Cold this have went any different?

[Renton]

How interesting that you point to this graph like it's a good thing, while I see an exponential depletion of resources. Population growth is now a problem, it's not a good thing at all. Of course, growth is the result of improving living conditions. So technology takes us into new realms, until eventually we overrun the planet and there are no longer enough resources to ensure a high quality of living for everyone. Just because our Western lives are great, the average global quality of life is decreasing, not increasing. There are more people becoming poor. Eventually population should decrease as food and water become more scarce.

It's pretty safe to say that we aren't even close to overpopulated, taking the world as a whole into consideration. There's a reasonable case to be made that there are localized pockets of overpopulation in the world, though. Population growth is generally a universal good for the economy because it results in more output. More ideas, more research, more innovation, all of this scales with population. As I addressed my last post, depletion of physical resources is not a major issue. As population continues to increase, and our needs for energy, metals, potable water, etc. increases in turn, the incentives for conservation will increase as well. In capitalism, prices do all of the work of this. For example, as countries like India and China emerge to become rich economies on the level of the U.S. and U.K., the demand for oil for increase. As the demand increases, the price will rise. As the price rises, consumers will bid for less of it than they would otherwise. Eventually alternative sources will begin to be competitive with oil. This is how electric cars will become completely mainstream. You don't need a government mandate to do this, you just need to let prices do their job. This applies to every other natural resource.

There's also not factual basis for the claim that we're running out of food or potable water. Starvation has sharply declined since the industrial revolution and continues to do so. Potable water problems are largely due to a tragedy of the commons, as the water sources tend to be owned by states and not private entities. States corrupt everything they touch, so you can't call this capitalism. Drinking water is handled in a damn near communistic way in most countries in the world. As far as running out of it, though, just as with oil, the price of it will increase until desalinization becomes an economically competitive extraction method, and then we've got oceans.

I've flown once. Air travel is not something I can afford, nor do I have the need for air travel.

Okay... Are you suggesting that commercial air travel isn't beneficial to societies? I merely brought it up as a good example of how the poor are getting richer and not the other way around.

So I can sue car users for forcing me to inhale their fumes? That would set a very dangerous precedent.

Actually you would sue the owner of the road, technically. But probably (warning: theoryland) in a futuristic free-market economy, it would already be worked out what you're entitled to financially for having a road adjacent to your front yard with bumper to bumper traffic and you'd be receiving that money as a matter of course. Also, in an economy where people/companies are accountable for the pollution they cause, pollution-mitigating tech would stand a much greater chance of emerging and being implemented. This is just one of the plethora of problems that governments are royally fucking the dog on. Don't blame capitalism.

Well this would also be unsustainable over a long period of time unless it is managed properly, and I don't trust humans to do that because that involves cost. For every kilogram we take from a moon and bring here, we need to take a kilogram of something else to replace it with, otherwise the mass of the planet and moon will change. I'm not going to pretend to know what would happen if we just imported a shit load of titanium from one of Saturn's moons without taking anything there to balance out, but I do not for a minute think that nothing will happen. Our planet's overall mass will slowly increase, meaning its gravity will increase, meaning our solar interaction will fluctuate. Gravitational balance seems essential, and when profit comes first, I don't have confidence that it would be managed properly.

If you're mass driving such a volume of resources that you're significantly altering the mass of the earth, I think we're already 50k years into the future and colonizing other planets and stuff so I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume they will have worked out the logistics and sustainability of that.

Like I say, I'm no economist. Something is wrong, I blame capitalism because it encourages greed, an every man for himself mindset. Maybe the problem is nation-states, or maybe it's just human nature, that the fact we are still essentially monkeys competing for bananas means I shouldn't expect anything else.

Well the one thing that needs to be understood about capitalism is that it isn't immoral, but it is amoral. Morality is a separate part of human nature that DOES influence economics but there's nothing to suggest that capitalist actors must be moral. I would strongly disagree with the claim that capitalism has an "every man for himself" mindset, though. Collaboration is incredibly important to functioning capitalist society. People who share information and team up will always have a competitive advantage in commerce over people who are lone wolves.

I think what you mean to say is that capitalism is based on self-interest, and that I would agree with. Acting in self interest is different than "every man for himself," because mutual self interest is possible. Lefties give free trade an unfair shake when they criticize it as being parasitic, when it's actually quite symbiotic. Greed is generally quite healthy. According to webster, greed is defined as "a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is needed." I would define greed less pejoratively as "a desire for a better life."

The webster definition is flawed because it uses the quantifying terms of "excessive" and "more than is needed." Who the hell is to say what constitutes excessive or what is needed by another subjective person? We have as a race been sharply increasing our standards of living for hundreds of years and I hope we continue to do so for thousands more. I think that if people in Victorian-era England knew of all the incredible luxuries even relatively poor Americans circa 2014 enjoy, such as televisions, central air conditioning, refrigeration, and supermarkets with 100,000 items in stock, they would decry those people as being "excessively greedy." But its hard to deny that progress has been made. Capitalism leads to increased living standards for all, including the very poor, and there're mountains of physical evidence that prove it.

I just feel like there has to be a better way. Capitalism has had its day imo, now it's time for the next stage of economic development, one which encourages community over individuality, where greed becomes part of humanity's shameful past.

Maybe command economics will work once we invent AIs that are capable of making objective on-the-fly adjustments to economic policy. With humans at the helm it will continue to be a perpetual catastrophe that squanders all our resources, including human lives.