We are naive fools to wait for the free market to save us from impending shortages of critical natural resources

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing

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The shocking same-ness of human behavior

As a general rule, simple questions, especially simple questions with purportedly obvious answers, are the most interesting questions.

While I attended a wedding this weekend, I noticed all of the sex partners seated together, you know . . . husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends (and a few gay couples).

Why do sex partners sit together at public rituals, I wondered.   The obvious answer is that it’s because most sex partners live together, right?  Other people thus see sex partners as couples and feel that they should be invited to important rituals together, especially to important rites of passage, such as weddings.  But why do so many sex partners live together (and hence get invited to prominent social events as couplets)?  After all, instead of living with her sex partner, maybe a woman would rather live with (and then potentially be invited to go to weddings with) a non-sex partner friend or neighbor, or perhaps even her non-sex-partner plumber or accountant.  Or maybe she’d rather attend public gatherings by herself, so that she could freely mingle.  The norm, however, is obvious to anyone who bothers to scan the crowd at a wedding:  the great majority of people who attend such gatherings attend them as sexually-paired couples.

Someone who followed the SSSM model might say that this behavior (of attending prominent rituals with your spouse) is simply learned, or that it is “social convention” or that it “feels right.”   There is a compelling story that can be told about paternity …

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