Wanna beta it for me when I get it to third draft status? Before you say yes, it is about 20,000 words, not including footnotes. By the time it is in third draft state I hope to have cut the wordage substantially, but it will still be long.

If I had the time, petal, I'd love to - but I've got 2 weeks in which to get a hideously big mountain of planning work done for school (History half-done, Geography half-done, Maths, RE, English, Science, CDT, IT, Music all still to do...), and I sure as hell shouldn't be here at all (la la la I'm not here, no sir, not me) - so I'd just let you down if I said yes.

Sounds v. interesting, though!

We Spanish kids got crap like "Destinos," despite there being Almodovar right there at the local video stores.

We never watched movies, but for reading material, we got Borges and García Márquez. I don't feel cheated in the least!

Later on we got Cervantes and Calderon, but pretty much nothing written in the current century.

Sorry, I wasn't blaming the guys in the lab coats as such, more expressing disappointment that they haven't been able to fix all the important yucky stuff. The ones I blame are the god(s), the high priests and the clerics of the church of neo-liberal global economics, as well as the ones that 'use sharp stones to whack people over the head'.

But I don't feel confident that my comforts aren't founded upon other people's poverty. Coffee, chocolate, sugar, trainers, clothes - lots and lots and lots of things that I use are produced by people who are being exploited and kept in poverty (even effective slavery, for a lot of the cocoa trade, apparently).

But my understanding is that, for these people to enjoy near-middleclass Western conditions, the actual middleclass Western folks would have to give up some of the stuff they take for granted. And people absolutely won't do that for the greater good. I mean, I agree that it's the politics and economics that's the problem, but I think that the middle class westerners are culpable to some extent.

Exactly Fay and this squirmy feeling of at least half-assed culpability, I believe, is leading to the feelings that have been mentioned just a little upthread, of a real uncomfortableness in talking about all of this stuff, including the war, with people, even friends and family. I mean it really is becoming difficult to blithely plead ignorance about the part that 'every one of us who benefits in any way from the current unfair system' plays.

But I think that consumerism - the very concept of consumerism and wastefulness, which is so thoroughly ingrained in the West, is a Bad Thing. Labels. Logos. Throwing stuff away when it's still useful. All that stuff. The sense of value being limited to how much money it costs absolutely permeates our society, and it's terribly flawed, but it's insidious.

Yeah it's a pretty much unsustainable way to live in the big and long pictures, but what is even worse is the fact that the 'value', as in how much money things cost, is false/incorrect because it does not include environmental, social, etc. etc. costs. A good example is organic produce prices versus agricorp produce prices (assuming that the Australian situation of is pretty much applicable across US/UK otherwise I'm talking out my ass). The cost of organic produce in Australia is costed far more 'realistically', taking into account environmentally sustainable practices, 'fair' wages and conditions, property rights, transport, distribution, etc. whereas the multinat agricorp's prices often reflect cheap/ripped off land, slave or child or just bad labour wages and conditions, harmful agricultural practices, and so on. And this does not take into account the number of un-employed, under-employed, and paid-bugger-all-even-though-I'm- employed people who are all struggling to buy the produce even at the cheap price.

I mean take the airline industry (who would at the moment). I understand that there are a few big things going on that have severely impacted their ability to make huge profits for their shareholders, but can they not see that by sacking thousands more staff, that's thousands more people that can't afford their product. And then there is the flow-on effect, as more and more in the tourism/service sector (the sector that much of the latest round of western affluence comes from) are sacked/retrenched because less travel, less tourists, less business, and you keep increasing the number of people who can't afford a ticket on the goddam airplane. So next year the airline profit forecasts don't look good either, and then the whole downward spiral spins another revolution.

Science & technology - airplanes - Next Big Thing, travelling at the speed of sound - Concorde - not enough profit - out of business. Are we going forward?

A French teacher friend of mine lamented that there was no way she could get Umbrellas past the principal at her school -- despite the fact that there's a firm moral basis for everything that happens in the movie, it's not going to fly in today's school environment!

Yes moonlit - full social costing would help. But here is something interesting. We could cut consumption of resources tremendously, provide the same services, save money compared to what we spend now - at current market prices for energy and resources, not even counting social costs. It is not only that our system has the wrong prices. It does not respond to the price signals it gets.

When you talk of waste, you come close, but I think the Japanese have a word for the particular type of waste I'm thinking of "Muda" which translates as something along the lines of "futility and waste".

In my opinion there are specific things in the structures of markets, and more generally of highly unequal relations that tend to promote this kind of waste.

BTW in terms of disappointment; back when your Father was telling you this, we already had the technical capability of providing a decent life for everyone on the planet. I've seen at least some good arguments that we had this as early as 1910. In short, since the early 20th century it has always been about the politics and economics, never about the technical capability. I'm sure your Father believed what he said. But, as one example, take world wide food production records, and divide by worldwide population records, and you will be surprised at how long hunger has been technically unneccesary.

In my opinion there are specific things in the structures of markets, and more generally of highly unequal relations that tend to promote this kind of waste.

Would you mind stating some of those things. I'm only barely able to follow this discussion, but I have felt for a long time that we have the capability, but not the desire to help out our fellow humans. I've only recently tried to back that up, so this discussion is very interesting to me, even if I'm too dim to completely follow.

Oboy - this is the heart of a 20,000 word article. Still if I just state it and don't try to prove it, maybe I can be brief:

OK Markets depend on bargaining power between buyer and seller, and especially between buyers and sellers of labor. Now imagine yourself a business owner. You have a choice of two cost savings that will save you the same dollars. One saves labor, the other materials. Well your supplier probably has more customers than just you. (Not neccesarily, but probably.) You are probably your workers only current employer (not neccesarily but probably). So if you cut your need for labor or increase what you can do with the same labor you increase your bargaining power more than if you cut your materials cost by the same amount. In other words, saving labor will increase your bargaining power more than savings materials. You are more likely to be able to demand a wage cut (now or in the future) than a materials price cut (now or in the future). Thus there is a built in bias against materials savings. This is a long established bias. The article covers some accounting practices that actually make savings in energy or materials harder to see than direct labor savings.

Secondly markets (not just capitalism but any market) tends to encourage atomization and discourage whole systems thinking.

Tasks tend to get very subdivided with each person optimizing his or her part. But you very seldom optimize a system, by optimizing individual parts in isolation.

Take the example of pumps. Industry uses a lot of pumping energy to pump (for example) hot water through pipes. OK, most pumping energy is used to overcome friction. If you make the pipes 50% fatter this reduces friction by 85%. If you pay attention to layout and have them undergo fewer twists and turns this saves anther half or two thirds. fatter less twisty pipes will save over 90% of pumping energy. But normally this is not done, because the cost of fatter less twisty pipes is more than the energy saved. Only if you save pumping energy, you can also reduce the size of your pumps. And that saves enough to pay for the more expensive pipes - even before you save one Btu of energy. So by looking at pumping as a system, you can save 90% of energy in a new system, and it won't cost a dime even before energy is saved. But no one thought of that until the last five years, because no one was looking at pumpings system as a whole systems. And you know what? It still is not considered in most new pumping systems.

And as a second post - why markets tend to encourage atomization.

1) All markets end up with workers being controlled. Even worker owned co-ops in market systems end up hiring managers who are pretty much in control on a day to day system. Now from a managers point of view the ideal would be to measure and control every action every worker performed. But that is impractical. So the next best thing is for workers (including intellectual workes) to act as "black boxes" - with clearly measurable inputs and clearly measurable outputs. That way if a manager can't control a worker in detail, the manager can still make sure the worker requires no more inputs than she should, a produces the output she is supposed. So this encourages greater atomization, not only as a matter of efficiency but as a matter of control.

There are even examples where control has been chosen over productivity. In California, there was a tremendous fight to outlaw the use of short-handled hoes in agricultural labor (where employers required farm workers to use short rather than long handled hoes.) Short handle hoes destroy farm workers backs. Workers also can pull fewer weeds with them than with long-handled hoes. So why did farmers fight so hard against the change? because with a short handle hoe, you can see the muscles in a workers back tense with effort. An experience supervisor can glance a worker and instantly tell how hard he or she is working. With a long handled hoe, there is not so much strain. You actually have to look at the area the worker is clearing to tell how the worker is doing Supervison is much harder when teh workers use long handled hoes. And the farmers were willing to not only to cripple their workers, but to have them work less efficienctly until crippled, in order to keep tighter control.

2) Workers and especially intellectual workers have incentive to favor atomization in markets. Basically, in a black box situation, the worker has more bargaining power than if everything they do is easily replicated.

3) The same thing applies in other extremely top down systems - possibly more so in the case of stuff like central planning. Central planners need to keep control of workers just as owners dl. Managers working for central planners have the same need for control as managers in market systems. Workers have the same need for bargaining power with managers in central planning as they do in markets.