Science Forum - Picture a starving man who owns a Ferarri.

kojax · Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 1:26 pm Post subject:

And that will tell you most of what I see wrong with the world's economic systems, from my perspective.

We've fooled ourselves into believing that our labor, and manufactured goods are the fundamental source of wealth, and we just keep being all surprised when a shortage of a natural resource cripples us.

No. The most fundamental wealth of all is land, followed closely by resources. You can't eat if you don't grow food. You can't grow food without arable acreage. You can't make stuff if you've no raw materials.

Which is more expendable, the Farmer, or the arable land he/she tills? Well, if you lose the farmer, some woman somewhere can bear another child, and in another 18-20 years you're set. If you lose the acre of arable land, nothing can replace that. (Women don't create land in their wombs)

Indeed, the total potential productivity of food is tied proportionally to the amount of land available. Putting extra amounts of effort into tilling that land, beyond the basics, can only increase your final output by a small margin. (And for my purposes, the "basics" include the use of fertilizer and most modern farming techniques.)

Nothing we do adds to the total pool of available land. We can increase its ease of access by terra-forming it, building roads, being careful not to pollute it. That's kind of like making more of it, but the same could be said of mining ore, or pumping oil. It's true that Ore/Oil is useless until somebody mines/pumps it, but there's still a fixed, final amount of ore/oil that ever can be mined/pumped, and we approach that limit hyperbolically.

(As you get closer to the limit, the cost of extraction becomes greater and greater until it becomes too great to continue, but you never reach a point where you've fully mined every last grain of say... gold)

So, what I would propose, at least in the third world, would be a change to the way we distribute land, one that more closely reflects the relationship between how much land exists, and how much an effect it has for a person to work really hard at creating more and/or maintaining what we have. There is kind of a relationship, but it's not like the relationship between working and building cars.