Rev. Pfloyd said:
'We worked hard, we went to college, we tried to better our lives. Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?'
Well, apparently until you reach some arbitrary threshold of success, then you apparently "owe" society something back for it.
That's always something that "stuck in my craw": the notion of "giving back" to society what you gained from it in your success. I contend that people look at this in a very backwards way, even the successful people themselves. The statement implies that in order to be successful you have take something from other people. But spending any modicum of time looking at an Edgeworth box (or just taking the time to reason through the statement) shows you that in order to be successful you need to provide something of value to others, not take something of value from them. Success (and the accompanying income that goes with it) is a measurement of how well you provide something of value to society, not how well you take from it. If taking from others is the measure of success, then governments probably have a much firmer grip on society than wealthy people do for they certainly take a lot from people without necessarily providing anything of value in return.
Rev. Pfloyd said:
Russ Roberts had Derman on his podcast the other week. Quite an interesting listen. They talked about the "scientism" of economics; such as the fact that "aggregate demand" is merely a concept, not something that exists in reality or is measurable. And yet, policy-makers will stare at this mathematical model, conclude that all we need to do is tweak a variable to move the curve and all will be great again.
Of course, being that we can't run such large economic experiments, when these forms of economic engineering don't have the outcome the planners expected, it can easily be brushed off as "we didn't do enough". And so we continue spiraling.
Clippingdesign said:
WOW! Fabulous work. You have a great creativity inside you....
Rev. Pfloyd said:
The above is why dialogue probably needs to make a clear distinction between "scarcity" and "accessibility". We hear about the Malthusian nightmare of the "peak oil" and the fact that we will soon run out of energy.
But energy itself isn't scarce, it's inaccessible. In Diamandis's book, he points out that 174 petawatts (174 quadrillion watts)of energy hit our atmosphere a year while the entirety of humanity consumes about 18 terawatts (18 trillion watts). So the problem certainly isn't scarcity, just our ability to harness it.
When put into this perspective, public discourse concerning what to do about the future and "sustainability" should instead be focusing on increasing access to things that aren't scarce at all. When framed in that context, there's a lot to be optimistic about. But that doesn't sell newspapers, and so public policy and dialogue inevitably continues down the doom-and-gloom road, even though time and again throughout history (and especially the last 200 years) that point of view has been proven wrong.
Rev. Pfloyd said:
I was just reading about this in Diamandis' book. It's certainly an interesting concept, but I have to wonder how much resistance we will experience both culturally and commercially. Auto insurance companies might find such a low-risk world utterly unprofitable--how will their lobbying activities reflect this as these innovations become more and more popular?
But the cultural resistance might be even stronger, especially in the U.S. Americans love their cars and even someone like me, who tends to see vehicles mostly for practical applications, isn't able to contain my smile while taking a little Porsche Boxster, top down, out onto the highway and opening it up. Americans far more gear-headed than I have built an entire culture around driving and automobiles--it's certainly one of the staples of the American experience. To some, owning a car and driving it is an extension of a free society.
So cars that drive themselves while you simply ride along (no need for a DD for your night out at the club)? There are certainly great strides to be made there, but I wonder how much such a thing will be fully embraced and how many generations after it's availability it will take.
Heck, I pooh-pooh'd eReaders when the technology was still in its infancy and clutched my weathered tomes like they were my small children. But then I got an iPad and saw the practicality of having digital version of books, especially for academic pursuits where it's far easier to search them for a particular nugget of knowledge than it is to peruse shelf upon shelf of books in my reading room trying to find one thing I had read 3 years ago about immigration policy.
So maybe it's not as far out as I think.
Rev. Pfloyd said:
xkcd is easily my favorite webcomic.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is another favorite, and they poke fun at economists a lot:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1940
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2185
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1924
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2305
Rev. Pfloyd said:
Such is the fate of capital-intensive industries. The same applied to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Claims of job creation and lower fuel prices were certainly overblown if one got down into the details; you don't really need many employees to monitor gauges on a pipe line or a windfarm.
Of course, in the case of oil booms and the massive population explosions that result--such as in North Dakota--there are other problems. Ultimately in both cases slow and steady would be a better way to win the race.
That's not to say that windfarms, oil refineries, and pipelines aren't all noble pursuits (or at least useful pursuits), but that when government money is hinged on the idea of selling benefits (job growth), we get a distorted picture of the outcomes and people and resources get allocated inefficiently. And if the government isn't distributing taxpayer money like so much candy at a ticker-tape parade, then the market can be allowed to work its magic and we can have these capital-intensive, life-improving projects without the shadow of cronyism.
And we can be truly honest about the benefits.
Rev. Pfloyd said:
Kind of reminds me of the bet between Economist Julian Simon and neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich on the topic of resource scarcity. The economist won out over the biologist, but people have been making that bet in intellectual terms all over the place. I'm glad some more people are picking up onan alternative to the Doomsday Resource Depletion approach.
Michael Shermer has written some great books himself, "Mind of the Market" being among my favorite books of all time. Having finished Tyler Cowen's more dismal tome, I'm tempted to grab this "Abundance" ASAP and cleanse my intellectual palate some.
