Thank you capitalism pt 2
Forums:
Read it and weep Paul Ehrlich fans......
Resources Are Almost 5 Times as Abundant as They Were in 1980
Humanity is enjoying a world of increasingly cheap and ever more abundant mineral, argicultural, forestry and energy resources reports a brilliant new study, the Simon Abundance Index. This analysis by Marian Tupy,* editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University – Hawaii uses data on 50 different commodities to track their price trajectories over the past 37 years from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They find in real price terms their basket of commodities decreased by an average of 36.3 percent between 1980 and 2017.
That's great, but their breakthrough insight is that, since 1980, global real hourly income rate per capita has grown by more than 80 percent, which means that the commodities that took 60 minutes of work to buy in 1980 now take only 21 minutes of labor to buy in 2017. As a result, the "time-price" of their basket of commodities has fallen by 64.7 percent.
They also report that the SAI rose to 479.6 in 2018, meaning the Earth was nearly five times more plentiful with respect to the 50 commodities they track than it it was when Ehrlich and Simon laid their famous wager. What about the future? Tupy and Pooley calculate if current trends continue that "our planet will be 83 percent more abundant in 2054 than it was in 2017."
"The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet," write the authors. "The Earth's atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have."
http://reason.com/blog/2018/12/04/resources-have-become-nearly-5-times-mor
Free markets and free people = abundance for all
- Log in to post comments
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Lucky Day
lol
lol
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: New & Improved
Mass is constant.
Mass is constant.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Bucky Badger
HIS NAME WAS PAUL EHRLICH
HIS NAME WAS PAUL EHRLICH
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Druba
(No subject)
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: 2 Room Shack
the earth is becoming less
the earth is becoming less inhabitable and everyone is using up it's resources as fast as they can.
capitalism is great for accelerating our demise.
congrasts, plutocrats. enjoy your champagne as 14 million people starve in yemen.
your argument(s), if any, are so simplistic and binary its unbecoming.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Where Does The Time Go?
some people can't see the
some people can't see the deforestation for the trees.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
This dude's gotta be the most
Lol. Fucking guy's gotta be the most gullible librarian on the internet.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: 19.5 Degrees
And the rich man in his
And the rich man in his summer home,
Singing "Just leave well enough alone"
But his pants are down, his cover's blown
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Thumbkinetic
Poor Thom.
Poor Thom.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
"The world is a closed system
Two words for this bullshit right here: dinosaur bones.
Our planet will be even more abundant in 2154 when it's uninhabitable to humans and we've stopped the wholesale rape of its resources.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
Oh you forget this post
Oh you forget this post-script note in your copy/paste, Thom.
So, again, you can file this Cato Institute bullshit under "Opinion."
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Ken D.
Thank you labor unions for
Thank you labor unions for creating the middle class.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Hitchhiker awaiting "true call"
How much should homes cost?
How much should homes cost?
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: 2 Room Shack
$85k
$85k
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: skyjunk
Thank you Michael Flynn, you
Thank you Michael Flynn, you piece of shit
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
OP posts like somebody's
OP posts like somebody's perpetually giving him a titty twister.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Alan R
I read this today in a
I read this today in a comment section under an article and I think it is representative what a certain segment of the population truly believes (and I use the term "belief" as opposed "to know empirically"). I'm guessing 30 years of AM talk radio is involved. An actual quote:
"You just want the US to roll into some new world order where we all submit to a bunch of tree-hugging globalist hand-wringers who assure us that being middle class is the best we should ever hope for. "
Wow. This guy seriously believes he is going to be subjugated.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Thomas O' Bagenhammers
And it just keeps coming....
And it just keeps coming....
Ryan Zinke announces massive new oil find
The new shale oil and gas formation known as Wolfcamp, which is adjacent to the oil-rich Permian region in Texas, contains an estimated mean of 46.3 billion barrels of oil, 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/christmas-came-a-few-we...
But I guess Obama did this as well.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Andean Flight
The fallacy of economists and
The fallacy of economists and their ilk to measure wealth exclusively in financial terms has contributed massively to the growing inequality and environmental destruction of the planet. If you live under the idea that more resources or more accessible resources = wealth, then you are buying into a philosophy that only counts the visible monetary value involved, not the hidden costs. What cost does the extraction of that resource have on the environment? How about its processing? How about the transformation of the resource into a finished product? How about the transportation and packaging of said resources? All these steps involve hidden costs to the environment and vulnerable populations. Furthermore, although the presence of those new resources may imply a generation of wealth, the true factor is how much of that wealth will actually reach the people involved in all the steps of the processing of that resource, versus how much will end up in the hands of the corporation owners.
Finding new sources of resources that are shown to contaminate and destroy our planet as well as create global inequality is not a step in the right direction. Not even close. Look at the indicators from the OECD regarding inequality and you'll see that the USA is third from the bottom, just ahead of Mexico and Chile. In other words, this growth of resource exploitation has not in any way resulted in an improvement in the lives of ordinary people AND the USA, despite being the largest economy on the planet (read = resource consumer) has the third worst ranking of income inequality of all the countries in the OECD (which involves all the first world and some developing economies, but no third world economies).
Further, and anybody with half a brain can figure this out, so long as there is such as thing as tariffs and subsidies, then there is no such thing as a capitalist economy. These business have been saved and manipulated so much by government regulations, that to speak of a capitalist economy would be a huge mistake.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Andean Flight
Just to correct myself: the
Just to correct myself: the most recent data from the OECD shows 38 member nations and the USA is number 32 in terms of income inequality. Iceland is number 1, meaning they have the least inequality, on a scale where zero is total equality and 1 is total inequality, Iceland gets a 0.25. The USA on the other hand has a 0.39 and is only ahead of Turkey, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica and South Africa. Now, I love my country a whole lot, but really, it's shameful that the US should be in the same category as these countries considering the economic history of the nation.
Source: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm
Oh, and Thom, yes, I typed this all up in my own words. Didn't need to copy/past an article, write some stupid quip and then run for cover.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: 19.5 Degrees
Thank you zinc!
Thank you zinc!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ji4zycScUE
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: good at drinking water
So if the Saudis find some
So if the Saudis find some oil, should we thank capitalism too?
Stalin found lots of oil. So did Mao.
Hitler like oil too, he lost the war by trying to steal Russian oil (found by the Czar, then controlled by Stalin).
Nazis and communists and Saudi Monarchs like oil just as much as capitalists.
Poor Thom.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Andean Flight
That's another good point,
That's another good point, steve. The article says more resources have been found, NOT who found them. I'm guessing the Chinese probably have a fairly big hand in the discovery of new resources these days, and they ain't exactly capitalist....
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: 2 Room Shack
we are currently witnessing
we are currently witnessing captialism's last stand.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: 19.5 Degrees
we are currently witnessing
we are currently witnessing captialism's last stand<<<
The free market seems to be under attack from oligarchical special interests.