[p2p-research] Fwd: Kragen Javier Sitaker comment on Brian Davey and scarcity

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Brian,

this came on my facebook link to your article,

Michel

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From: Facebook <update+pjiidwm at facebookmail.com<update%2Bpjiidwm at facebookmail.com>
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Date: Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 12:33 AM
Subject: Kragen Javier Sitaker commented on your link.
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


    facebook
Hi Michel,
Kragen Javier Sitaker commented on your link.
Kragen wrote: "I admit I still haven't read the Club of Rome calculations
and their followups --- can you recommend a good starting point? --- but I'm
skeptical of this idea that we've drastically overshot the carrying capacity
of the Earth. If I read the USDA report right, world grain production alone
is enough to supply the caloric needs of about 20 billion people, and we're
still using low-productivity-per-acre mechanized agriculture and
still-lower-productivity traditional pre-mechanized agriculture throughout
much of the world, rather than modern high-productivity biointensive
agriculture. People only go hungry today because they can't compete with
cows and chickens to buy the grain. That's an economic and spiritual
problem, not a problem of carrying capacity. Furthermore, if I understand
correctly, we have produced enough food to feed the world since about 1970,
with a gradually increasing surplus. I could, of course, be mistaken. I'm no
expert like the Club of Rome folks or the liberal economists who oppose
them. I think it's useful to distinguish between three levels of abundance
of a resource. Ubiquitous abundance is what we experience today with free
software, Wikipedia, ocean water, nitrogen, sunlight, and the like. There's
so much of the resource, or it's so non-excludable and non-rival, that
anyone can have as much as we want. (A few years back I would have put
oxygen on the list, but what you do with oxygen is to combine it with
carbon, and it looks like we're going to have to go down the road of
restricting that activity in order to survive as a species.) Collective
abundance is a lower level of abundance, which we experience today with
quartz, grain, fruit, oxygen, and so on. There's enough for everybody to
have what they need, but not enough for everybody to use as much as they
want. There's plenty of grain for you to eat, but not plenty of grain for
you to feed to your cows and eat, or ferment into alcohol to power your car.
Collective abundance is the basis for the governance of traditional commons
in grazing, fishing rights, and so on. You can have individual scarcity in
the midst of collective abundance if it's managed poorly. Scarcity is where
there isn't enough of a resource for everybody, so some people have to do
without, or perish. This is the future of food, as predicted by people like
Malthus and Hardin, and the present of, for example, personal computers."

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