Chris Zell wrote:
Why should we condemn consumers for wanting a good home, a safe useful car or the ability to support their families? The idea that we are somehow 'stealing' too much of the world's resources so as to impoverish the rest is nonsense. If we all stop eating meat, it won't add a single calorie to the starving.
It is not nonsense, but not quite true either. As you say, the proximate cause is bad governance. However, resources are limited. If we reduce our consumption, market costs will fall and people elsewhere will have more. To take a dramatic approach, suppose we develop cultured meat, grown in machines. In that case the cost of meat per gram will be about the same as tofu, and supplies will increase by a huge factor. Plus the meat will have fewer carcinogens and bacteria, and it will eventually taste better. (This is likely to happen in next few decades.)
No one condemns consumers for wanting "a safe useful car." I am all in favor of that! Unfortunately, anyone familiar with automotive technology knows that cars are anything but safe and useful: they are appallingly inefficient, unsafe and overpriced. Do consumers want to throw away their money and risk their lives for no reason? An automobile is a 19th century machine with a bag on it (as programmers would say). This is like using souped-up Zeppelins instead of jet aircraft, and fast moving mechanical calculators instead of silicon-based computers. Oil-powered internal combustion engine cars should have been replaced decades ago.
Bad governance does cause problems. So does bad management, and backward, anti-technology, anti-science attitudes, and consumers who settle for fifth-rate obsolete technology and 40,000 unnecessary accidental deaths per year. These consumers are ignorant: they do not understand safety; they do not realize that better alternatives exist, and that the auto companies are ripping them off. If the automobile companies would do their job right, we could easily supply every family on earth with a car, and the expanded fleet of cars would consume far less energy then automobiles now consume, and cost far less overall, especially when you include the cost of insurance and accidents.
People sometimes say that consumers are spoiled in America, and too demanding. It sure doesn't look that way to me. I cannot understand why Americans, who are so enamored of technology and wealthy, are willing to put up with garbage cars from GM, buggy software from Microsoft, and food that tastes like cardboard. Japan has many social problems but compared to the U.S. it is a consumer paradise. The cars are decades ahead of ours; washing machines and other gadgets are superbly engineered and last for decades; and the everyday food you buy from the 7-11 on the way home tastes better than American gourmet restaurant fare. I cannot understand why Americans settle for second-rate stuff! We would be better off indeed if people demanded "a safe useful car."
- Jed
