At first glance this seems incredibly concerning, especially if we ever get to a point where some people can 'afford' water while others can't.
While we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival, they do play key roles into how our society operates. I'm hoping to understand more on why we should treat water in the same way.
We are almost there. In Bangalore, India due to hockey-stick like expansion of houses, mainly high rise gated communities, the municipality is just not able to supply tap water. They all rely on daily supply of water tankers. However, even that water isn't potable. So house holds buy bottled water or have RO machines. Bear in mind, this is the situation for middle/upper-middle-income group. Lower income groups just drink any water they can, waterborne disease is rampant.
This[1] talk from P Sainath about the water crisis in India is revealing.
I would the situation would be similar in other emerging countries. I remember that a few months ago Cape Town, SA ran out of water[2]. Water was strictly rationed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-l2LvA2dSI
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/cape-town-was-90-days...
In this case, it sounds like what's needed is better city planning and more equitable distribution of water. I don't know the specifics here, but I suspect there's plenty of water but it's probably being tied up in industrial applications.
Also, instead of letting the market decide where to build houses, why not build them where there's infrastructure to support them, instead of building them where the profit is highest?
Also, have you even considered what a one-child policy entails? It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies.
Over 70% of surface water in India is unpotable. The main problem is inadequate or non-existent waste water treatment, but agricultural and industrial runoffs also play a large part.
There must be a real limit to how many humans this planet can support.
It takes water to make a human. You will pass the point where you can't expand the population before you get to the point where you can't maintain the population that already exists. If something does decrease the water supply, you will in a short period of time have a smaller population to support. Such is the nature of carrying capacity.
If you get a million people to build a city in the Sahara and don't build any infrastructure to get water to this city, of course they are going to have water shortages, but this does not suggest some global water crisis nor is a limited birth rate going to fix the problem. Likewise if someone sticks their head in a plastic bag they may run out of air, but that doesn't mean air is any less abundant. There are some resources of which there is an actual scarcity such as arable land and energy sources, but water is not one of them.
In fact, China is already considered to be suffering from water availability issues, and while this still happened with a one-child policy it almost certainly would be worse had Chinese population growth had the same trajectory as India's. (This is not an argument for the general good of one-child policy, and I do not endorse such a thing.)
On the demand side, if moving is not legally or socially acceptable, what is the difficulty of changing the laws or culture? If cities are sticky, move the things that attract people to those cities elsewhere. If new cities are difficult to set up, how difficult is that compared to modifying an existing city?
there's a big difference between "there isn't any water" and "we won't take actions to get water." Now you may be saying "but those things are hard and expensive" to which I will respond "yeah, providing for the needs of 20% of the world's population is going to be hard and expensive," but on the brightside 20% of the world's population is an incredible resource if utilized properly.
The problem with new cities is generally trying to move employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most planned cities without a specific employment reason either fail or become big suburbs.
Making it easier to move to other countries is not exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India is not in control of how the US makes legislation and pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would probably make the situation worse, not better.
The GP comment I was responding to was specifically talking about water being "a real limit to how many humans this planet can support." Literally the first thing I said was that regions could run out of water. That said, how we frame our problems influences how we think about solutions - how we solve a water infrastructure crisis is very different from a water scarcity crisis.
> There's technically no such thing as peak oil either, but there is a point where it becomes economically infeasible to produce more oil
Peak oil is the point when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which it is expected to enter terminal decline. Peak oil is most certainly real, and likely in the near future. Oil is an energy source and it takes energy to extract it - eventually you will hit a point where it takes more than a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil. Further, oil is destroyed when used, and it takes more energy to recreate it than you get from using it, so there is no sense in replenishing it. Conversely, you don't need to spend water to get water, nor does it cease to exist when you consume it. You can replenish a region's water supplies indefinitely.
> The problem with new cities is generally trying to move employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most planned cities without a specific employment reason either fail or become big suburbs.
If the companies won't move, tax them enough to build the infrastructure to support their employees. Either you'll have no problem getting them to relocate, or there will be no need to.
> Making it easier to move to other countries is not exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India is not in control of how the US makes legislation and pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would probably make the situation worse, not better.
1) The US is not the only country to move to, or even the best option 2) The US is a nation of immigrants which could most certainly be convinced to take immigrants from India with the proper incentive structure 3) As an emerging powerhouse, the assumption India has no negotiating leverage and is simply at the mercy of other nations seems extremely unfounded
As someone descended from poor subsistence farmers who moved to the other side of the planet to avoid famine, I am extremely skeptical of the claim that millions of people will just sit back and wait to die of dehydration as the water supplies dwindle. History is a long tale of people migrating to greener pastures when they are available and making pastures greener when they are not, and I see no reason that this time around will be any different.
If you haven't been following the news in the last decade or two, that has been causing an increasing array of other issues.
Why does it entail that? And do you mean forced abortions?
And no, forced sterilization, as in the surgical procedure to permanently end the ability to conceive, is a thing.
More relevant, historical precedence in India:
> As the fertility rate began to decrease (but not quickly enough), more incentives were offered, such as land and fertilizer. In 1976, compulsory sterilization policies were put in place and some disincentive programs were created to encourage more people to become sterilized. However, these disincentive policies, along with “sterilization camps” (where large amounts of sterilizations were performed quickly and often unsafely), were not received well by the population and gave people less incentive to participate in sterilization. The compulsory laws were removed. Further problems arose and by 1981, there was a noticeable problem in the preference for sons. Since families were encouraged to keep the number of children to a minimum, son preference meant that female fetuses or young girls were killed at a rapid rate.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_(medicine)#Natio...
Don't push politics and ideologies into things that have little to do with it. What you describe is the underlying problem, one that needs to be solved as well (though how, is another thing). But solving that, even today, won't bring water to the people who need it today.
The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each decade in India and quality of life is lower than in the 70s when the population was 555million (currently 1.3b).
Meanwhile the upper castes flee the country en-masse to the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe.
The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. It will be substantially easier to fix water infrastructure if this number was hundreds of millions lower. Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams.
"Population management" is a road leading straight to ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms of suffering. There have been many of these - genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child policy".
The best way a society can handle population management is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access to healthcare and a social security network so that people don't have to have half a dozen children if they want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them at old age.
You can say that about anything: socialist policies, "no-tolerance" policies, anything that looks like censorship.
You say there have been many such example, then trot out Nazi Germany; The fact the Nazis purposefully initiated a genocide (the holocaust) out of hatred out the Jews undermines the suggestion that there was a genuine attempt at population management.
Chinas also has a pretty poor human rights example, aside from it's 1-child policy.
Do you have any example of a modern (first-world, developed) country with a good human-rights record, and QOL index pursuing population management?
Seems like the Brits have done a lot, historically in Indian and China, but have their hands full at the moment with Brexit to reunite the "kingdom." My money is on the Chinese and their scientists in exchange for concessions that will further isolate the United States due to xenophobic thinking some people in the states perpetuate. How long before "their" water born illnesses become our airborne viruses?
BS. They just don't want to be part of a new "kingdom".
Brexiteers don't trust EU politician, but they also don't trust UK politicians.
> My money is on the Chinese
Chinese aggression isn't much better than US "xenophobic thinking", plus India has pretty good contacts with Europe and other south-Asian countries. Plus there is a large and influential Indian population in the US, I'd be surprised in The Indian population in China are half as influential.
India could undergo governmental reform and hire, say, German experts (or Indian experts!) to help revitalize their water infrastructure. Just illustrating a scenario where things change for the better and neither China nor America is involved whatsoever.
The things that need to be done are public knowledge or easy to find out. Most of the west already does it, and has been for one hundred years or so. There is nothing magical about turning bad water into clean drinkable water. All that India is lacking is the will (probably because of money or corruption - both real problems).
And on an ethical note, managing populations is something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
The population boom over the last 100 years is not due to people reproducing too much, it is due to a decrease in child mortality, that and development from agricultural to industrial economies meant a cultural lag time in reducing the number of kids a woman has.
Once you have an industrial economy, the pressure then becomes to have less kids. You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally. If you need proof, these education programs didn't exist in the west during development into industrial economies and yet the fertility rate decreased simply due to economic pressures.
A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement rate. At that rate population does not increase.
Long story short, at least in cities (where the water shortage we are talking about is happening) you won't see a doubling of the population due to sustained fertility. So the shortages you see of water and other resources can be entirely attributed to inefficient resource allocation, and once capacity is increased to match population you won't have to worry about it again and again.
This is a good point which often gets overlooked in the heated debate of population explosion.
Coincidentally just a year or two ago Indian growth rate reached replacement levels[1]. As per the latest data (not sure if it's been reviewed/confirmed) it's now slightly below the replacement levels.
Also, if you notice, the southern states's growth rate is well below that of replacement level.
[1] https://niti.gov.in/content/total-fertility-rate-tfr-birth-w...
I don't think it is impossible to bring the projected population of India up to decent living standards, I think this is highly unlikely, but my point doesn't account for that, so it could very well be.
That's just a theory, and if you're wrong, then what? A description of what you think will happen needs better evidence. At least one other factor is religious/cultural inertia encouraging people to have lots of children, and that is somewhat characteristic/unique for each given culture s.t. you can't really generalise it too much.
There was a similar theory about non-democracies being unstable (Democratic peace theory, wrt greater public wealth), and how free trade liberates nations. How did that turn out for Chinese superpower?
China is an emerging superpower, and economic powerhouse, and anti-democratic to the extend of suppressing democracy in HK. It also does lot of trade that never seems to encourage an increase in civil liberties.
Now, maybe the theory was all an illusion caused by the domination and coercive power, of existing democratic nations.
Their issue here is poor governance, economic inequality, and climate change.
Is every progression on human DNA eugenics? Is every new law facism?
"Family planning" suggests agency. Humans have agency. The comment I'm responding to explicitly recommends forced reduction in fertility rates, removing agency, something you don't do to human beings unless you think of them like sheep or cattle. Equating a one or no child policy with "family planning" is extremely disingenuous.
Any law that tells human beings how many children they are allowed to have is fascism, yes. Any directive telling human beings how they have to reproduce is eugenics by definition.
It could be dysgenics, depending on what the instructions are. :-P How about private charities that provide voluntary incentives for some people to self-sterilize and others to have more kids? How about private charities that subsidize birth control and abortions? How about friends and family encouraging people to marry someone smart, or telling people with genetic disorders that they should adopt? Do you draw a line somewhere in the above between "eugenics" and "not eugenics"? I think your line would be far from universal. dictionary.com says "the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population", which would indeed encompass all of the above. I'm afraid the word "eugenics", like "fascism", has been corrupted into "something whose exact definition is unclear, but it's definitely a bad thing".
> Any law that tells human beings how many children they are allowed to have is fascism, yes.
So what is there to prevent some people from having 10 children, every generation, until the system collapses under their weight? If you say "it's the parents' responsibility to provide for the kids, and if they don't manage to do so from their own resources or persuade anyone else, then the kids may starve and that will limit the process", then, fine, that would work; though many people think the state should always prevent kids (or perhaps people generally) from starving, and I think policies with that effect have been enacted even in the U.S., and I doubt they will get repealed anytime soon.
You say that people with increased access to education and health and such naturally reduce their birth rates. That may be. But I think it would be only a matter of time before they got selected for impulsivity, high libido, inclination to adhere to the parents' religion that says to maximize children, or whatever other traits would lead to a bunch of people actually having tons of kids they can't support. (Perhaps the singularity and/or genetic engineering and/or other stuff will happen and make that irrelevant long before it becomes an issue.) Maybe those traits would also lead to doing things that land them in jail for years, getting a reproductive penalty that way; I dunno if that would be enough.
> So what is there to prevent some people from having 10 children, every generation, until the system collapses under their weight?
The fact that if they can't feed those children those children will die and the standard of living of their other children will be significantly reduced. Natural economic pressure handles this problem already.
>You say that people with increased access to education and health and such naturally reduce their birth rates. That may be. But I think it would be only a matter of time before they got selected for impulsivity, high libido, inclination to adhere to the parents' religion that says to maximize children, or whatever other traits would lead to a bunch of people actually having tons of kids they can't support.
That's more speculative than anything I've said so far, everything I've said so far has a historical example to reference. Even if that were to happen, not bring able to support the people you create means reduced standard of living, and therefore reduced resource consumption, at best. Again, the problem is self correcting.
This is not how people works. I have seen people who gives 10 children due to religion thing. Sure the quality life is low but they don't care. There children are also doing same thing. You may be open to ideas but many religious people don't think like that. They will simply trade low quality life thinking more children brings more money.
your alternative is to eliminate a significant potion of the population
managing populations is something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
> The comment I'm responding to explicitly recommends forced reduction in fertility rates, removing agency
where does it? It's a comment previous that the same poster talks about Chinas 1cp, and as I understand it, it was implemented as a fine for having more than one child.
Do punitive fines, and tax/welfare incentives/disincentives count as being "forced" or "non-agency"?
> Any law that tells human beings how many children they are allowed to have is fascism, yes.
I disagree. Point me to a commonly accepted definition of fascism that agrees, without requiring too much subjective interpretation. Anyone can have their own notion of what constitutes freedom/oppression etc.
> Any directive telling human beings how they have to reproduce is eugenics by definition.
Again, show me that definition. Most that I've seen limit the choice of who can procreate. A flat rule of 1-child applied to everyone equally doesn't seem to apply to me as there is no differentiation based on genetics. But in any case, a rose by any other name: deciding something fits a definition doesn't really change the semantics, so it doesn't really make any difference, especially if you are using a special-case, or non-standard application of the definition (e.g. like arguing abortion is bad based on whether it counts as murder, or not).
Managing populations does not have to include killing people. China's one child policy strictly and explicitly prohibited couples from having more than one child. You're softening the definition of what I was responding to to discredit my response.
I consider Fascism as authoritarianist, but not necessarily the other way around: there are plenty communist regimes that are authoritarian (including maybe China) but that are not considered Fascist.
> China's one child policy strictly and explicitly prohibited couples from having more than one child
Sure, but you seem to assume what this means. I don't read what you assume into the original post. Again, what about Chinas 1cp specifically do you believe to be fascist and/or immoral?
meh, not really. The OP may have worded it bluntly but the distribution of free contraceptives, access to birth control is just the 'nudging' version of the same thing. I always find it a little bit hilarious how you can reframe population politics in terms of some technocratic wonk policy or language and then it's total cool, whereas just doing a one-child policy is evil despite having virtually the same goal
I was basing my response on what was clearly stated. You can't just reinterpret what someone else said for them. There is a big difference between "distribution of free contraceptives" and "one child policy" and you can't wiggle your way around that.
In 'free' societies when governing elites want a policy outcome they dress it in women's liberation and rights language, put a tax on something or hand you a subsidy to remind you of what you're supposed to do, in China they don't give a crap and send you somewhere by fiat. tomato tomahto
In that sense authoritarianism actually treats you less like cattle, because authoritarians think highly enough of their subjects to actually perceive them as a threat. The modern western technocrat on the other hand pretty much just thinks everyone's a number in an excel sheet.
india will run out of resources(and water) before population hits a peak. depopulation is a statistical guarantee. reducing population voluntarily is the only way to assure a reasonable stock of the gene pool before the country completely runs out of resources and scarcity escalates into wars of depopulation(historically, it has been proven that war always follows drought or famine on a larger scale..from genghis khan to african tribes to vikings to the last syrian war, if you can collect enough data sets about world famine/droughts/scarcities, wars always follow.)
now..how to go about it. its a multi pronged approach:
1. stop incentivising children. what does this mean? instead of punitive measures or coercive one child policy, the state should incentivise responsible procreation and reward the child free. like an UBI for those who dont contribute to population growth.
2. provide free preservation of genetic material(sperm/eggs/dna) in a gene pool databank for posterity. this may not mean anything. it may amount to something. the idea that a 'legacy' might have a chance in a better world through frozen dna is a perk. it is a small cost and a nice gesture to reward selfless action for the nation. also: who knows what we might need in 300-500 years later.
3. go back to village or rural economies. by this, i dont mean that indians should start turning back time wrt sci and tech. what i mean is that people should go back village size communities. these have to be self governing and self sustaining units that can manage their own resources.
4. diversity is a double edged sword. i am not talking about social diversity, but diversity of resource expenditure and resource scarcity. there are too many people in india and to a certain extent, more cohesion and homogeneous living/way of life will give smaller communities more agency over how they manage local resources.
example: a meat eating population has a different resource expenditure pattern than a vegetarian/dairy inclusive one. rural communities differ from urban community's needs. droughty areas have different management starategies than those with monsoons.
5. it's very easy wrt water. dig more ponds and save rain water. protect watersheds and prevent ag/industrial runoffs. adopt 'nile valley' model of digging canals. take whatever you grow indoors into hydroponic systems. india still gets a lot of rain during the monsoons. development of rural areas and relieving the pressure in urban density will help. but only if there is a limit on the number of people per resource budgeted zone.
6. more importantly..before the depopulation occurs due to scarcity of resources, there is a real danger for india. if the wet bulb temperatures[1]rise as predicted, the heat and humidity will kill people in their sleep. they'd go to bed and die in their sleep.[2]
[..]He and his colleagues previously looked at how heat waves would evolve with warming in the Middle East and found that region will likely be home to the highest wet-bulb temperatures the world will see. (Bandar Mahshahr in Iran hit a wet-bulb temperature of nearly 95°F during a 2015 heat wave, which translates to a heat index of about 163°F (73°C).) But South Asia poses the bigger concern in terms of threats to people, as it is home to one fifth of the world’s population and is an area of deep poverty.
“That combination is what makes, what shapes this acute vulnerability,” Eltahir said.
Eltahir and his colleagues found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, parts of eastern India and Bangladesh will exceed the 95°F threshold by century’s end and most of South Asia will approach that threshold.
If emissions are substantially curtailed and global temperature rise meets the 2°C (3.6°F) limit agreed to in the Paris accord, no place in South Asia would exceed 95°F, though wet-bulb temperatures over 88°F would be widespread. Such temperatures can still be deadly, especially to already vulnerable populations like the elderly.[..]
[1]https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-change...
[2]https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-india-most-...
Yeah but people have a survival instinct. They won't just say"Hey, it's so hot I will die before I wake up. Let's go to sleep!". They'll go somewhere where they won't die. They will go to where we are...
and how and where will a few hundred million people migrate?
[..]Currently, about 2 percent of the Indian population is occasionally exposed to extreme wet-bulb temperatures (between 89 and 94 degrees). According to a 2017 study, by 2100 that number could increase to 70 percent. [..]
https://scroll.in/article/931865/the-human-body-cant-cope-in... : Human body can’t cope infinitely with rising temperatures – and in India, it is close to its limits At a certain temperature, sweat stops evaporating – shutting down the body's cooling mechanism, causing death. Parts of the world are already there.
When the air temperature exceeds 35 degrees Celsius, the body relies on the evaporation of water – mainly through sweating – to keep core temperature at a safe level. This system works until what is called the wet-bulb temperature reaches 35 degrees Celsius. The wet-bulb temperature includes the cooling effect of water evaporating from the thermometer and so is normally much lower than the normal dry-bulb temperature reported in weather forecasts.
Once this wet-bulb temperature threshold is crossed, the air is so full of water vapour that sweat no longer evaporates. Without the means to dissipate heat, our core temperature rises, irrespective of how much water we drink, how much shade we seek, or how much rest we take. Without respite, death follows – soonest for the very young, elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions.
Wet-bulb temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius have not yet been widely reported, but there is some evidence that they are starting to occur in South West Asia. Climate change then offers the prospect that some of the most densely populated regions on Earth could pass this threshold by the end of the century, with the Persian Gulf, South Asia and most recently the North China Plain on the front line. These regions are, together, home to billions of people.[...]
Peak temperatures don't occur during the night. How do you figure heat wave will kill people in their sleep?
The one child policy has been disastrous for China. Imagine a whole generation of people that have no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles (after 2 generations of one child policy). The social fabric in China has been gutted by this policy. Also it means that after 1 generation of this policy the number of working people is significantly less than the number of retired people. It destroys economic output and ability to care for a population, the oldest people suffer in a system like this, and younger people spend more of their earnings taking care of older people than improving their lives, so living standards stagnate or go down, you wind up with less resource availability.
A no child policy leads to extinction after one generation. You don't even need to do research on anything to know this, just simply thinking about what you're saying for a moment works.
A reduction in population does not increase resources available to people. Resources must be produced by people, a reduction in population also reduces that output. For historical proof, look at the numerous examples of famines that occurred in previous centuries, when there were less than a billion people on earth, by your logic life should've been more plentiful throughout history until recently but the opposite is actually the case, because resource availability scales with production capacity, it does not simply decrease with demand pressure.
In China's case, even at the height of pre-automation manufacturing economy, the manufacturing sector accounted for 400M jobs. 300M work in agriculture, kept deliberately deindustrialized (until recently) specifically as a jobs program. Today, 600M subsist on less than 2000 USD per year. These are excess people. What do these numbers mean? World demand was/is literally not enough of uplift 1.4B Chinese out of poverty. That's simply too many people. The sooner China can settle at 800M (2100 estimate) the better. There's literally not enough resources in the world for China to consume much above middle income, let alone high income like the west. If everyone consumed like US we would need 5 earths. China is 1/5 of global population.
Long term, One Child Policy was the better moral calculus despite social ramifications, i.e. demographic bomb, which TBF is blown out of proportion. It's better to be less populous and rich than the alternative. At minimum wealth allows you to import cheap surplus labour to take care of aging populations, which China should be able to arbitrage internally due to income disparity. Family Planning and crudely, millions dead under Mao worked in China's favour (well minus purging experts). The alternative is geometric population explosion to support successive generations. We know from overpopulation studies that this is fundamentally a self terminating system that will exceed carrying capacity of Earth.
Every human being alive is made up of biomass, which means that the meat that people are made up of was once animals and plants, also eating, also drinking water. So the idea that food and water shortages are caused by increase in human population is simply not possible. It is not possible for there to be more people than there are resources to create them in the first place.
The only real difference is that human beings consume industrial goods and excess consumption caused by increase in standard of living (for example flushing toilets, something animals and plants do not do). But even considering these things, they're due to an increase in standard of living which can only come from an increase in production. In aggregate, humans cannot consume more than we can produce. So it follows that an increase in population that causes resource shortages can only lead to a reduction in living standards, and only down to the living standards of a subsistence agrarian society. Overconsumption of resources then is a self correcting problem.
Now, suppose human beings could exceed the earth's carrying capacity, which I have just showed you is not possible. This would cause many human beings to die from starvation, as the decrease in living standards would take us below the standard of living of subsistence agriculture in this hypothetical scenario. Even in this extreme case, it is still a self correcting problem. There is no need to artificially correct it.
Any and all problems that appear to stem from overpopulation are actually resource allocation problems, inefficiencies in resource distribution. The problem with China is not that the resources cannot be produced to support the population, the problem is that the resources are inefficiently distributed, in part because a centrally controlled economy cannot possibly distribute resources more efficiently than a distributed (or free market) economy, but that is a different discussion.
You're forgetting the most extreme form of self correction... People killing each other in a coordinated fashion AKA war.
The problem with your argument is that you consider wars to be an acceptable solution.
In such a world where there are too many people, we get suggestions such as instituting a one child policy, forced sterilization, outward extremists even discuss culling populations. What's the difference between that and war? The difference is, in war you have agency. War happens organically between people. An authoritarian solution takes agency away entirely. People are not free to be people, but you wind up with, best case scenario, the same result with regard to resource management. So yes, even in extreme circumstances where war is a response to resource shortages, it is still a preferable outcome to authoritarianism.
>Well, first of all, I demonstrated how this extreme case is impossible, but let's address war.
Did you happen to be an engineer working on the design or marketing of the Titanic in a past life? You sure sound like it. You also sound like you have not once ever grown a plant.
You can go from perfectly green and healthy to dead in a week if you don't pay attention. A seed can flourish just fine, only to eventually die as the energy burden required for it to thrive is no longer met. If this happens before you go to seed, congratulations, your population of plants just went extinct due to breaching the carrying capacity of their environment.
Try raising an orchid some time. I guarantee you'll learn something. One of the Vanilla ones in particular is best.
Your arguments are naive and reek of "not my problem" type thinking. You may believe that carrying capacity is a a priori defined as "I'm here, therefore not exceeded" but it isn't.
We're all hot-house flowers who are facing the possibility of the gardener (humanity collectively) just saying "screw it" and destroying our chances at continued success.
And war... War'll happen, and calling that a systemic self-correction is both callous and wretched beyond all reason. Nevermind that no one tends to factor in environmental damage that occurs as a result of warfare.
Try to stick to discussing the topic and my point rather than attacking me personally, it is much more effective and productive.
War IS authoritarianism. History shows that war pretty much requires it.
Looking at recorded human history, the long term trend consistently is that the population has risen. This means resource availability has increased, either due to discovery of new sources, invention, efficiency increase. Shocking decreases in some or other resource have had little effect on this trend.
Unavailability of some resource just means reduction in standard of living, for everything except food and water. And again, the net biomass on earth does not increase the more humans are here, and so the demand for food and water does not change whether that biomass is humans or buffalo. There can be no food or water shortages from overpopulation, only mismanagement and natural disaster.
The free market is the only thing capable of handling shocks, no other system is flexible or agile enough to quickly resolve a change in resource availability or demand. And sudden change of resource availability is not what we are talking about, we are talking about resource shortage due to overpopulation. A shock decrease in resources would result in disaster no matter how many people exist, so trying to address it by managing population levels is pointless.
I've been filling this bucket with water, and it's never overflown. Therefore the bucket can contain infinite water.
Free market economics don't work so well when the biggest players decide to augment their value proposition with the barrel of a gun. Available biomass is not the relevant metric when determining the carrying capacity of the earth, with the obvious caveat that by carrying capacity, we mean some definition that includes the continuation of modern society.
I'd say a more apt comparison to the point I'm making is "I've been filling this bucket with after and it's never overflown, and it appears that there is no way to overfill the bucket and exceed it's carrying capacity." I never said anything about continuous population growth, in fact, my point is that it is not possible to grow the population beyond the carrying capacity.
People can have different daily-intake requirements as children versus adults, plus a growing populations consummation can temporarily exceed food production by burning trough food stores. Also, local food production can vary, place to place, season to season - what's sustainable during a good year, might not be during a bad one.
Plants and animals can eat and drink things humans can't; e.g. a plant is fine with muddy, faeces-contaminated water, it would even thrive on it. Livestock may happily eat grass/straw long-term.
The killing of one cow won't feed a human for the rest of their lives - multiple cows are needed to provide constant food, and the cow population may as such increase along with the human population.
When the rate at which the cows are eating grass is faster than the rate at which the grass grows, your population is unsustainable, and you will eventually not be able to feed everyone. The only sense in which it's "impossible to exceed the carrying capacity of the earth" is that when you do, people will die.
So I should elaborate, global overpopulation is impossible. Local overpopulation and resource shortages are possible, but this is not due to too many people (as the resources exist somewhere on earth to support them) but due to inefficient resource management.
Local shock increases in population are due to migration, not birth rate explosion, since birth rate follows resource availability. And again, a sudden migration from one place to another of large numbers of people (which we see in urbanization) is another example of inefficient resource allocation.
The increase in resource demand from a person as they grow into adulthood is a consideration, but an indicator that resources are strained is child mortality. The fact that it is decreasing worldwide tells us that we are not at the edge of carrying capacity. Even if we were, the result would be either decreased standard of living or increased child mortality, and thus the problem self corrects. My assertion again is that human population cannot exceeded carrying capacity globally.
Some creatures can consume resources that humans need to process before consuming, but in aggregate the amount of biomass stays the same and so the resources are always available. It is a question of production, not availability. An increase in livestock that depletes the food store of the herd is essentially the same scenario as a local increase in population of humans that strains locally available resources. And like I pointed out talking about that scenario, the issue is inefficient resource allocation, not overpopulation.
The inefficient resource allocation happened because of overpopulation. Managing resource of 1 million is easy but 1 billion (Hello Hello?) is not easy.
And the issue is quality life. Do you think many people from India/China can have same quality of life like that of US? No.
Just tell me how would u make efficient resource allocation? The world simply doesn't demand excess population. When there is more population resources must be shared and when resources are shared quality of life decreased leading to all sort of problem.
Why is that a waste of effort?
Municipalities in most of Urban India are hand in glove with these water tanker mafias.
Good governance is the answer.
But there’s also a lot of truck-delivered water used in construction/dust control.
No shortage of reports/charges: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/23/pepsi-coke-b...
Not if they’re taking it from folks who now don’t have enough.
Show me the computer program that knows how to create a pencil? And then a toaster? How does it know how many toasters will be needed? Is a toaster more important than a smart watch?
Also, if you have such a Computer program, you could use it to beat the markets. You could use it to compute the perfect prices of futures (because you know the future demand and supply). So I guess there is your answer: if you had such a Computer, you could beat the markets, as long as you don't do that, markets are better.
Is boiling water not option or am I missing something? On a world scale having a potable tap water is more of an exception than a norm.
Even if heating with gas/electricity, aiming for boiling is hard to screw up, but an overshoot of what’a required.
This is only good for bacteria/viruses.
To be fair, waterborne illness is very often organic related: microbes, viruses, bacteria, etc.
What can you call a chronic 20 year drought when it stretches to 40 years?
What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but these states are mostly still growing as part of the American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land only became easily accessible with the completion of the interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s. Therefore, the material abundance necessary for truly large scale populations to live in comfort has only come to these places in the last 40 years. This has caused a consistent population boom in some places which is not yet tapering and will lead to increased stress on these resources.
R/O is expensive. Tons of opportunities in the average home for re-use. Can use that shower/sink/laundry/dish water for toilets. A selective automatic bypass system could save the (mostly soapless) water to replace plant/garden watering (though that’s evaporation!).
On the one hand, this is true in a literal sense. On the other, there are as many people (~20M) in the SoCal triangle southwest of the Transverse Ranges as there are in the remainder of the Colorado and Great Basins (NV+AZ+UT+CO = ~20M) combined, yet we continue to ship water from Lake Mead and Owens Lake to Los Angeles. Improving the situation in California would take a lot of stress off of everyone else.
I thought this was a deliberate approach: the city would round-robin supply water and if you’re wealthy, you fill your tanks when it’s your turn, and if you’re not, you do all of your water consumption during those periods.
Properly trading water is more important for industry and agriculture. And I'd be very happy, if some very 'thirsty' crops like almonds or industrial applications would stop because they might not be profitable once you take the full cost of water into account.
The alternative is what you see eg in California, where residential users of water often face severe restrictions, but many agricultural users have grandfathered water rights that they have to squander to keep.
Yeah, that's developed-world life talking.
Markets absolutely work at dissuading growing almonds in the desert. Until there's too much wealth disparity, and Peter is willing to pay more than Paul has in total for desert-grown almonds. Either Paul steals the water or he dies, and thieves aren't popular.
Of course there's another form of currency - votes. I can't really say they're universally distributed, because FPTP screws up the purchasing power of a vote. But I'd give good odds on a very strong correlation between a functioning democracy and cheap water.
> Markets absolutely work at dissuading growing almonds in the desert. Until there's too much wealth disparity, and Peter is willing to pay more than Paul has in total for desert-grown almonds. Either Paul steals the water or he dies, and thieves aren't popular.
Eh, unlikely. Peter will just get his almonds from the cheapest supplier, who is unlikely to be growing in a desert.
There's nothing special about water in the scenario you are describing. Plenty of other commodities are traded on markets, and more developed markets have meant better and more secure supply for everyone, especially poor people.
> Of course there's another form of currency - votes. I can't really say they're universally distributed, because FPTP screws up the purchasing power of a vote. But I'd give good odds on a very strong correlation between a functioning democracy and cheap water.
Only some countries use FPTP. In any case, there's a strong correlation between any attributes generally seen as desirable. Figuring out causation is harder.
Btw, you know what poor people lack even more than money: influence and connections. I wouldn't look to politics to improving their lot.
Btw, poor people lacking influence is not consistent with how quite a lot of European nobles died or the vast array of modern working practices that are suboptimal from a capitalist's point of view. I'll leave the debate there since I've no interest in arguing a fictional universe.
I believe people dying (noble or otherwise) is the recurring historical singularity we're trying to avoid; so we can both acknowledge that the poor can violently and quite temporarily gain political advantage while recognizing that during non-singular time periods (which is most of time) the converse is generally true.
Europeans generally didn't kill off their nobles much. (Mostly the French Revolution and the Russian October Revolution come to mind.)
Sure, but this is water in California.
> Until there's too much wealth disparity, and Peter is willing to pay more than Paul has in total for desert-grown almonds.
You're not going to have so much demand for thousand dollar almonds that it makes a significant impact.
https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths
For almonds you have to frame it about where that water is coming from, ie dairy from outside California may be less impactful. So the question should be whether futures will help sourcing water better in some sense
Side thought: on things using way too much water, it's always amusing that more water goes into producing bottles as opposed to the water content in a bottled water
If a almond takes the same amount of water per calorie as a strawberry, does it matter that it has a husk?
No. But it sounded like you were surprised that almonds were so consumptive it the first place. I don't know off the top of my head that they are consumptive relative to any given metric, but it shouldn't be surprising that they are, considering how almonds "work" and how much they are produced in CA.
Especially since you compared against wine. Wine can be extremely drought tolerant; there are wine fields in california that are only watered for the first season of growth and the remaining productive years are sustained by waters from the local aquifers (rainfall).
I think the confusion comes because people don't take calorie density into account.
An acre of grapes produces 375 million calories and uses 2.5 Acreft of water An acre of almonds produces 580 million calories and uses 3 acreft of water Beef is much much worse.
As an aside, Husks take up negligible water in terms of the trees consumption and are not a good indicator. 99% of the water used by nut trees goes into evaporation.
Since you're saying 99% evaporation, I assume for most everything most water follows air flows which through the pareto principle collect to places which don't need water? (& may actively not want water in the case of flooding)
The valuable output of the water (H20) is converted to other molecules (eg sugar, cellulose, ect). You could measure this by the change in plant mass from the start of the season to harvest time.
Some of the water will also seep into the ground deeper than the tree can reach, and some will be lost as evaporated vapor from the leaves and tissue.
This water would is generally gone from the system. This can and cause increased humidity and cloud formation and be blown to different locations. There is some literature on the subject.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/hydr/15/3/jhm-d-1... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-008-0445-z
They aren't saying people should go after wine makers for wasting water. They're saying going after almonds is scapegoating. Calorie density will tend to come up in that context because the premise is that vegans are increasing demand for almonds which is squandering water on poor nutrition. This plays on memes about vegan diets being insufficient nutritionally
As it turns out neither almonds nor wine are really to blame for California's droughts. So yes, ferment some alcohol & be merry
IF we use almonds for food, I think it is reasonable to compare almonds to other foods, and ask how much water they use. As such, I used numbers for edible table grapes.
IF the end goal is to to change state policy to make water use more efficient, I think we need to answer the question of why some foods are allowed to use more water than others.
I had Californian almonds in Europe and Asia. I don't get Califarnian beef there. (The beef on offer is usual from places with fewer water problems. There's no big need to conserve water where it ain't scarce.)
So almonds are very visible.
The problem I saw with nut trees, is during the drought nuts became far more profitable, largely because they are not drought resistant. So, a lot of farms were replacing the more traditional, regional, drought-resistant plants (hay, alfalfa, soy?) with nut trees that would take 5-8 years to mature and use way more water.
Both crops are based on pumped water. Trees can survive on 10% water for a year but wont bear fruit or make a profit. The other crops cant be grown on 10% water. You simply don't plant alfalfa if you don't have the water.
But the actual almonds are only something like 6% water by weight, so when that pound of almonds leaves the farm for some far off destination it is only taking about an ounce of that 16000 pounds of water with it.
What happens to the other almost 16000 pounds that does not end up in the almonds?
Giving producers and consumers a way to get a standardized contract at a given point ahead in time usually makes the price of the underlying commodity much more stable.
It has been argued that the way our society operates is based on the concept of futures contracts. It all began with the Dutch tulip futures in the 17th century that stabilized flower prices and made them a viable business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
"Unknown" is something of a problem when preparing the budget for next year. I could buy X gallons now, but then I'd need a way to store it. Or, I could agree to pay a specific price now for water that would be delivered in the future.
First, if you look hard enough, you can see traces of the hand of government in almost anything on earth, including any market.
In practice, government meddling is a matter of degree and kind. The dose makes the poison. There are some markets that are free enough of interference that we can fruitfully analyze them as 'free' markets.
Second, what do you mean by 'try to game the market'? In general, markets are sustainable in the long run without government interference (and usually actually more stable this way).
Interactions in markets often behave like the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. So, yes, for a single interaction it's profitable to cheat the other guy, but repeated interactions tend very strongly towards cooperation.
Even Adam Smith recognised the need for government regulation to ensure that markets remain free.
Edit: I think you may have misread my comment; I wasn't claiming that there is no such thing as a market without government interference (though that is probably mostly true). I was claiming that a market cannot be free without government regulating it to keep it free.
Markets are more robust than you give them credit for.
One argument is that rather often governments themselves are trying to monopolize markets with all their regulatory might, but grey and black markets usually spring up rather quickly.
Trying to monopolize a market as a private participant (even a big one) without the government on your side is even harder.
I do agree that monopolies are an important consideration when designing regulation. But mostly in the sense that your regulation has to be careful to avoid supporting monopolies. Especially barriers to entry are often overlooked.
For example, regardless of content, complexity of regulation itself can be a barrier to entry. Compliance takes a lot of lawyers and accountants. (Eg most agricultural subsidies around the world go to really big farms. And financial regulation's complexity essentially forces banks to become big.)
If regulators were really interested in combatting monopolies, there are a few straightforward strategies to try first:
* Encourage foreign competitors to enter domestic markets
* Encourage companies from different industries to branch out (eg Walmart tried to offer banking services a while ago. Lobbying by banks kept that competition at bay.)
* Encourage start-ups. (This is much harder for governments than the first two points. One way to encourage start-ups is via simplifying regulations. But there are lots of other popular ways that don't work well. See eg all the government funding available for tech startups in Europe that sadly doesn't seem to produce much by and large; but it feels good to hand out money.)
> In general, markets are sustainable in the long run without government interference (and usually actually more stable this way).
With the market, you don't even have to look very hard. Many people like to believe that the market is self-regulating and "natural," but that's not the case. It was created via government policy (hundreds of years ago), and depends on government in such fundamental ways that it's inseparable from it.
The market would destroy itself (and much else) without government interference, and to claim otherwise is akin to denying the mountain because you're standing on top of it.
1) The "market" (for what, you don't say) was created by government policy hundreds of years ago (but not thousands of yeas ago?)
2) The market needs constant interference in order to not destroy itself (and again you seem to be referring to a great range of economic activity, perhaps all of it, but not all of it because you're also saying it would destroy "much else")
Do you have evidence to support either of these claims, other than begging the question? Would you like to modify them so that they are more specific?
By market, I'm referring to what we refer to as the market today, which is a relatively modern invention. Sure, for thousands of years there have been things called "markets," but they were far more limited in scope and their role in society was not nearly the same.
> 2) The market needs constant interference in order to not destroy itself (and again you seem to be referring to a great range of economic activity, perhaps all of it, but not all of it because you're also saying it would destroy "much else")
I mean, isn't this obvious? The market itself is not going to enforce contracts, it's not going prevent a wealthy person from paying for a private army and making his own rules, it's not going to do anything about monopolies and cartels (at least not on a reasonable timescale), it's not going to manage negative externalities, it's not going to address or mitigate socially destabilizing economic forces, etc.
The market is like a car: it some ways it may be a modern marvel, effortlessly regulating the timing of its complicated internal workings in a way no person could, but without a driver it will run out of gas and as happily drive into a wall than not.
Contrast and compare 'Legal Systems Very Different from Ours' at eg http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...
I think most financial constructs were created by traders, not governments. Financial constructs are basically standard contracts.
Maybe this is true with respect to global financial markets, etc. But it can't possibly be true in general. People have stably traded physical goods in literal markets (i.e. stalls where you buy spices and tomatoes and such) for thousands of years with no government intervention.
Small amounts of people do not need a government because they can just represent themselves. Any city needs a government, tasting at any sensible scale needs a the government. 3000BC Egyptians had taxes, laws and a government.
Can you provide some historical example of thousands of citizens trading without a government? That would be an incredible experiment on anarchism.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0960310011008808...
Futures markets do increase spot market efficiency.
Of course, if the price increases, then you don't get the profit that this would have otherwise produced. That's the price of the insurance against low prices.
Nobody actually claims that, specially not economists. In fact, economics study exactly how and when markets don't produce the most favorable outcome.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dojima-rice-exchange.as...
Commodity markets are much closer to perfect markets than anything else.
Sure, there are plenty of poor people who are so poor that they don't have any savings at all. But surely you don't think that rainy-day funds are just a theory?
If we do get to a point where this is true, it will primarily be because of decreasing amounts of water sources, increasing population, etc. Banning water futures won't magically solve these problems.
Privately owned water is being extracted from a region and then sold. They have no incentive to sell water to those who need it to survive, except if they also accidentally make the owners more money.
One basic consequence is incredible human suffering and an extreme amount of power imbalance. Then, it is a matter of time and critical mass until things get ugly and violent.
FWIW I'm sympathetic to that position (in some form), it would just be better to be more precise... people are acting like "water is a basic human right" is a principle that can straightforwardly be used to derive the rest of our water policy.
It solidifies the notion of privately owned water sources in a general sense: That's too much "free market" for my taste and goes against my ethical disposition.
Secondly it doesn't solve any problems and challenges. The incentive here is to profit from making market predictions. No more, no less.
There are more balanced approaches to handle water distribution. Via public commissions and regulated use for example.
For many people, it allows them to get price stability. It means that, for the length of a growing season, they can have water at a known price and not be vulnerable to price swings.
IMO, that does address a real challenge or problem faced by real people. Especially in agricultural places where water markets already exist, like California.
I think you're right, though. There must be a better way to handle this. I'd love to hear about realistic ways to reform California's water rights system!
In fact futures contracts could in theory even take away a little of the power they have since, in effect, they won't be able to raise water prices on you over night, but you can have a 3-6 month warning that a price rise is coming and can plan accordingly.
Water should be free upto basic living necessities, and the government should be responsible for maintaining that.
If you mean to an end user, that's your opinion. I think we should aspire to that, but water is most definitely not "free" in general, and treating it as such is very dangerous. Even if government is responsible for providing water to the people, there is a cost (to the government for obtaining that water), and that cost needs to be accounted for somewhere.
Perhaps you can provide a better price discovery mechanism that efficiently matches the price to its cost, that is robust to environmental swings and minimizes waste. Please let us know.
Water is a scarce commodity used in industry. Since there is more demand than supply, supply has to be allocated in some way. Markets are the ordinary way of doing that.
What do you propose as an alternative? Here are some examples.
The first option is to give everyone the same amount of water, and prohibit anyone with more than they need from selling it, since that would be back to markets again. That obviously doesn't work, because some, like farms and power plants, need more than the typical household, and they would have no way to get it.
Another option would be to make water free to everyone. Use as much as you want. But it's scarce, so some would water their lawn in the middle of a drought and people would die.
Another option would be central planning. The politburo would decide how much water everyone gets. This requires your politicians to be smart enough to make better allocations than markets would and then actually apply that intelligence to the problem even when there is no personal benefit in doing that and a large personal benefit from corrupt allocations. Historically the results of doing things this way have ranged from mediocre to presiding over the deaths of millions of people.
Markets work better than all of those things, so what do you propose that works better than markets?
Note that there is a version of the first option that works great in combination with markets -- everyone gets a minimum amount of water required to live and then all the rest of the water is sold in the market. But then you still have markets for water.
I do remember early HN and even early reddit being much more pro-market. I wonder, assuming my perception mirrors a real change, whether that's down to changes in individuals' attitudes or to different people making up the bulk of the communities? Are we just going mainstream?
It shows you have registered in 2007. Quite a lot of history has happened since then which may have altered people's opinion of the pro-market narrative.
> Are we just going mainstream?
Mainstream opinion is very pro-market. Calling for abolition of either markets or value itself is a highly niche position--you will typically only see people calling, to varying degrees, of smoothing rough edges.
But yes, from an even further left point of view, full on abolishing of markets ain't that popular. (A few countries tried going in that direction throughout history, it never ended well.)
In the US the Republicans are against free trade, and the Democrats have their usually anti market stance.
About stuff since 2007: the economic difficulties in the years after mostly showed that when central banks refuse to print enough money, nominal spending drops, and the economy tanks. (The Israeli and Australian central banks kept their countries' nominal GDP stable, and mostly avoided recession.) But you are right that the perception in the mainstream does not agree with that perspective (as I mentioned, the mainstream is by-and-large anti-market.)
I'd like to see some examples.
> In the US the Republicans are against free trade
This isn't anti pro-market. This is anti market-as-totalizing-factor-in-life. These things aren't contradictory.
> and the Democrats have their usually anti market stance.
They gave us NAFTA. They passed a--i shit you not--market-mediated healthcare bill. As you speak, there is literally a power struggle happening wherein lobbyists are being stacked in Biden's future cabinet to ensure favorable market positions for their represented patrons.
I think there's a lot of confusion on your part. I think you're mis-using "market," to refer to some "free-market," that could never exist. I might be wrong, but there's no other way that I could understand how you can refer to Democrats, as a whole, as "anti-market." Sure, AOC gets a lot of press, but you're missing the forest for the trees when this forms your world-view of what that party is and does.
What I would have in mind is policy more guided by econ 101, or alternatively, whatever Estonian, Singapore and Hong Kong are doing.
The latter only by-and-large and with big exceptions obviously, since they are complicated real world places.
So called 'free trade agreements' are an interesting example: econ 101 tells us that free trade agreements are pretty silly. Adam Smith and Ricardo already showed that you should abolish your own trade barriers unilaterally regardless of what the other guy is doing, no need for any agreements.
(But that's a digression. I agree that free trade agreements are largely seen as pro-market by the general public.)
In any case, NAFTA stems from the bygone era of the Washington Consensus. It mostly predates the time I am talking about.
Yes, there's a tiny bit of market in the American healthcare system. But it's a very small sliver.
Have a look at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... and https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co... for a more in-depth and even-handed discussion than I could give you. Especially the 'certificate of need' is interesting. (Basically, existing hospitals in an area can veto any new hospital.)
Yes, if you by "market" you mean "corporate welfare" and "crony capitalism", than what your comment makes total sense.
A perfect free market might never have existed, but good enough approximations do; and it's useful to move more areas in that direction.
I have a degree in Economics. The first they thing teach you in Econ 201 is to ignore everything that happened in Econ 101: it's useful to learn to read graphs, but everything is largely useless otherwise.
Also, why are you prescribing that we ought to follow Econ 101 then 2 sentences later telling us to instead ignore Econ 101 in favor of this other thing. This is contradictory advice.
> A perfect free market might never have existed, but good enough approximations do
Good enough is arbitrary. Go check out Anarcho-Capitalists, they want a very different good-enough. Furthermore, we're finding another contradiction: your pursuit of a free-market, yet you're offering up countries with varying levels of market and capital control. Estonia, for example, has highly market-distorting healthcare/insurance industries through a monopsony. This is, again, contradictory, as a monopsony is a market-distorting force--especially when constructed through government mandate. Or is this where that ideology safety-valve kicks in: > The latter only by-and-large and with big exceptions obviously, since they are complicated real world places.
It's full of contradiction and arbitrary distinctions.
https://prosperousuniverse.com/blog/2020/11/03/learn-economi...
I think it's incredibly interesting because it helps people actually experience economic theory first hand by letting everyone run their own virtual business. It's obviously highly simplified but if you have spent your entire life on the consumer/worker side then you will never get to experience even a tiny bit of the complexity of running a real business and how economic theory works out in practice. When you aren't actually running your own business you often get hung up on high profile edge cases like monopolies where it's in your face that the economy is not in your favor but you never ever stop and think for a second about the parts of the economy that do actually work out just fine. Things like water futures are a net positive compared to the previous situation. Instead everyone in this comment section assumes the worst and thinks about how this system is going to get broken and abused because that is what they experience all the time in far more complicated situations like health care.
Free markets aren't ideal in every situation. That's true but there are also situations in which they are excellent. The closer you get to a prefect market the more effective the free market. Health care is the ultimate counter example to a perfect market and managing it as a free market will not yield efficient results.
That's obviously stupid because it would undermine all regulation because you can always ship products to an unregulated market and then ship them back. Free trade agreements exist because the countries involved want to keep some degree of regulation and they want to have a choice which regulation they get to keep.
So the EU can keep their regulations about banana curvature.
Just put domestic and foreign producers on the same footing.
I think we're in the mess we're in BECAUSE too many politicians act like all there is to know about economics is covered in econ 101.
I suggest this book - "What Every Economics Student Needs to Know and Doesn't Get in the Usual Principles Text" (https://www.amazon.com/Every-Economics-Student-Doesnt-Princi...) for some insight into what happens when perfect, academic, theoretical models collide with the real world.
The problem is that the definition of "free markets" has been badly muddied. What we have in most of the real world are not free markets. It skews everyone's opinion.
As a counter example, many places in Asia have gone more pro-market in the last decades and have benefitted enormously from it.
It's all a matter of degree, of course. Eg South Korea isn't made up of only free markets. But it has noticeably freer markets than North Korea. Or China pre- and post Deng Xiaoping.
Singapore is perhaps the closest to a free market place on earth, and is also one of the richest and safest.
I don't think this is necessarily a counter example. Certainly some individuals in these countries are much better off than they were before. The economies of these countries may be doing better, but this growth has increasingly come at the expense of a vast number of individuals lower down the pole. The youth of China moved to the city from farming towns and villages, and now work to enrich the CEOs and executives of Foxconn. Children in Bangladesh and India are spending twelve hours a day making shoes for Nike. The well off in these countries are much more well-off than they were before, but the poor are potentially in a worse/more inescapable position than they started.
> Singapore is perhaps the closest to a free market place on earth, and is also one of the richest and safest.
Singapore is a heavily authoritarian country in which the state directly controls large sectors of the market[1] and daily life.
Some quotes from the source that illustrate the extent to which the Singaporean government is directly involved in shaping and controlling the country's markets:
> State monopolies provide all utilities, telephone and postal services, port and airport services, industrial estates, and radio and television. Government ministries provide a large part of medical and health services, all sanitation services, and all education for the population from primary to tertiary level. The state Housing and Development Board houses nearly three-quarters of the population in public housing estates.
In the non-social sector they own and operate: > Singapore Airlines, ...A state trading company, a state shipping company, two state join-venture shipyards, ...The Development Bank of Singapore
The government also owns "about 75% of all land in the country".
The rest of the paper goes into detail explaining how the government routinely intervenes with subsidies and tax policy in order to force the market into whatever shape it deems fit. So I think the fact that people view Singapore at anything close to a free market is more a testament to just how effective the propaganda that has been pushing free market economic thought has been.
[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2644389?seq=...
Would you count this statement as falsified, if eg the median income in Bangladesh went up? (Or any other percentile.) If not, what would falsify that statement?
Singapore is an interesting case. You are right about ownership. I am basing my estimate more on eg the low rate of government spending compared to total GDP, general ease of doing business, light touch regulation.
Close to my heart (coming from Germany) is the absence of pervasive occupational licensing in Singapore. Similarly the absence of minimum wage laws.
> The rest of the paper goes into detail explaining how the government routinely intervenes with subsidies and tax policy in order to force the market into whatever shape it deems fit. So I think the fact that people view Singapore at anything close to a free market is more a testament to just how effective the propaganda that has been pushing free market economic thought has been.
I am currently living in Singapore, and so far the 'propaganda' has been so effective that even living here I still see that it's fairly pro-market.
And that includes talking to 'normal' locals, and also to people running businesses here.
Malaysia is useful for contrast. The government is a much bigger drag on the economy there.
The paper you quote is fairly old, and also doesn't seem to reflect the consensus of economists. (It's nonetheless interesting though.)
I don't honestly know. Quality of life is in my mind the most important factor and is hard to measure, I don't think there's any one statistic or small group of statistics that can capture it.
What worries me at the moment is the trend of 40-50 years of productivity increases leaving wages far behind. The elimination of secure, well paying jobs for the lower working classes that have been replaced with gig/service work where you hope you'll be given enough hours to make end meet that week. Sectors of local economies destroyed or made dependent on global capital firms with huge losses. I want to know where it will end, because all I can see in the future is rising inequality and stratification.
> Close to my heart (coming from Germany) is the absence of pervasive occupational licensing in Singapore. Similarly the absence of minimum wage laws.
I'm not familiar with occupational licensing in Germany. But I don't have a problem with it if it's done to ensure safety/quality and there are minimal barriers to entry, employers seem all too happy to introduce inexperienced workers to situations which may not be obviously dangerous to the worker without proper training.
Minimum wage is a fairly contentious issue, what is it you dislike about it in particular? Interestingly it looks like some sectors have enforced a minimum wage:
https://www.minimum-wage.org/international/singapore
I'd be interested in knowing why cleaning and security were singled out specifically rather than a more general rule.
>I am currently living in Singapore, and so far the 'propaganda' has been so effective that even living here I still see that it's fairly pro-market. >And that includes talking to 'normal' locals, and also to people running businesses here. >Malaysia is useful for contrast. The government is a much bigger drag on the economy there. >The paper you quote is fairly old, and also doesn't seem to reflect the consensus of economists. (It's nonetheless interesting though.)
It was interesting to see how far back the disagreement on Singapore's economy goes.
First, people usually make that claim for the US. Living standards in the developed world have improved too visibly. So let's concentrate on the US.
Second, that claim usually comes about by people comparing productivity statistics to wage statistics. Usually, both of those data sets are inflation adjusted, but via different measures of inflation.
To avoid that complication, we can just look at the ratio of nominal wages to nominal GDP over time.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/estimating-the-us-... has a graph that shows that labour share falling from about 66% in 1947 to ~58% in 2016.
That's a fall to be sure, but calling the change something like 'leaving wages far behind' seems a bit dramatic.
If I remember right, most of that lost 8% went to higher land rents. The share of capital is generally stable.
I find land rents as problematic as the next Georgist.
> I want to know where it will end, because all I can see in the future is rising inequality and stratification.
Globally, inequality has gone down massively over the last few decades. Billions of people used to starve. Now people in China and (many in) India obsess over which smart phone to buy.
> I'm not familiar with occupational licensing in Germany. But I don't have a problem with it if it's done to ensure safety/quality and there are minimal barriers to entry, employers seem all too happy to introduce inexperienced workers to situations which may not be obviously dangerous to the worker without proper training.
In Germany, the government requires a two to three year apprenticeship for you to be allowed to eg cut hair or fix a computer or lay bricks or cook etc.
In Singapore, you mostly just have to do a short health and safety training, and then it's up to the customers to reject your bad haircuts.
> Minimum wage is a fairly contentious issue, what is it you dislike about it in particular?
They are an instance of the 'Copenhagen interpretation of ethics': https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
If we want poor people to have more money, we should levy a general tax of some kind, and then use the proceeds to give them more money.
Minimum wages put a burden on people who interact with poor people instead. So they encourage you to find ways around having to interact with poor people. Eg you can avoid the burden by eg replacing workers with robots, or by shopping at a more upmarket place than Walmart. Or eating at fancy restaurants instead of Burger King.
(You might notice that the people shopping at places that hire a lot of minimum waged workers tend to be also on the poorer side.
And I don't think business owners are absorbing the costs of minimum wages, because capital is internationally mobile.)
> It was interesting to see how far back the disagreement on Singapore's economy goes.
I asked Google Scholar to tell me who cited the paper you quoted to get some further context. The paper and author seem to be embedded in some particular corner of economics.
Wikipedia and most of the rest of the world describe Singapore as free market. (Including also the economists blogging at econlog.)
> I'd be interested in knowing why cleaning and security were singled out specifically rather than a more general rule.
I might look up the history behind that. In general, I assume it was some pragmatic bending to political pressure. In some instances the population is not quite as free market as the government here.
I really like the system Singapore has for cars. Basically, the government sets an overall limit for the number of cars on the island. It's about a million at the moment. Those one million permits are auctioned off to the highest bidders for ten years at a time. Each month, roughly 1% of permits expire and are auctioned off again.
The auction is a simple affair:
The government takes all the bids from the current month, and determines the lowest price that clears the market. Ie every one who bid more than the clearing price gets a permit at the clearing price. Everyone who doesn't get a permit bid less than the clearing price.
To come to the point: often people suggest that instead of every winner paying the same price, winners should be made to pay what they bid.
For some reason, that's supposed to make big companies pay more in the end, and individuals pay less.
Of course, big companies are exactly the kind of institutions who can afford the modelling and research to forecast the clearing price, and they can also afford to miss out or get a few extra cars in their fleet.
(Thus the government understands economics a bit better than much of the population.)
It's also a good illustration of how the government intervenes here, instead of letting everyone drive a car, but does so in a way that econ 101 would approve of.
Student loans, house loans, car loans, payday loans. Food deserts, prison standard of living. Social mobility in general. "Right to work", worker protection. At-will firing. Non-existing safety nets. Days of vacation and parental leave. Average savings per capita.
Most of the above are absolutely more feudalist (not sure about the neo prefix). Some of these are literally unimaginable at the other side of the pond.
Well I wouldn't call this a failure of the free market because this is actually the exact opposite situation. Americans have decided to solve funding for education through private funding, which is fine in principle but then they ruined the free market component through extreme government intervention that sets up perverse incentives. It's a text book example of government intervention gone wrong. The way it should have worked is that degrees with good job prospects are cheaper to finance than those where people end up unemployed. If people pick the wrong degree that's fine because they can discharge the debt which causes interest to go up and make the uneconomical degree more expensive. It also means that colleges don't get a free money siphon and waste all the money on things that don't improve the job prospects of their students.
The free market utopia would be that average people go to college and money printing "corporate drones" leave college. People can then use their wealth to pursue their true interests in their spare time, or you know at least feed their kids. Instead what we have right now is basically 18 year olds chasing their dreams and everyone around them (advisers, bankers, government, college) tells them to go ahead while those young people are about to blow their foot of with the debt and no job prospects.
>house loans
Not sure what's wrong with those to be fair. The free market works here because money is just another type of commodity. It's fungible, it doesn't matter what bank you go to. The central bank printing press is causing some asset inflation but it's not fundamentally broken, just tilted.
>car loans
I have heard that it is difficult to get financing for small cars in the USA because Americans don't buy small cars anymore. I personally can't comprehend this but why not just get a used car instead? What else is wrong car loans?
>payday loans
Yeah this is definitively a complete failure for the free market. There are some people that are doing so badly that lending them money for a profit will just make their situation worse. This is something that can only be solved through charity or welfare with no strings attached and no expectation to get the aid back. If someone is lacking $500 then charging them $600 isn't going to solve their problems. Giving loans to people who can't pay them back is always a bad idea. However, there is also a group of people who is merely late on their payments but can eventually get back on their feet. 30% annualized interest for small loans can be a perfectly acceptable solution for people who are a high default risk. Payday loans are often something insane like 500% annualized interest and they also offer extremely poor repayment conditions. They just shouldn't exist.
>Food deserts
This is caused by differences in access to transportation. If all the "not poor" people use their car to drive to a Walmart that is 15 miles away then poor people won't get access to a decent store within 15 miles.
>prison standard of living
Yes, another failure of the free market but also a case of the people involved being morally corrupt through and through. It's basically legalized slavery and the prison wards can always ask for more "slaves".
>Social mobility in general.
Well, this is primarily caused by labor abroad increasing supply for everything and pushing down prices to a level where richer nations can't compete. The "corporate drone" I mentioned above does very well in such a situation because his skills are still in high demand. The problem we have is that there are not enough "corporate drones" who get a profitable degree. Upskilling is extremely important because low skilled workers basically compete with dirt cheap labor abroad nowadays.
>"Right to work", worker protection
The free market can work in favor of workers if businesses are competing for workers. As I said, there is a lack of workers that companies want. If you have to compete with your neighbors it's a race to the bottom. I can't say the free market failed here. It's inherently a difference in culture.
> Non-existing safety nets.
Yeah this is one of the weirdest things about the USA. It's easy to get fired, but it's also even easier to lose everything once you lose that job.
>days of vacation and parental leave.
One of the greatest failings of the free market is that it can't ensure reproduction of our species. Going by what the bean counters say we would never have kids.
>Average savings per capita.
This is probably influenced by culture. Owning housing often causes savings to go up. In renter societies you often see people own less capital than in home ownership focused societies.
Overall the USA somehow managed to have both the worst parts of the free market and the worst parts of government intervention in one ugly package. It's very surprising to me. I'm pretty sure that if they could have avoided the worst parts of government intervention that they would put my own country to shame. Instead there are some rich dudes in a gated community and lots of poor people around the gated communities. Yeah sure the rich dudes brag about how rich they are rich but that's not the only important thing for me. It's also not guaranteed that I will be one of them if I go there. I never want to live there. If I was on exile I'd rather go to countries that are not as wealthy as Germany than to the USA.
I readily admit that I just brainstormed to support my initial association, so not all points are going to hold their water. But you seem to agree to a direct relationship of free market and feudalistic traits, so do you actually agree, but wanted to introduce nuance?
Sounds like social mobility for me but not for thee?
You know that 'evil' cheap labour from other countries is just folks trying their best at getting some social mobility? Foreigners are people, too.
Never said cheap labor was evil or that foreigners aren't people. I never made a judgement good, neutral, bad. Not sure why you read it that way?
I'm not seeing it, either that most of the above are feudalist, or that the US is more feudalist than Europe.
Food deserts? Feudalism was an agricultural society. Peasants worked on farms. "There's no grocery store poor people can get to easily without a car" wasn't really a thing back then.
At-will firing? That's capitalism, not feudalism. In feudalism peasants were attached the land. "Go peasant for a competing lord" wasn't a thing either. More like at least the US idea of Europe being someplace where it is impossible to fire an employee once they get hired. That sounds like feudalism.
Days of vacation? "While we may be accustomed to images of medieval peasants toiling away from dawn until dusk and be convinced from this that we have it better than they ever did — a 13th-century laborer could have up to 25 weeks off per year". Working all the time is capitalism, not feudalism. Europe is way more feudalist on this measure too.
Payday loans are feudalist? You think serfs got payday loans? Or car loans? Someone told a peasant back then, "Oh sure, here's a house, it's yours, pay me back over the next 30 years"?
Right to work? What does that have to do with feudalism? If you were attached the the land, you had to work it for the benefit of the lord, it wasn't whether you paid dues to the Peasants Local 1347 or not.
Criticize capitalism all you want, but it is not feudalism.
Germany has Aldi and Lidl to help against food deserts.
Not sure what you mean by prison standards of living?
About social mobility: have a look at 'The Son Also Rises' for an interesting approach to historic and cross country comparison.
I am still quite confused about why you link all these things with feudalism? Feudalims was really heavy on intervention and paternalism. Just the opposite of what a market based order would be.
The balance is usually tilted slightly towards free markets because many governments are often incompetent but the free market doesn't tolerate incompetence or inefficiencies. In many cases it is so hyper efficient that smaller players have such a hard time that monopolies form and globalization brought this to a new height where we have entire countries like China specialize in manufacturing to the point where USA/Europe can't compete and seek out other opportunities.
Neither of which are anything close to free markets.
For which there are two possible conclusions.
1) Free markets are unable to supply reasonably priced, high quality health care and internet
2) The markets for healthcare and internet in the US aren't Free markets.
You seem very sure that possibility 1 is the only correct conclusion, without examining possibility 2.
Because it’s pretty fucking important and the best way to make sure it’s not wasted is to get it as freely traded as possible. Rations are terrible and we need pricing to make sure we aren’t doing something dumb like growing almonds in a desert with water that needs to be used for drinking water or even just another crop that isn’t so inefficient.
As it stands, the super old water rights around the US of farmers are fucking the rest of society because they don’t pay for it on an open market.
But it's sobering to realize how much water agriculture can waste today.
My cousin inherited some sort of farm license when they bought their property in the countryside. It has a well down into the water table and river access. He was saying how he could freely pump 100,000L/day if they wanted to, mainly going on about how weird it was to see how few stipulations there were in said license.
This is just an extension of land. Certain people are granted a monopoly on a resource because their ancestors knew the right people, or were simply lucky.
Inherited luck. No way to run a country.
Or alternatively, the government could officially own all the water supply and auction it off.
None of these is an argument against trading of water or water futures.
We should treat water the same way because water is a human right, a commodity, and a resource. This discussion is prominent in the early chapters of Planet Water (https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Water-Investing-Valuable-Resou...)
By mispricing the resource, we've gotten to where we are: 1) Massive inequality 2) Bottled water has become the default backup system to investing in rebuilding the tap water system 3) There is not enough investment to rebuild the tap water system. The paradox is best seen at an airport where a bottle of water is $5 in a single use plastic bottle (that lasts for 450 years) and the water fountain which is "free."
As a social capitalist, I believe "free" water is bad for the marketplace. I've written about this more here: https://drinktap.substack.com/p/tap-june-2020-update
Does the trading of other kinds of future cause this? For example, the fact that corn or oil can be traded.
> we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival
gold, maybe not, it's mostly used by financial institutions as collateral, but I think we require petrol a lot.
Aren't we already arriving at that point? The Flint water crisis is still ongoing since 2014.
Why shouldn't it be? I buy water every day.
> At first glance this seems incredibly concerning
Why?
> While we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival, they do play key roles into how our society operates. I'm hoping to understand more on why we should treat water in the same way.
Because it's very important for our survival!
Money.
What would be the environmental cost of prohibiting sales of cpus/gpus by anyone who didn't own a cpu/gpu factory?
Uh.. Money? lol
Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, is well known for moving his interest to water investment/trading many years ago
https://www.killik.com/the-edit/why-michael-burry-is-investi...
This article goes some way to explaining the rationale
Grain and cheese are the product of human activity. Fresh, clean water exists in plenty in nature.
Except in the places/times it isn't, which is much of the world for some of the time, and some of the world for much of the time.
Water rights exist, and who gets to exercise them in times of shortage can be very contentious, and even a cause for war.
Which is precisely why trading water futures is an immoral idea and can't be compared to trading any other commodity. There exist alternatives for every commodity on the planet (don't have oil? Use coal. No coal? Use wood, etc.), but there are none for water.
There's plenty of alternatives to any specific water, just use some other water. (And if you really want to, you can make water from oxygen and hydrocarbons.)
Difficult to extract, store and transport while maintaining quality.
Humans themselves need fairly small amounts for direct use like eating, drinking, hygiene.
What do you mean by "nature"? Do you own the land where the water is, or do you simply plan on collecting rainwater? Otherwise, you don't own the water. This is a real-life problem that countries and communities the world over are dealing with.
Water shortages are local problems. The issue is just that a lot of the world's agriculture are on places with little water.
Not really no. It requires huge amounts of infrastructure, logistics, regulation to get it to people. Industrial activity, farming use water to make the food you eat