.
And if we do want to get off this planet, before it pops, freedom isn’t just a nice idea for western dilettantes. It’s essential to humanity’s future. Without it we’re just brow-beaten serfs surviving from one generation to the next, under an oppressive rentier aristocracy, until the Big Red One goes bang in the sky.
Though it ain’t going to take two billion years, to get away. We’ll be long gone by then. If only we could leave behind all the socialists, do-gooders, leftist-fascists, rightist-fascists, and all other species of collectivist. Wouldn’t that be nice? 😎
No doubt the parasites will try to hitch a ride with us (gratis, naturellement), but they’ve always wanted the whole Earth to be red.
Maybe the dying Sun will give them that opportunity! 😉
Andy Duncan:
My guess is that we humans (or whatever we will have become by then) will be the ones to save the good ‘ole earth in 2 billion years – a nice big sunshade or maybe shaving a bit of mass off the sun, or even moving the earth out a bit, would all do the job.
It’s a nice twist to the Gaia idea. Earth gives birth to humans, we grow up and save our old mother when she can’t look after herself any more!
Cydonia
Andy Duncan – Yowzah! What a great post!
Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing. Practicle access to space is in the forseeable future. See: The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality and: your The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System
This should provide even S. Weasel with plenty of “wilderness and lonely places and frontiers” although the frontiers may look somewhat different than what we have here.
I’d like to second Andy’s comments. While many resources are finite (like land), many others have a considerably more elastic supply than the doom-and-gloom merchants would have us believe (like oil) – it in no way follows that wealth or human welfare is finite.
This is because human know-how is unlimited. The essence of technology is to produce more results with fewer resources. Some people, myself included, believe that the rate of human knowledge gain is accelerating which will result in accelerating human wealth and welfare.
Sorry, but ouch guys, watch those knees!
Perry, the Earth is a closed system. I agree that to all intents and purposes the solar system is not. I specifically made the point about the Earth because we are not currently doing anything like enough to exploit non-terrestial resources.
David: Yes lots of people have made mathusulen type predictions which haven’t come true. To infer that therefore they will never come true is also a logical mistake. I for one have great faith in the human “resource” to handle all problems. However, I also recall the conversation between the Columbia and Houston on January 23rd (?) telling them that the previous X hits by foam were fine and so would this one. Just because X has always worked in the past is no guarentee that it will continue to do so.
Andy: I was careful to point out that I meant over a arbitarily long time period. I don’t think that we are close to any limits, however, that should no stop us from looking at new areas of development and economic expansion.
The people of Easter Island were convinced they had an inexhaustable supply of trees.
“However, I also recall the conversation between the Columbia and Houston on January 23rd (?) telling them that the previous X hits by foam were fine and so would this one. Just because X has always worked in the past is no guarentee that it will continue to do so.”
Do you honestly think that that is an adequate analogy?
“The people of Easter Island were convinced they had an inexhaustable supply of trees.”
How do you know what they were thinking? And if they had the technology and ability to replant them they probably would have had an inexhaustible supply of trees.
If you are so unshakeable in your belief that we’re going to run into the brick wall of doom at some point, then tell us when. If it was foolish to buy into the malthusian convictions of the past, why are they any more plausible now?
Yes, actually, I do think is an apt analogy – after the Challenger accident, Richard Feynman explained that the problem was the perspection that as they had launched in cold weather with damage to the O rings before and not had a problem, it therefore followed that you could continue to do so.
That was not the case.
One of the problems for Easter Island was they reached a point where they could no longer grow trees through soil errosion. They had left it far too late to undertake remedial action.
There are plenty of natural examples of this sort of catastrophic collapse in nature. The North Atanlatic Cod reserves being one of them.
If you are so unshakeable in your belief that we’re going to run into the brick wall of doom at some point, then tell us when.
I haven’t suggested anything of the sort. What I said was that the resources of planet Earth are, over an arbitary time period, not infinite.
Even for the UK, North Sea Oil is eventually going to run out – this has led to signing a deal for Russian to meet our energy requirements from a little later in this century. That we will become reliant on energy shipped from Russia does concern me somewhat.
If it was foolish to buy into the malthusian convictions of the past, why are they any more plausible now?
I’d argue it wasn’t foolish. There are plenty of examples of local Malthusian collapses. Fortunately we’ve been able to avoid one for our civilisation, which is excellent, and what I expect to continue.
However, that doesn’t stop me from being annoyed by complacency when I see it.
On a flippant and wholly inappropriate note, does anyone else think Freedom’s Fruits would be a cracking name for a gay military unit? (Don’t ask what I made of the “Now you can camp with your laptop” thread).
Hi Dave,
Hope it’s going well, your end! 🙂
Perry, the Earth is a closed system.
Sorry Dave, I must disagree again. There is only one closed system, in the Universe, and that’s the …errr… , well, the Universe 🙂
I specifically made the point about the Earth because we are not currently doing anything like enough to exploit non-terrestrial resources.
We don’t exploit non-terrestrial resources yet (except for solar radiation, of course), because we don’t need to yet. When we do need to, we will.
I also recall the conversation between the Columbia and Houston on January 23rd (?) telling them that the previous X hits by foam were fine and so would this one. Just because X has always worked in the past is no guarentee that it will continue to do so.
You know, it’s funny you should say this, because an almost identical set of scenarios fills the first few chapters of Mr Popper’s book, below:
If you’re interested in logical induction, and why analogies are such a dangerous tool for reasoning with, I reckon you won’t find a better book. (BTW, it’s nothing to do with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.)
Andy: I was careful to point out that I meant over a arbitarily long time period. I don’t think that we are close to any limits, however, that should no stop us from looking at new areas of development and economic expansion.
You don’t get out of jail that easily! 🙂
We won’t be here for an arbitrarily long time period. Long before any significant resource ever runs out, we’ll have either moved on to a better alternative, or we’ll be off-planet. I suppose a few thousand years ago, some cave man (perhaps Cro-Magnus Malthusus? :), was sitting about one day on a pile of chalky rocks predicting the end of the world supplies of flint. And then some bright spark, probably Cro-Magnus Libertarius, said, “What about this coppery-coloured stuff, I’m sitting on?”
The people of Easter Island were convinced they had an inexhaustable supply of trees.
I won’t add too much to Mr Carr here, except to say from what I saw of David Attenborough’s superb program on Easter Island, from the picture he painted they seemed too busy having wars with each other, probably over tree resources, to maybe realise that trees grow from seeds. And that you have to plant these seeds, or allow them to grow, if you want any more trees. Perhaps another example of why violence may work in the short term, for a particular group, but fails over the longer term for the whole of society. Or maybe that there are stupid people everywhere. I mean, what were they doing 2,000 miles off course, anyhow? 🙂
For a superb exposition on how such island economy’s work, under conditions of violence then conditions of contract, from Robinson Crusoe up to Planet Earth, I’m currently wading through the masterpiece below. Just started Chapter 2 this morning. Blimey, it’s superb. A mountain of wood pulp to lug about, but superb. Buy a copy. Immediately! 🙂
I picked the Challenger example because the failure of that kind of “if this continues” is now pretty well documented elsewhere too. The “NASA Effect” as Feynman christened is endemic in human understanding of probabilities and few are immune. What we “think” are obvious statisstical likelyhoods – like, “When we do need to, we will.”
That’s a line of reasoning, in conjunction to space development that I remain unconvinced by.
While its unfashionable I could also recommend Martin Ree’s new book where he only gives mankind a 50/50 chance of getting out of this century 😉
I suspect myself we will be fine. However, the fact is we are mmoving into a phase in this country where we are no longer energy self sufficient. That is a problem and its not one we are doing enough about yet.
Personally I think we need a hell of a lot more nuclear power stations, but that’s a different issue.
Dave O’Neill writes:
There are plenty of natural examples of this sort of catastrophic collapse in nature. The North Atanlatic Cod reserves being one of them.
I’m afraid, as with all the “Malthus got this right!” examples I’ve ever come across, this is just another example of Henry Hazlitt’s “Tragedy of the Commons”, something caused by statist tribalism, rather than the free market. The links below may give you the flavour of this terrible condition, and the free market ways necessary to cure its evil effects (Oh, and don’t get me started on the NHS, BTW – It’s been a long, dark, day, in the test-cycle room, and you won’t like me, when I’m angry! 🙂
Private Ownership Promotes Responsibility
An evaluation of capitalism vs statism
Fishing for Markets
Incidentally, while digging out the links above, I found a really interesting article linking Easter Island with the Tragedy of the Commons, on how its treelessness could’ve been averted by the use of the free market. It’s only a snippet, but interesting nevertheless.
Finally Houston, you’ll need “The Tragedy of the Commons”, from the man himself. I’m afraid I’m going to load your shopping cart up with another fine masterpiece (though this is a nice slim one! 🙂
If you only ever buy one book in the next decade, if you haven’t got it already, buy Mr Hazlitt’s inspirational, Economics in One Lesson. Blindingly good.
Dave writes:
…”When we do need to, we will.”…
That’s a line of reasoning, in conjunction to space development that I remain unconvinced by.
Well, it’s worked so far. How many years is it since we split from chimps and gorillas? Five million years. It’s not a bad track record. Admittedly, from the Popper, it’s not ultimately “proven”, but I’ll go with it until something better comes along.
While its unfashionable I could also recommend Martin Ree’s new book where he only gives mankind a 50/50 chance of getting out of this century 😉
Ah, sounds like the late Mr Carl Sagan, with his equations on when all civilisations end, still has at least one disciple left! 🙂
With Islamofascism, eco-terrorism, anti-globalism, and the many other tribal stone age “-isms” walking the Earth, it certainly is a dangerous century. But Christ, after watching “K-19 The Widowmaker” the other day, it can’t be any more dangerous than the last one. Those scenes with the guys coming out of the reaction vessel. Flipping Heck. I’m glad Harrison Ford’s DREADFUL Russian accent was so hilariously bad. It was the only thing that kept me going.
…we are mmoving into a phase in this country where we are no longer energy self sufficient.
Dave, the last time I heard this argument I was wearing a “Coal Not Dole” sticker, and standing on the picket line at Rossington Colliery, at 5am, just outside a very cold, and a very dark Doncaster. I suppose if it really gets desperate, we can drag Mr Arthur Scargill out of his Barbican penthouse flat, and shove him back down into the ground to dig out the 500 years worth of coal, he kept wittering on about. And in the free market, Dave, if we really do need the energy enough, that’s exactly what’ll happen if the price of British coal becomes “economic” once again. Ah, to use that word in connection with the Miners’ Strike. Takes me back to when I was young and stupid.
Personally I think we need a hell of a lot more nuclear power stations, but that’s a different issue.
Hmm, I’m not so sure after watching “K-19 – The Widowmaker”, but you’re right. Let’s not go there.
Pip pip!!
I remember the “Coal not Dole” too – but at least then we weren’t signing a deal with Russia to solve our energy problems. That makes me nervous. Its not that we can’t solve the problem if getting more energy, its the way we’ve decided to solve it. Being dependant on a fragile pipe line and French Nuclear power is more than enough of an economic concern for me, thanks very much.
Technologies which currently concern, and awe me in equal measure – biotech and nanotech. While the chances of a Nanotechnology “Grey Goo” machine are low, the chances of some smart biochemist re-engineering Small Pox with some added bits to make it more deadly are much higher.
Nuclear isn’t a problem if you treat it right. The Russians have always been rather cavilier about their nuclear systems – I understand that Vodka has remarkable anti-radiation properties!
😉