-----Original Message-----
From: Tor Forde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Futurework
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sunday, August 09, 1998 8:28 PM
Subject: Re: What planet are you proposing for this experiment?
In response to my argument that man is not particularly rational, Tor Forde
wrote:
>The best way to keep a society rational is to get "the calculators" to
>wear the eyes of the common man, that is to avoid the development of
>excessive poverty and wealth.
Tor,
I see two problems with this. One is that "calculators", as you call them,
come with theories by which they interpret the world and with pre-conceived
notions of what things ought to be like. Whether they would recognize it or
not, they are, as Keynes put it, slaves of some defunct economist (or
philosopher, or political thinker, defunct or otherwise). The other problem
is that there is no such thing as "the common man". We are essentially
tribal, with each tribe having its own notion of what is, or ought to be,
common to man. And within each tribe, people vary greatly in erudition,
power and wealth, and it is not always the good people who wind up on top.
I'm trying hard not to be cynical about what is and is not possible with
respect to the future of humankind as we know it. However, from what I have
seen around me for several decades, I simply cannot bring myself to believe
that this future can be planned rationally, or that any coherent plan can be
devised that will be viewed as fair and equitable by all peoples, or indeed,
fair or not, that we will all somehow come to our senses and behave with
enough environmental and social responsibility to pull our global industrial
system back from the brink toward which it appears to be headed.
I have just reread a short book which I first read about thirty years ago.
It is "The Economic History of World Population" by Carlo M. Cipolla, an
Italian economist. There is an interesting diagram in the book entitled
"The consumption of fossil fuel in historical perspective". The x-axis
line is absolutely flat until it gets to our era, then it rises and falls
sharply, and then continues on flat again. That may well be how it will all
work out.
Best regards,
Ed Weick
