From: J. Maxwell Legg (income@ihug.co.nz)
Date: Sun Oct 04 1998 - 23:43:33 MDT
Doug Bailey wrote:
>
> One last point is the idea of efficiency. I read a paper a year or so ago
> in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (I'll try and locate it but can't at
> the moment) that stated some poor countries would do well not to worry about
> acquiring more of the right resources but instead work towards wasting less
> of their existing resources. What impact might a drastically increased
> efficiency in capital utilization have on growth models? How would this
> potential effect of AI-development be factored in to growth models?
>
I found one site that said the opposite condition applied to countries
facing scarcity :
"Resource depletion and degradation in poor economies may have their
most inimical
effect not by directly constraining growth but by indirectly affecting
the potential of these economies to innovate."
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/pcs/eps/social/social1.htm
For low and middle income countries, Deacon finds that
"the political variables associated with deforestation tend also to be
negatively
associated with ordinary investment." In particular, the strongest
(negative)
associations were between investment and guerilla warfare, revolutions,
constitutional changes, military executives (i.e. dictatorships or
juntas) and
circumstances in which the senior executive of government was not chosen
by
elected representatives.
----------------
Nonetheless, it is my considered view that the simplistic measurement
system of double entry bookkeeping is highly suspect as to it being the
cause of this so-called affected potential. A public AI would not and
could not make head nor tail of such information in determining how best
to structure the public data needed to foster innovation. Thus
capitalism, seen as a degradable economic lubricant, will be as foreign
to a public AI as oil will be to a Drexlerian assembler. In the YAK
fiasco monetary mechanisms will be seen as a hindrance and in the same
way that NZ shelved its pounds shillings and pence in 1967 when they
were seen as a machine problem and likewise when gold met a similar fate
in 1971, in part because of Hewlett & Packard's advice to the
government, public AI researchers with a keen eye on the problems of
financial statistics are now calling for the next informational change
of transactional integrity.
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