>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Being a lit-critter, not a bean-counter, I have no idea, but now
>>that you mention it, I'm curious. Suppose everyone on earth is to
>>live (at least) at the level of Brad's living standard (including
>>occasional visits to restaurants comparable to Chez Panisse), since
>>the working class deserve nothing less than that. How many Brads
>>can the earth support? Or how many Brads can capitalism support?
>
>On a world scale, there's not much difference between you & Brad.
>Someone with an income of $25,000 is richer than 98% of the world's
>population; even the bottom decile of USers have incomes higher than
>2/3 of the world's population. And the correlation between income &
>resource use is pretty high.
>
>Doug
The question is, can we all live the lifestyle of a Brad? I consider
Brad's living standard, not mine, to be the minimum that a hedonistic
socialist should want to settle for if circumstances allowed. Don't
we all deserve to live like Brad, not me (for instance, I live with
no car, no health insurance, no air-conditioning in summer at home,
no fancily labor-intensive meal at a moderately priced French
restaurant, no pleasure trip to Italy, etc. and I live in what is
called "efficiency")?
What is the production cost of a Brad? How much energy does it take
to create and maintain Brad in the style to which he is accustomed?
Can each and every human being on earth live like Brad? If a Brad is
too expensive, what about a Michael Perelman? A Eugene Coyle? A
Doug Henwood? A Lou Proyect? How many Lous can the earth support?
Or (a different question) how many Lous can capitalism support? Or
if it has to come down to that (though that would be tragic), how
many Yoshies?
Yoshie
