Re: What is your level of optimism concerning the future of the United States of Amer
Thanks for taking the time to write all that. I shouldn't have written you off so quickly, I apologize. I'm just so used to getting blasted and trolled that I assumed there was no real logic behind what you were saying.
Responses below.
Neo-Malthusianism is dangerous and it is wrong. It's proponents seem fundamentally unwilling to accept the essential and primary role that human ingenuity must play in alleviating our problems, instead they fetishize restriction and the need to dramatically alter our society.
Well, I'm a not a neo-malthusian. I don't view straight restriction as the answer because it will stifle innovation, but at the same time there are some stark realities we really need to examine here.
Of course they were wrong. As has always happened the needs of civilization (sometimes greased with state support) propelled the changes needed to alleviate ourselves of these problems. We found better ways to reach new caches of resources, we perfected more efficient extraction methods and it doesn't stop with metals, we expanded industrial agriculture and pioneered new methods of crop production with the Green Revolution, we increased access to water by expanding irrigation and digging new aquifers, and on and on.
I have less of a problem with resource extraction than I do how those resources are being inefficiently allocated under the current economic model. Our economies are wasting huge amounts of resources on what is tantamount to short-term luxury. All the developing nations seem to be clamoring for a standard of living en par with American exceptionalism, and there is no way, I mean
no way that this planet can sustain that. America uses almost 30% of the world's annual resource harvest yet contains a comparatively lesser amount of the world's population. We should not make this the model for living.
The growth model is defuct. It increasingly cannot provide, not with the way resources and finances are entrenched, and not with money sequestration happening by a select few. It's incredibly difficult to face the next set of human challenges when all of the capital is being held by less than 0.5% of humans, most of whom are driven by some anachronistic impulse to accumulate status.
This remains in my view the prevailing problem of their mind set. In their eyes all too often every new human is another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another potential problem in waiting. While they should see a new mind, a new member of the labor force, a new leader, a new artist, in other words: potential. For example in the long term I think one of the greatest developments in the history of modern civilization has been the lifting of China from the dregs of the third world. We are only just beginning to feel the impact of millions of new scientists, engineers, and artists. Imagine magnifying that by similar developments in the rest of the developing world and you could transform the planet.
Human creativity is not fostered enough though. Our systems of governance are still following the old industrial model, and we are in a post-industrial world. Children have access to a wide array of interactive multimedia but are expected to sit at desks for 8 hours a day, studying useless indoctrinating crap that has no real world practical value anymore. When they can't or won't perform, they are drugged.
Our problems right now are top-down. If we actually allowed the genius and expertise that has been lying dormant to have more command of the situation, I think we could extricate ourselves; but that's not happening because the people running the show don't care about anything but the next quarter.
As for China... it's one of the foreign nations I lived in for several years as part of my profession. Conformity is so high there that innovation is incredibly stagnant. Most wealthy Asians send their children abroad for education. Most of their innovations are stolen from the west, and then appropriated as their own. People scoff at China's one child policy but their population will be stable at 1.4 billion by 2040 while the western nation will be suffocating in its own numbers. The top problems on this planet are a) the number of humans, and b) the number of humans all demanding the same exorbitant standard of living, completely out of touch with nature c) an economic model based on short term projection only, combined with an inefficient means of distributing new innovation in a timely manner, to ALL PEOPLE.
The same types of innovations that lifted us above our problems in the 20th Century will form the blueprint for the 21st. The rise of cheap desalination, innovations in biotechnology and GMO's, more sophisticated extraction methods for rare earths and other minerals, new deposits of oil and gas, revolutions in battery technology, perhaps even developments in renewables like Solar (not at present), and so much more. We live in a century of fantastic possibility. Our only realistic hope is that our genius measures up to the task. Planning for massive global legislation and controls for carbon, water management, or whatever the issue of the day may be is not only unrealistic but counter-productive as it retards growth which breeds the dynamism that allows that aforementioned genius to rise to the surface.
They're not just "issues of the day" though. There are global food shortages in most of the developing nations, not just due to political corruption but also drastic changes in weather systems, resources shortages, and again a global institutionalized plutocracy that uses the IMF and World Bank to enslave them for resource extraction to fund the aforementioned exhorbitant living standards in the rich nations.
The problem here is largely the western world, always been. Europe and its offshoots just can't stop the colonial non-sense and accept a lesser standard of living. We are living off the backs of everyone else, at the peril of this world's biosphere.
We have Western economies whose indebtedness is built on consumption because the corporate plutocracy retain the lion's share of new productivity and growth. The only way to sustain such an economy was initially with extending credit with Fed policies geared to below inflation rate interest rates. At some point, that increased indebtedness must come to an end. It happened in 2008/9 in the same way it did in 1929. It will soon happen again and there is no credible ammunition left in the Fed or governments' arsenal.
Of all the innovations you mention, the only ones that are not causing environmental devastation are the renewable energy sources. The jury is still out on GMOs. The European studies on GMO corn fed to rates show cancerous results. GMO pollen is suspected in why bee populations are in peril all over the place. There are essentially no long term studies on the safety of GMO in humans, and anytime someone tries to start one they get shut down by corporate powers. So... don't hold your breath on that one.
