At 12:35 23/10/2010 -0700, Harry wrote:
KH: What will be the next energy technology that can replace the burning
of fossil fuels?
HP: Whatever it is, it will still consist of Land, Labor, and Capital.
The next scalable energy technology is highly likely to be solar. You'd
have to extend your format to Sun + Land + Labor + Capital! My four-factor
production format incorporates this already -- Land + Energy + Capital +
Innovation (once again, labour being confined to the consumption side of
the equation.).
KH: How should children and young people be given equal opportunities?
HP: Too vague to answer. However, the whole thrust of George's Political
Economy is toward the ending of privilege. His question at the beginning
of Progress & Poverty is "why, in spite of the constantly increasing power
to produce, is it so hard to make a living".
The evidence is piling up that by far the biggest cause of excessive
inequality occurs in the earliest months and years of a child's life. By
the age of 5, the average child is mentally a year behind the upper
middle-class child, and by 11 is three or four years behind. As we're now
moving into an increasingly specialized era then this neurophysiological
fact must be incorporated in any political or economic policy worthy of the
name.
KH: How do present individual wealth disparities compare with those of the
past?
HP: George would no doubt change this to Why are there such wealth
disparities?
In which case Georgism had better start thinking seriously about the matter
raised in the previous question.
KH: Do national aggregations (e.g. a country's GDP) mean anything any longer?
HP: Good question. Perhaps they never did mean anything (except to
governments and academics).
They only meant something when governments not only began printing money
from 1914 onwards (in order to fight artillery wars) but also began to
assume that they could control their individual economies. We now know that
they can't do so (except negatively).
KH: What role will genetics play in future business?
HP: Another sociological question unless it is tied to production.
This is very much more a question of consumerism. Once full DNA sequencing
is cheaply available then it will be gradable (according to number and type
of harmful gene variations) and females will take this into account (in
addition to normal criteria) when deciding on a life partner for parentage.
The present class divide is likely to be stretched a great deal wider as a
consequence.
What will be the effect of continuing job specializations?
HP: No doubt, higher Wages for the successful specialists.
Yes. Once again, unless very early education and socialization is
incorporated into any worthwhile economic analysis and policy-making then
we are heading fast to a bipolar society.
KH: Why has the financial sector become so large in recent decades?
HP: A mixture of reasons, including inadequate education leading to
misplaced trust along with the entertainment/news industry which, failing
to understand basic economics, has stressed such things as the stock
market and land-value bubbles, while endlessly analyzing them as if they
were important. It's rather like hurricanes and Global Warming. Now TV
picks up an incipient hurricane of the coast of Africa and lovingly
follows it west. In fact, 3 of the 4 Category 5 hurricanes to beset the US
occurred earlier in the 20th century (before the Global Warming
hypothesis). The fourth -- Hurricane Andrew which happened in 1992 wasn't
covered until after its destruction hit the US. Then the news people
discovered it!
The simple answer to my question is that currencies seesaw such a lot that
more and more derivatives (insurance policies) have had to be devised in
the last 30 years or so. It is the sheer size of this (having grown
ten-fold) that needs so many more operatives than ever before. (And money,
too, in the purchase of options -- this is where most of QE money happens
to be residing at present -- a great wall that will crash down on us as
hyperinflation sooner or later.
Does the declining birth rate in advanced countries mean ultimate extinction?
HP: Mark Steyn seems to think so. But this is another sociological question.
But it's an economic question also. Without a mass market in the "advanced"
countries there'd be no economic system either!
KH: Is money a valuable good in its own right or is it a piece of paper?
HP: It is a promise to pay -- only as good as the promisor. If the
promisor is trustworthy, then the money has value. (Value and Wealth are
not the same.)
This has only been the case since 1914. Before then, money had intrinsic
consumer value (as an item denoting high status, in the same way as
property, clothes, etc).
KH: What consumer products, presently enjoyed by the rich, await mass
production?
HP: Yachts, private jet planes, Lincoln Town Cars. But much of humanity
would be satisfied with three square meals a day.
But, as Fred Hirsch pointed out 40 years ago, there's a limit to how many
yachts and private jet planes can be accommodated in today's world. There
are no more mass-producible consumer goods that the daily lives of ordinary
people in the Western countries can absorb -- unless they cannibalize the
use (and purchase) of others.
KH: When we know how to divide ourselves into two species who will be
motivated to do so?
HP: As a species can interbreed, becoming a new species is a problem
unless sufficient nubile partners are available. I doubt that this would
be a choice if it were to happen.
The how of speciation is almost certainly going to be solved in the next
few years. As also In Vitro Gestation (IVG). The temptation for someone,
somewhere, sometime to experiment with injecting new genes into the human
DNA will be too great. IVG would enable a sufficiently large de novo
species to be established quite quickly. If man survives the
energy-food-freshwater crunch of the next century or so, it is too much not
to imagine that the curiosity of man will not drive him to initiate a new
human species.
KH: Will there be an economic benefit in becoming two or more separate
species?
HP: Can't see one, but it's an interesting intellectual exercise.
It;s quite easy to understand once you have read Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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