economic boom and simple living
First of all, thank you very much for your very interesting and helpful comments. Some additional thoughts / questions : - I think that the economic boom is not only based on successful exports, but must have its most important source in the local (=North American) very high level of consumption. - Nan Hildreth from the positive-futures list told me about a survey by Paul Ray, who found that about 25% of the population are "Cultural Creatives" who want to transform the society in the direction of more sustainibility, simple living and democracy. http://www.coopamerica.org/Business/B44million.htm and http://www.ligthparty.com/Spirituality/Culture.html ). Are there other studies and is there some clear practical evidence, that the number of the "Cultural Creatives" is really as high as 25% and that their number is rising? We can see some "no-future"- and "we want everything and that immediatly"-concept that seems to be very popular for the young generation. - Could it be, that "voluntary simplicity" is not really voluntary for most of the simple living people? Simple living could be a reaction to the limits and problems of the traditional way of working and careers. Personal limits (stress, health problems), restructuring of companies (devaluation of human work, unemployment, interruption of careers), automation and globalization could be some reasons. - On the other hand: Who is voluntarily living in the complex ( or complicated) way of "work and spend"? Aren't there billions of $$ being invested in marketing activities? Once more, thanks and best wishes, Robert Neunteufel e-mail: - private: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - office: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: short article on pop. devel.
-- From: Steve Kurtz [EMAIL PROTECTED] POPULATION GROWTH IS PIVOTAL ISSUE IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT by Georgie Anne Geyer WASHINGTON -- It's not working. For years, people who were against family planning could argue, and hope, and pretend, and weave tales about the glories of open grasslands in Kazakhstan as an answer to the world's population problem -- and some people listened. But now, in a sudden rush of new information about both population pressures and the Earth's sheer sustainability, we can clearly see how foolishly self-destructive that approach has been and continues to be. (snip) Hi Steve: I just read the article you suggested and what I found most interesting is: The fact is that we know now what works in developing peoples and countries to limit population growth: a reasonably non-corrupt representative government, appropriate forms of economic freedom, a just legal system, a wise diversification of economic resources and income, a high investment in education, women's rights AND family planning. Thomas: It would seem to me, that if we know what works and the above 7 points do not seem so drastic that we couldn't - through the UN decide that each country must re-align their political systems, create the structures mentioned above and solve the biggest problem facing mankind -overpopulation. Given the alternatives, wars, starvation, misuse of resources, the above changes seem quite benign. Quote: A prime example: Arab Tunisia on the northern coast of Africa had 4 million people in 1957 when it gained independence from France; with a strong family planning program, it now has 9 million people and is one of the fastest-developing countries in the world. Its neighbor Algeria also had about 4 million in 1957; today it has 30 million people and is ensnared in seemingly endless civil war and chaos. There are many such examples. Thomas: I know it has been postulated before, but I think it is time, perhaps evolutionary to make a conscious decision to outlaw war. If that requires a world police force, so be it. Law and order, good government, good use of unsustainable resources and deliberate use of sustainable resources only make common sense. Forget the economies of the marketplace in which we use a half a gallon of gas to go the the convience store to pick up a pack of cigerattes, it's time to bring in a higher level criteria other than just we can do it and keep the price down. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
Re: short article on pop. devel.
On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Thomas Lunde wrote:
I know it has been postulated before, but I think it is time, perhaps
evolutionary to make a conscious decision to outlaw war. If that requires a
world police force, so be it.
Be careful what you wish for!
I doubt you're suggesting that the US should serve such a function, so are you
thinking of a UN police force capable of policing even the US? If so, are
you proposing this as an experiment to see if Lord Acton was right ("Absolute
power corrupts absolutely")?
If nothing else, such concentrated power would be an irresistible magnet for
precisely those people whose instincts that power was created to control. The
danger of cooptation seems insurmountable.
P-)
--
___o -o Peter Marks [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_-\_, -_\ /\_ 15307 NE 202nd St., Woodinville, WA 98072
(*)/ (*)-(*)^(*) (425)489-0501 http://www.halcyon.com/marks
--
More comfortable AND faster ... that's REAL technology!
Re: short article on pop. devel.
I agree in general with Thomas' evaluations. Enforcing peace with the threat of force seems a particularly perverse requirement, though. We humans are alone in this particular dilemma, as ethics appears tied to our form of self-reflective consciousness. Steve Thomas: It would seem to me, that if we know what works and the above 7 points do not seem so drastic that we couldn't - through the UN decide that each country must re-align their political systems, create the structures mentioned above and solve the biggest problem facing mankind -overpopulation. Given the alternatives, wars, starvation, misuse of resources, the above changes seem quite benign. Thomas: I know it has been postulated before, but I think it is time, perhaps evolutionary to make a conscious decision to outlaw war. If that requires a world police force, so be it. Law and order, good government, good use of unsustainable resources and deliberate use of sustainable resources only make common sense. Forget the economies of the marketplace in which we use a half a gallon of gas to go the the convience store to pick up a pack of cigerattes, it's time to bring in a higher level criteria other than just we can do it and keep the price down.
Re: FW: DOWN AMONG THE ECONOMISTS
It's interesting that Jonathan Rowe's article of several years ago is again making the rounds on the internet. It also showed up a couple of days ago on the PEN-L (progressive economist) list. Rowe uses a pair of analogies with psycho-analysis and medicine that could bear literal elaboration: "How such agile and ambitious minds could drift so far out of touch with daily reality, is a question which merits the attentions of our most astute psychologists." and "Could it be that in industrial societies, human distress is increasingly a form of iatrogenic disease - the doctors in this case being economists?" 1. "How such agile and ambitious minds could drift so far out of touch with daily reality, is a question which merits the attentions of our most astute psychologists." Would Freud be astute enough? As it turns out, the drift of the "agile and ambitious minds" of economists exactly fits the textbook case of *repression* as theorized by Freud in several articles, notably his articles on "Repression"(1915), "The Unconscious"(1915) and "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"(1920). The following passage from Beyond the Pleasure Principle gives a compressed account of Freud's theory about what the organism tries to accomplish by means of repression: "*Protection against* stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than *reception of* stimuli . . . The excitations coming from within are, however, in their intensity and in other, qualitative, respects -- in their amplitude, perhaps -- more commensurate with the system's method of working than the stimuli which stream in from the external world. This state of things produces two definite results. First, the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure predominate over all external stimuli. And secondly, a particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendendcy to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of *projection*, which is destined to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes." The mechanism of repression is almost too byzantine to summarize briefly, but it involves, firstly, the substitution of an external phobia to take the place of the anxiety-causing internal drive and subsequently an endless repetition of substituting for the substitute. Although economists concern themselves with the *elasticity* of substitution, I've yet to come across much acknowledgement of the possibility that some such substitution may be, as Freud suggested, PATHOGENIC. The repression of key economics texts and the substitution of vulgar apologetics is endemic to the *discipline* of economics. The process of repression/substitution is so fundamental to economics that it would be more clinically appropriate to refer to the discourse frankly as an "anxiety hysteria" rather than "discipline". From this perspective, the GDP is not simply an "inadequate concept", it is a hysterical projection -- a chimera. The GDP simply has no theoretical standing in economics (this can be readily documented from the source texts -- see for example remarks by Simon Kuznets). It is, rather, symptomatic of a *phobic flight* from political economy's own theory and evidence. Of course, this diagnosis of GDP as symptom doesn't say much for Rowe's project of constructing an alternative indicator of "genuine progress". What could it possibly mean to educate the patient in the production of "healthier" symptoms? This sounds like what Freud referred to as a transference neurosis -- "*repeat*[ing] the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of . . . *remembering* it as something belonging to the past". The psycho-analytical therapy for the neurosis of economics (of which the GDP is a symptom) would seem to involve uncovering the repressed impulse and, as Freud suggests, "to force as much as possible into the channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as repetition." This is easier said than done. There is an additional irony here in that mainstream economics purports to be about the satisfaction of psychological impulses -- that is to say, the pleasure principle -- but it takes flight from the implication of an economic "beyond the pleasure principle", a compulsion to repeat. 2. "Could it be that in industrial societies, human distress is increasingly a form of iatrogenic disease - the doctors in this case being economists?" Rowe's second analogy acquires an extra measure of menace from the suggestion that not only are the "doctors" inducing disease "unknowingly" but they do so *compulsively* as the symptom of their professional neurotic disorder. Sure, it would be nice if we could "cure" the economists, but what does this say about the rest of us -- submitting passively to a
interesting development in Europe
FIRST EU THREAT TO WITHHOLD FUNDING OVER ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLIANCE BRUSSELS, Belgium, July 8, 1999 - The European Commission has told five countries that they may not be eligible for European Union (EU) regional aid money unless they properly apply European nature laws. Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily Website: http://www.ends.co.uk/envdaily } For full text and graphics visit: http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jul99/1999L-07-08-06.html
Re: interesting development in Europe
Was it for prohibiting use of hormones in cattle that the US just decided to sanction EU? On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, Steve Kurtz wrote: FIRST EU THREAT TO WITHHOLD FUNDING OVER ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLIANCE BRUSSELS, Belgium, July 8, 1999 - The European Commission has told five countries that they may not be eligible for European Union (EU) regional aid money unless they properly apply European nature laws. Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily Website: http://www.ends.co.uk/envdaily } For full text and graphics visit: http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jul99/1999L-07-08-06.html
Jeremy Rifkin - 1-6-99
Work, Social Capital, and the Rebirth of the Civil Society: A Blueprint for a New Third Sector Politics Rapporteur: Mr Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Washington, DC Picture: bouton_Conference.GIF (1078 bytes)Index The global economy is undergoing a fundamental transformation in the nature of work brought on by the new technologies of the Information and Biotech revolutions. These profound technological and economic changes are going to force every country to rethink their long held assumptions about the nature of politics if they are to adjust to the radical new world being readied for the 21st century. In the new era, the traditional political spectrum of marketplace vs government is likely to be replaced by the notion of a three-legged political stool with the marketplace, government, and civil sectors each acting as a check and balance against the other in a new kind of tripartite politics. The new political paradigm is going to have far reaching consequences, reshaping our very ideas of citizenship in the coming century. The revolutionary changes in technology and work are already laying the groundwork for this historic shift in the exercise of political power. Sophisticated computers, robotics, telecommunications, gene splicing, and other Information Age technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every industry. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the manufacturing sector. The number of factory workers in the United States declined from 33 percent of the workforce to under 17 percent in the past 30 years, even as American companies continued to increase production and output, maintaining our country's position as the number one manufacturing power in the world. For most of the 1980s it was fashionable to blame the loss of manufacturing on foreign competition and cheap labor markets abroad. In some industries, especially the garment trade and electronics, that has been the case. Recently, however, economists have begun to revise their views in light of new in-depth studies of the manufacturing sector. Economists Paul R. Krugman of MIT and Robert L. Lawrence of Harvard University, suggest, on the basis of extensive data, that "the concern, widely voiced during the 1950s and 1960s, that industrial workers would lose their jobs because of automation, is closer to the truth than the current preoccupation with a presumed loss of manufacturing jobs because of foreign competition." Automated technologies have been reducing the need for human labor in every manufacturing category. Within 10 years, less than 12 percent of the American workforce will be on the factory floor, and by the year 2020, less than 2 percent of the entire global workforce will likely still be engaged in factory work. Over the next quarter century, we will see the virtual elimination of the blue collar, mass assembly line worker from the production process. Until recently, economists and politicians assumed that displaced factory workers would find new job opportunities in the service sector. Now, however, the service sector is also beginning to automate, eliminating vast numbers of white collar workers in the process. In banking, insurance, and the wholesale and retail sectors, companies are deconstructing. They are eliminating layer after layer of management and infrastructure, replacing the traditional corporate pyramid and mass white collar workforces with small, highly skilled professional work teams, using state of the art software and telecommunication technologies. Even those companies that continue to use large numbers of white collar workers have changed the conditions of employment, transferring workers from permanent jobs to "just-in-time" employment, including leased, temporary, and contingent work, in an effort to reduce wage and benefit packages, cut labor costs, and increase profit margins. Acknowledging that both the manufacturing and service sector are quickly reengineering their infrastructures and automating their production processes, many mainstream economists and politicians have turned to the emerging knowledge sector, pinning their hopes on new job opportunities along the information superhighway and in cyberspace. While the "knowledge sector" will create many new jobs, they will likely be too few to absorb the millions of workers displaced by the new technologies. That's because the knowledge sector is, by nature, an elite workforce and not a mass workforce. Engineers, highly skilled technicians, computer programmers, scientists, and professionals will never be needed in "mass" numbers to produce goods and services in the Information Age. Indeed, the shift from mass to elite labor forces is what distinguishes work in the Information Age from that of the Industrial Age. With near workerless factories and virtual companies already looming on the horizon, every nation will
