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Attempted endless growth
from Ikonoclast
I guess history shows that moral wrongs can continue almost indefinitely. However, being empirically (provably scientifically wrong to a high degree of probability) is another beast altogether. Trends that can’t continue because they approach limits imposed by fundamental laws of nature, won’t continue. It’s as simple as that. We have to change our ways (patterns of production, consumption and attempted endless growth) or civilization will crash and burn, pretty much literally. The opposition of entrenched dominant capital to necessary changes and transitions has seriously delayed necessary change. The situation is now ultra critical. We have ten years, or maybe only five years (as per the old Bowie song).
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Endless growth???
If economics is the study of allocating [scarce] resources to provide for the needs (products and services) of a society, then — there is a link between economic development and human progress. Of course that addresses our material needs, and we have other needs beside that.
I am reading a book called Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship: Startups for the 99%. The more I study economics the less I think economics will be relevant or contribute much to the task of reforming and transforming capitalism. The real reform will come from entrepreneurs who create new business models based upon open innovation, open data, the commons, cooperative business models, etc, based upon supplementing the profit motive with the service motive. Cohen calls this “Open Entrepreneurship.” He writes:
The 8 richest people in the world have the same aggregate wealth as the poorest 50% of the global population (i.e., 3.5 billion or so)! We have witnessed a decoupling of GDP growth and job growth in developed countries around the world. As companies have rebounded from the Great Recession, they have done so through increased automation and the use of temporary, freelance workers. (Cohen 2018, xiv)
I know the harm the shift to the use of “temporary, freelance workers” inflicts upon society well, for I disarticulated the global supply chain and pierced the technological smoke screen hiding the predatory abuse of contract workers.
Just last night I attended a technology Meetup here in Nagoya and learned how the Fissured Workplace is happening here in Japan too.
Well, perhaps it is time to create a startup here in Japan where temp workers will more readily recognize the social good of such new business models?
Economists will talk until everyone is blue in the face, entrepreneurs will act and change the way the capitalist game is played.
Upon further reflection (reading Soderbaum 2018) the above comment, is too harsh. Offer and Soderbaum (2016), and scholars like them, are indeed contributing to the intellectual foundations needed for change. Further reflection is required on my part.
The info age goads focus of distributed intelligence. One may denigrate human intelligence suppressed by war and police power as a classic fool who attempted to convince women that breast feeding is barbaric.
Actual war monger barbarians twist reality 180°
In 1798, just before the beginning of the industrial revolution in the UK, Robert Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.” The thesis for the book was simple. The natural human urge to reproduce increases human population geometrically (1, 2, 4, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.). However, food supply, at most, can only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.). Thus, since food is a necessity for human life, population growth in any area or on the planet, if unchecked, would lead to starvation. Malthus argued there are preventative checks and positive checks on the population that slow its growth and keep the population from rising exponentially for too long, but still, poverty and some starvation are inescapable and will continue. Preventative checks alter the birth rate. They include marrying at a later age (moral restraint), abstaining from procreation, birth control, and homosexuality. Malthus considered birth control and homosexuality vices, but recognized they are practiced. Positive checks increase the death rate. These include disease, war, disaster, and finally when other checks don’t reduce the population, famine. The fear of famine or the development of famine was, thought Malthus a major impetus to reduce the birth rate. Potential parents are less likely to have children when they believe their children are likely to starve.
Malthus considered these “laws of nature.” Turns out, it’s not quite so simple. The world’s human population in 1798 was about one billion. Now it’s nearly eight billion. There is famine and starvation. As well as the other preventative and positive checks pointed out by Malthus. But hunger in the modern world results from poverty and inequality, not scarcity. Put more simply, hunger, as well as war, disease, and disaster (more accurately the failures of disaster relief) are results of capitalism. To be fair, at least some of the increases in food production since 1798 result from capitalism, as well. But most is the result of new ways (cultural norms) for farming and new farming technologies.
Farming (mostly now corporate) currently produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed every person on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak expected by 2050. But people making less than $2 a day — most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviable small plots of land — can’t afford to buy this food. Right now, the bulk of industrially produced grain crops go to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the one billion hungry. The call to double food production by 2050 is only needed if governments and corporations continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people. And, that translates to profits for agribusiness and auto makers.
The bigger issue is how to feed those ten billion expected by 2050, sustainably, in a world racked by the effects of climate change. According the United Nations, there is no choice but to embark on a greener revolution. Crop production can be sustainably increased by using a range of techniques more in tune with ecosystems by minimizing the use of external inputs and by helping farmers cope with the weather extremes that increasingly accompany climate change, thereby enhancing their resilience and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is a kind of farming useful and accessible to small-scale farmers as it is adapted to the conditions they face with emphasis on local crop varieties, and harnessing traditional knowledge to sustain, rather than fight, natural ecosystem processes. At the same time, intensive, industrial-scale farmers must be encouraged to greater environmental awareness. This can be done by providing the right incentives for sustainable practices, and penalties for unsustainable ones, along with strong regulators who know the difference. The dominant agricultural model inherited from the Green Revolution of the 1960s, emphasizing a narrow range of crops and heavy use of chemicals, energy and capital, cannot meet the challenges of the new millennium. How does capitalism fit into this new model to feed the world sustainably and fairly? It’s my opinion it doesn’t. Waiting with bated breath for the views of the largest capitalists on this question.