Welcome to the Speculist, looking forward to your posts.

Sally --

In your response to Joseph Jackson, you wrote:

>> I also don’t agree with Jackson’s contention that we have plenty now—that the plenty we have is not well distributed because of the greed and incompetence fostered by capitalism.

I'm not sure that's exactly Jackson's point, but I would argue that we do have "plenty" now in a relative sense. Michael D wrote in a recent comment that if you divided the GDP by the population, everybody would get $75K. Not bad. Of course, I'm not suggesting we do this -- I think it would be a one-off exercise, and we wouldn't have much of a GDP to speak of after trying it.

However, that's a lot more pie to go around than we would have had at any time in the past. Right now in the US we provide a sort of ad-hoc version of universal health care by allowing anyone who needs medical services to go to an emergency room. There's a cost associated with this, but it's different from the costs associated with other things we do as a society. It's an absorbed cost. Think about a public drinking fountain, or plugging your laptop into an outlet at the airport.

All three of those things -- water, electricity, and emergency room visits -- have a cost associated with them, but we have decided as a society to have that cost absorbed one way or another. No government program was required for any of those three things to become "free." The tendency is to argue that health care is different, and of course it is. But make the economy two or three times as productive as it is right now, and the difference might not be as painful or as apparent.

>>Changing the ownership of the means of production won’t do it. Upgrading those means to nanotechnology will.

Sure, we want to change the means, but ownership is coming along for the ride. In fact, the means of production has already begun to change hands. That's why we're able to do this!

Welcome Sally

In 1971 the World Health Organization estimated that there were approximately 900 million people living in hunger- or approx 1/4th of the total population.

WHO believed it was not a production problem but a distribution problem. They were met with fierce opposition from agri-business and others who wanted everyone to believe it was a production problem.

In 2001 when population was approx 6.1billion, WHO estimated 1.1 billion people living in hunger.
And they still maintained it's a distribution problem.

Some points-
It's possible that the only efficient way to produce enough food for 5 billion people is to have 6.1 billion population. But that seems pretty unlikely- no math, no science source, just instinct. (WHO would have the relevant sources. As will Conagra and Monsanto.)

Meanwhile- in 2001 we were feeding 5 billion, 1.3 billion more people than the total population in 1971.

I'd acknowledge that at some point, the carrying capacity of earth could be exceeded by human population. But if food is going to be the limiting factor, we didn't get there at 5billion. Assuming distribution is the problem.

BTW- I don't mean to trivialize distribution. It's a huge, and frequently overlooked or minimized, component of any economic organization.

In fact, the second biggest attraction of personal fab labs on every block is the lack of distribution required.

Distribution is negatively impacted by greed and incompetence-though I would argue the bigger part of the latter is the induced blackout. Si I agree with Joe Jackson up to a point.
Example- we could easily teach amortization math in 9th grade. ANd everyone would understand how mortgage financing is priced and sold. But the banking industry doesn't want consumers that well prepared. People don't need to understand amortization math to work at the bank (broker, credit union, etc) - and if they understood it well enough to really be cost conscious consumers, profit margins would be at risk.

Just one example- there are others. But the point is that the profit seeking corporation and by extension its capitalist stock holders not only have no motivation to provide that kind of education, they have HUGE incentive to make sure that kind of education is avoided.
(Big pharma and food and drug in general is way, way more lopsided )

>>It's possible that the only efficient way to produce enough food for 5 billion people is to have 6.1 billion population. But that seems pretty unlikely- no math, no science source, just instinct. (WHO would have the relevant sources. As will Conagra and Monsanto.)

Why would you go to them when there are truly authoritative sources available? To quote myself:

Consider agriculture..in 1850 there were 16 US citizens for every one US farm. In 1990, there were 122 US citizens for every one US farm. Over that period of time, farmers dropped from making up about 70% of the US labor force to a slot somewhere between two and three percent.

Meanwhile, from 1930 to 2000, the number of irrigated farming acres in the US went from about 14 million to about 50 million. Over that same period, corn yields have increased from about 40 bushels per acre to about 150.

Total and per capita agricultural output have increased while total and per capita participation in agricultural activity have decreased.

Agricultural output is following something less than a Kurzweilian hockey-stick, but when you map it against the number of people required to produce the food, it's very impressive.

I think the problem with food production and distribution is that too many people are trying to solve it. I wonder what the stats were, in 1971, for the percentage of the world population who owned mobile phones? (They have existed since the 1930s.) I know that almost 20 years ago, when the company I worked for set out to open up the mobile business in emerging Russian and Eastern European markets, cell phones were still considered pretty much a luxury item for normal consumers.

Today 2/3s of the world's population have access to this technology -- no large-scale programs required.

In 1971 if WHO or some other such outfit had put together a plan for getting four billion people onto mobile phones would it have worked? I doubt it. I think hunger and poverty are more likely to be solved by emergent, evolutionary developments rather than through direct efforts.

Yeah... but whereas activity like buying a cell phone can result in the emergence of a significant adoption, how do you get the highways built? or create a distribution capability?
Which individual actions get you there?

Yes- productivity is way up (though calories and nutritional content per acre is a better measure of carrying capacity and the production gains and it's not up as much)