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"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.'
i think about that quote a fair bit.
maybe it's not the worst thing to be a pig? if you're content and fed. maybe.
is that a life well lived?
i'm sure i'm being dense, but i still don't quite grok what you're getting at.
i was just trying to say that having a largely free economy doesn't mean that it's a consumerist economy for all, cuz lots of people can opt out.
if you wanna be an effective altruist and work in high finance and make multiple six figures & then give your money away to 'against malaria' or oxfam or something, that is still being a participant in a free market economy, but it's not materialist or consumerist or anything.
i'm all for changing the culture and making people not care about expensive shoes or whatever. if that is something we can change broadly.
but at the same time i also don't really care what other people do with their money in a real world sense. i think more people should spend less and save & invest more & give all their money away to charity like peter singer says, but if they prefer to spend, then ultimately that's their business.
i feel like i'm missing something you're trying to get at?
did i say something weird?
sometimes i say something and i think i'm making sense but i don't say it right.
what is it i've said that you think is wrong?
yes.
Russ Roberts: Yeah; and the presumption would have been--and I think it is in the minds of most of us--that if you are going to have 7 billion people, most of the earth's surface is going to have to be devoted to agriculture; and so much of it isn't suitable. It's either ocean, or it's mountain, or it's too rocky to farm. And we push everything to feed the world's people: we would have to push everything into agriculture. And, of course, the opposite has been the case.
Andrew McAfee: Yeah. And again, in particular in the rich world, where we have lots of technology; we have very strong institutions so that nobody can come in and just take your farm away from you; and we have a lot of competition, so that farmers really want to economize on land, rent, and fertilizer and stuff like that. A crazy thing has been going on, and I've got a graph in the book that shows this, I think, very, very clearly: The tonnage of total crops produced in America keeps going up. We're an agricultural powerhouse. The total tonnage of American agriculture keeps going up, while we use less fertilizer in total, year after year, less water for agriculture year after year, now. And, since about the early 1980s, we have given an amount of farmland back to nature equal in size to the State of Washington. That land is no longer economically productive or a great idea to farm, so the total--again, the total footprint on our planet, in just about all the ways that matter, is going down while our output, while our affluence, is going up. And we see this reflected lots of different ways. The rich world, for example, is generally reforesting, because we just don't need the land for farming any more. So, as you point out, a lot of these really dire estimates that we've been making in the past, they turn out to be wrong because of this one-two punch, I believe, of innovation--you know, 'Eureka!' coming up with things over and over--and, really intense competition that spurs companies to take advantage of all this innovation.
good article here - "The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment"
https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-5/the-return-of-nature
not necessarily.
to a pretty large extent, if you live in a relatively free place with free markets, you get to curate your own life, choose how much you buy, what you buy.
and you can to a large extent choose to opt out.
& it's also the case that economic growth in the west has actually decoupled from consumption.
the american economy has grown, while the actual amount of stuff we're consuming has declined. we're actually consuming fewer molecules, not just per capita but in total.
the goal should be to have more countries freely trading & fully developed so they can have the same quality of life while on the same downward trajectory of consumption.
andrew mcafee's book 'more from less' has a lot of really great details on that.
if anyone's interested, he had a great interview when the book was released on the econtalk podcast. very much worth hearing.
there's also a transcript on the site if you just wanna read it.
https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
i also think some of the things he brings up are ctually pretty interesting.
ok, fair enough.
it's not aggressive. maybe passive trolling is just as annoying. it's not to me, personally. & i'm still not sure the guy's not sincere. i really don't know.
if it really bothers you, that's where ignore features are handy.
if you look at the list of largest companies by revenue, including state-owned entities, oil/gas & power companies are definitely there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
i really don't know, but i have to imagine any kind of summary of the wealth of someone like escobar would have to be based on a lot of assumptions & guesses? some things can be quantified - they can see how much he may have in various bank accounts, i'm sure. but i doubt they truly would know how much cash he's holding at any moment, how much value he has in whatever drugs he has in stock. it's not like how walmart inventory can be detailed out for auditors to see.
i don't think he's a troll.
& if he's a troll, if it's just a long-running bit, it's pretty harmless, good-natured trolling.
imdb tells me she played annie.
sure, sure, absolutely. fair point.
but i think there's even worse humiliation in being laughed at, taunted, emotionally stomped on. being laughed at for years by teachers in classrooms. being tormented in workplaces. being an outcast.
that's worse.
drug lords no doubt make a lot of money & probably have high margins, i'd imagine.
but i'd expect they probably have a ceiling on how rich they can become, too. if you can't openly, legally trade to billions of people across hundreds of countries, if you have to stay hidden in some sense, you probably can't make the kind of money truly transnational companies can.
maybe. i dunno. that feels like the right answer, but maybe there are drug lords that are bezos rich. i guess it's possible.
hey, mrmojo, sorry for the random question, but have you seen this film? i just stumbled on it, and it looks interesting, & pretty highly rated. i'm probably gonna watch it tomorrow.
https://letterboxd.com/film/cut-throats-nine/details/
i knew someone who worked for an architect who wouldn't accept that 'priorize' wasn't a real word, & made his admin person add it to their spell-check.
i kinda agree.
the first half is a bit horror movie conventional.
but the back end is pretty fun. almost like a john waters-style attempt at a slasher.
it's a bit lacking in gore or brutality, but i enjoyed it a fair bit.
hmmph...how to explain this?
basically, a ww2 vet, living with a fellow vet, undergoes a treatment where his mind is transferred to the corpse of a guy who was executed for killing his girlfriend's rapist.
i think that's what happened anyway.
it has some scenes where it looks like they tried to recreate the psychedelic lightshow freakout section of 2001, but with a budget of about $2k.
it's great!
i thought it was wonderfully messed up.