PicoBusiness

An amusing article from the Register. A British economist says that economic growth and CO2 emissions are inextricably linked, and in order to reduce CO2 emissions, the economy will have to shrink.

Money Quotes:

Asked if this wasn’t, in the end, going to mean a fairly hair-shirt lifestyle for us Brits - no cars, no tumble dryers, fewer showers and iPods and so on - Bond said that “economic wealth isn’t the same as happiness or directly linked to quality of life … It’s about a quantity lifestyle - more and more stuff - versus quality”.

And

“The idea of a technological fix is one we should be cautious about,” he said. “So often there are unintended consequences or trade-offs. Look at the ‘paperless office’ - there’s now more paper, not less. Look at biofuels. I’d be wary of believing that a technology solution will arrive in time.

Yes, unintended consequences of technological change…. As if gutting the economy has no unintended consequences at all.

From data discussed at Future Pundit, I created this chart of miles driven per person in the US.

Based on population data from April 2008 and Miles Driven from May 2008, we can come up with some interesting observations.

1. The miles driven per person estimate for May 2008 is slightly below 2002 levels:

2001: 9689.38

2002: 9806.25

2008: 9758.76 (Estimate)

2. Another interesting measurement - %-age change in miles driven vs. the previous year:

And what you’re seeing here is a steady and ongoing decrease in the “rate of growth” of driving over time. In other words, since 1990, our driving miles/year has been leveling off, despite a significant increase in population.

3. Which suggests the graph - changes in population vs. changes in driving year-over-year:

Which shows that the population growth has been a steady 1% per year. In the go-go 80s, we increased our mileage more than the population growth, and for the 90s through 2005 we roughly aligned our driving to the population, and since 2005 we’ve been driving less relative to population.

Source Data:

Population

1980 – 1990 http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/nat-total.txt

1990 – 2000 http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/EST90INTERCENSAL/US-EST90INT-07/US-EST90INT-07.csv

2000 – 2007 http://www.census.gov/popest/states/NST-ann-est.html

2008 http://www.census.gov/popest/national/NA-EST2007-01.html

Driving

1983-2008 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/tvtpage.htm

Rotten Tomatoes gives Wall E a 96% “fresh” rating, which is a stellar achievement. I love looking at the negative reviews for a movie this well-rated, because the contrary opinions are so amusing.

When I came across this review, however, I am left befuddled. Specifically:

That poses a threat to the corporation that is generating so much profit from its captive audience on the space station.

You know the recent wisdom - stupid, incompetent people don’t realize that they’re stupid and incompetent, because they’re too stupid and incompetent to make the connections. So they sail through a world where things fail because of other people’s mistakes, not theirs, and if they can’t figure out how to do something, then it clearly just can’t be done.

Based on this one line of his review, I feel safe in declaring that Kyle Smith is both stupid and incompetent. He utterly failed to understand the meaning behind protocol A113, he fails to understand the difference between the “corporation” and the “autopilot” and, last but not least, he appears to have a child-like inability to understand how markets, corporations and profits work. 10 year olds can understand easily that there are no profits to be made on a group of people who don’t do anything other than eat, sleep, chat and play computer games. There’s no “evil corporation” here. The Axiom is the welfare state concept bubbled down to its core, and left to percolate for 30 generations. Instead of governments and taxpayers paying the bill, its robots, who dutifully care for the humans, with no interest or desire for profit - because there is none to be had.

On the hand, I am eager to find out if Kyle Smith was a fan of The Happening. If he was, I may be able to use him as an excellent anti-reviewer - stay away from everything he likes, and expect to enjoy everything he doesn’t.

The latest meme in the econ-o-sphere is “would I have viable skills in 1000 AD/1500 AD/1700 AD”. Generally, the assessment is dour.

Without saying that they’re wrong, I will point out a couple of interesting things:
1. We all know how to read. That was a privilege for much of the past, and would be in our favor.
2. We all know fantastic things about the cosmos, physics, matter, electricity, chemicals and mathematics that were incredibly arcane to our forebearers. They all seem commonplace now, of course, which is why we discount them.
3. Even with a modest understanding of warfare, we have the opportunity to be quite effective in updating the tactics and strategy of our government-of-choice.
4. A modest amount of cryptological sophistication goes an incredibly long way. One-Time Pads, anyone?
5. Our understanding of health and human anatomy is tremendously advanced, even at a casual level. Germs, viruses, exercise, healthy eating, vaccines - you can explain all of this to people of the past, and improve their lives immeasurably.
6. You know which composers and authors and artists are successful, and you can arbitrage that knowledge for certain kinds of work.

Of course there’s a lot of “ifs” in this - if you meet the right people, if you have some early successes, you’ll go on to tremendous later success.

But the idea that someone who is educated and literate ending up doing manual labor seems wrong to me. Anyone who could read well automatically had a huge leg up for most of history.

I finally got around to listening to this podcast on jobs and captalism and poor people.

The basic concepts that Russ discusses:

• Does Capitalism require poor people to do the menial work?
• Do rich countries require poor ones to exploit in order to do the manual labor work?
• Is Capitalism “rigged” to ensure that only the top 1% get all of the benefit of economic growth?

In general, Dr. Roberts knocks it out of the park - discussing in clear and data-leavened terms about why he believes that the system is not “rigged”, and why rich countries do not require poor ones.

It is on the topic of Capitalism requiring poor people that I find myself disagreeing with him. Here’s the general claim:

Rich people don’t want to mow their own lawns or paint their own houses. Without poor people to do that work, the whole system would collapse

Dr. Roberts points out, quite correctly, that this is absurd. 100 years ago, there were a lot of dirt-poor people who made a living (barely) threshing wheat in fields. Now we have combines and tractors and other devices to do this work for us. The poor in the US have multiple color televisions, cars, refrigerators and all sorts of other amenities in their lives that those wheat-field workers would have never had, or been able to afford, if they were still doing that work today.

But where I don’t think Dr. Roberts fully explained things is that this definition of poor is always changing - no one thinks about wheat-fields anymore when they think poor - they think “garbagemen” and “cashiers”. If, through the miracle of science we automated those jobs, people would move the goalposts - mechanics and security guards would be “poor”. And if, again, through science those jobs were eliminated, a new set of jobs would be the “demeaning jobs that no one wants to do.”

Essentially, there are always jobs that are the “least pleasant”, and people will always think “How horrid that I should have to do this unpleasant job.” Thus, they will perpetually see these people as exploited rubes whose sweat grease the wheels of the market.

Perspective is in order here, but perspective usually gets in the way of a good sound-bite.