A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
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> How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy.
He seems to be pointing at a future where transaction costs between individuals are lower, so there's less need to organize people into Large Organizations. (See: Coase's Nature of the Firm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm )
Fair enough, but I don't see companies going away, as you still need someplace to invest capital/pool resources to be spent, to create large-scale projects, whether they're created by employees or by freelancers.
Sort of on the same topic, this book talks about economic organizational models in the west vs the middle east, and how the former pulled ahead of the latter in part due to better institutions:
It's a bit long-winded at times, and repeats itself, but the subject is, IMO, interesting.
I think he's saying those sorts of investments will be fewer and further between.
tl;dr: I'm extremely pessimistic about the future. This sort of happy, dreamy nonsense gets on my nerves.
This opinion is extremely unpopular though because it requires so many lifestyle consumption changes for all of us.
It's like knowing you have a serious illness, but putting off a visit to the doctor's to confirm it, because then you'll have to take steps that'll impact your lifestyle (I.e. quit smoking / drinking / drugs).
Therefore, almost nobody will change lifestyle. But it doesn't matter, as we all die, and we are replaced by people with a different mindset/lifestyle.
E.g. smokers die of cancer, new generations smoke less.
Our earth is just one of billions of planets in our galaxy alone.
How long do you think we have to get it right?
> a closed-circuit life support system capable of keeping a human occupant alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with zero failures and losses, and capable where necessary of providing medical intervention. Let's throw in a willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this assembly. It's going to be pretty boring in there, but I think we can conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size and mass of a Mercury capsule
Perhaps the most effective means of interstellar travel is bases within asteroids, not spaceships. Future humans could build habitats inside asteroids, then with a few nudges upset the entire gravitational equilibrium of the asteroid belt, slinging some asteroids out of the solar system. We're probably able to compute the most optimum way of doing this within the next century, and humans are more likely to survive interstellar trips buried inside asteroids than in a spaceship's husk.
> you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades.
> transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime.
Why not one-way trips? The new civilizations might consider themselves new "countries", unworthy of interference by Earth in their internal affairs.
I should add we have another billion or so years of life left in our Sun, before we really need to leave our solar system: that gives us enough time to learn how to do one-way interstellar trips. I concede that in the meantime, Earth's population is likely to suddenly drop a few times. The projected 9 billion inhabitants in year 2050 seems unstable, though new food/fuel technology may come before then.
As for mining the asteroids, perhaps it'll be done by Earth-based avatars. Certainly the Moon can be mined that way, with its 1 second response time, but Mars would be more of a challenge, requiring machine-human cooperation in the processing.
While the author mostly hints at what could be next, his closing focus on human perspective is credible: finite resources of energy and diminishing returns on investment (whether of time, capital, productivity, etc.) will entail the weakening of the corporate mode of life, and will entail major re-evaluations of infinite-growth assumptions.
Before finding any uses for fossil fuels, we survived off of hydropower, an inifinite supply of energy. Predicting a doom and gloom because we'll run out of fossil fuels makes you forget that humans have survived for thousands and thousands of centuries without fossil fuels.
Further, stating that we'll run out of resources ignores the laws of supply and demand: if resources start to dry up, prices will increase, prompting people to find alternative sources for energy. Guess where the next growth industry will be, and where people will spend their money.
With economic growth, comes new and better ways of extracting energy (see natural gas and nuclear power, recent phenomenons). Humans are innovative, and we'll find even newer sources of energy in the future like we have been doing since the dawn of time.
Excuse me, this flies in the face of everything I know of. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. No source of energy even remotely comparable to fossil fuels in power density and convenience is in sight. Unless you discovered a way to build a fusion reactor?
> Predicting a doom and gloom because we'll run out of fossil fuels makes you forget that humans have survived for thousands and thousands of centuries without fossil fuels.
Logical fallacy. Human beings will still exist in the future. What's in question is advanced civilisation. Read about how Rome looked like when Carolus Magnus came there, 350 years after its fall.
> Further, stating that we'll run out of resources ignores the laws of supply and demand: if resources start to dry up, prices will increase, prompting people to find alternative sources for energy.
Typical armchair economist bullshit; this really makes me angry nowadays. People will find alternative resources given that some exist.
> With economic growth, comes new and better ways of extracting energy ...
Hello, second law of thermodynamics calling. Exponential continuous growth is impossible. You know, like "it will cease someday or another, whether you like it or not".
This recent post on the oil drum is a pretty good digest: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7924
Peak oil/resource depletion feels very much like global warming to me in that the main advocates of it make the data fit their theories instead of vice-versa. For example, back in '04, it was seriously argued that the peak oil crisis would cause me to now be living in a tipi in the post-oil dystopia. Instead, my living standard has only increased since '04.
Now, Ugo is arguing that even if we continue to acquire new sources of natural resources[1], that the resulting pollution will destroy civilization. Bollocks I say! Furthermore, I question why he and his ilk are so invested in the collapse of Western civilization.
[1] http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Debunking-the-Myth-of-P...
OK, please show me the data contradicting peak oil (even the IEA recognizes it now), or climate change. And I'm the one that "wants to believe". Heck, you people drive me mad.
The response you were hoping to get was...?
" its ok .. it upsets me as well " ?
He is only a few paragraphs in and he has drawn a causation diagram backwards.
Granted, it took hundreds of years. Present-day imperialists lack that kind of patience.
Compared with a few years for the wars. That's the point - it's easier to wage war than to change a culture.
Another interesting book along these lines is this one:
A Language History of the World http://t.co/f80cwQo
It uses languages to look at where they 'stuck' and where they didn't, why, how, and so on.
The invasion of Gaul is more akin to the way (relatively) early Americans forced out the Native Americans, and their culture certainly changed/doesn't really exist anymore. WWII Japan and Nazi Germany are examples of a places where a short war changed the culture.
The reason it won't work any more is because that style of 'total war' appears to have gone out of style. Probably a good thing, though Fareed Zakaria was on the Daily Show the other night talking about how one reason America has been so powerful is because Europe was leveled in WWII and the US had the industry to rebuild.
The effect of nukes not withstanding, I think 66 years is too short of a history to say that "total war" has gone out of fashion.
I was also thinking that economics and not war are behind the spread of the English language. You could argue that movies (culture) also cause people to learn a language, but the movies are coming from the place that has the money and industry to make them.
Implacable patience would almost certainly substitute for a certain amount of brutality, but the more of one you have the less you need of the other.
Why would it be necessary? The West could easily get oil from iraq without any involvement of the Iraqi people.
I write "the west" because the US doesn't get much of its oil from the middle east and oil's fungibility is a US choice. Neither of those things are written in stone.
As a matter of policy, the US could decide that oil doesn't leave the western hemisphere and let the europeans, chinese, and anyone else who cared handle the middle east. The western hemisphere has more than enough resources to handle US needs and europe could decide to simply take the oil and ignore the people. There's not much that any of the middle eastern countries/peoples could do about that.
I have no idea; it's a purely hypothetical question meant to demonstrate that wars are "easy" compared to changing a culture.
Kind of skipped over the whole 'US was founded on the premise of keeping corporations from having citizenship rights'.
Korps in decline, I think not, rights of real people in decline, rights of corporations on the continued rise.
The American railroads that conquered the west were grossly inefficient. Their "success" was sustained almost entirely by malfeasance, corruption, and the unchecked abuse of eminent domain.
Taylor was a fraud at best and a liar at worst. Taylorism and its cronies are possibly the greatest curse on our age.