Everyone knows CO2 is a growth stimulant. Greenhouses add CO2 to make their plants grow faster.
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"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy," American investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis stated in 1906.
Record food prices around the world.
The difference between "Makers" and "Takers" is a common abbreviation for the economics of production vs consumption.
Andy Kessler offers a twist:
Makers vs. Taylor Swift Shakers
Buying tickets to her concerts won’t boost the economy and create societal wealth.
Excerpts:
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There are two sides of the economy: the productive side and the spend side. You can create wealth by learning or you can spend it. We have makers and, appropriate to Swifties, shakers.
In April, Bernard Arnault, chairman of luxury goods maker LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, briefly became the world’s richest man as
’s stock was temporarily in the dumpster. Now Elon Musk is back. Bloomberg tracks the wealthiest daily. After Messrs. Musk and Arnault are ’s Jeff Bezos, ’s Larry Ellison and ’s Bill Gates. Françoise Bettencourt Meyers of cosmetics company , at No. 13, is the world’s richest woman. The list intertwines tech, luxury, energy and retail.Most of those near the top of the list are makers. They do more with less, while the spending side, such as Mr. Arnault’s brands, sells less for more. This is the difference between mass production and custom products. Let’s face it, a $4,650 Louis Vuitton “khaki and beige empreinte calfskin leather with polished brass” tote has the same utility as a paper bag from Safeway. That isn’t productivity. On the flip side, Amazon can deliver you a handbag tomorrow. Manufacturing and retail logistics run cheaper every year because of Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle data centers. This is how wealth is created now. Louis Vuitton is how it’s spent. See the difference?
Tesla straddles both sides. Investors are betting, heck, praying, that Teslas, basically low-margin cars, become productive autonomous machines, and they might if their Full Self-Driving mode stops running stop signs.
The economy needs both sides. But here’s something to think about: Both bring joy, but only one drives progress. We all consume, but progress happens when we postpone consumption and invest. Produce first; spend later. Consumption informs the supply side, which is where learning and societal wealth creation take place. Concert tickets and fashion reduce savings and investment. Production learns; consumption burns.
Yes, we need basic essentials. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Food, shelter and health should be coupled with love and belonging and a sense of connection. But at some point, the pyramid turns from needs to wants, with squishy stuff like esteem, self-actualization and even transcendence. Delivering these can be a profitable business, but does that create societal wealth? It more creates self-satisfaction....
Productivity is a game of abundance. We went from five transistors on an integrated circuit in 1958 to billions today. Million-dollar computers turned into $500 laptops, and now $50 smartphones. The old corner market was nice, but Walmart has more than 10,000 stores, each with about 140,000 items. Amazon and Walmart now each have more than 350 million items for sale online. That’s abundance.
Luxury, on the other hand, relies on scarcity: Hermès scarves, $50 million homes in the Hamptons, Tiffany jewelry, Breguet watches, $4,300 bottles of 2019 Screaming Eagle wine, Four Seasons over-water bungalow suites, meals at the French Laundry (a Gavin Newsom favorite)—it’s travel, restaurants, wine, jewelry, art. The more exclusive, the more expensive. I like the expression “peacocking”: showing off money and status, often to overcome insecurities. But self-actualization does nothing for society. Same for alcohol, tobacco, drugs and gambling.
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Mass customization is the AI-enhanced future. Abundance means that luxury and exclusiveness will erode and move further up Maslow’s pyramid, from needs to wants to “I desire a little me time.”
There will always be two sides to the economy, but I’m suspicious of those who charge more for less. They are exploiting wealth, not creating it. Ultimately today’s luxuries will become tomorrow’s mass-customized goods and services. AI anxiety therapists that sound like Ms. Swift are coming. That’s the side of progress.
The media wants you to know it’s hot outside. “ ‘Heat health emergency’: Nearly half the US at risk,” CNN proclaimed last week as temperatures climbed above 90 degrees in much of the country.
If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are. Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.
“Extreme Temperatures Are Hurting Our Mental Health,” a recent Bloomberg headline warns. Apparently every social problem under the sun is now attributable to climate change. But it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.
The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions. The authors also note that “climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”
Well, yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.
Yet according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.
A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.
“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”
These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential. A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.
The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis. “It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane,” Ms. Tolentino writes.
“A couple of years ago, reading a climate report on my phone in the early hours of the morning, I went into a standard-issue emotional spiral thinking about it all,” she recalls. “We had also recently had a baby, whose carbon footprint likely already exceeded that of entire villages in Burundi. I was playing whack-a-mole with my consumer desires.”
Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”
It isn’t difficult to notice that today’s snowflakes consider hot weather aberrant, similar to how they perceive normal feelings such as anxiety or sadness. But there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.
Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children. A mental-health reporter for Vox recently wrote about climate stress, and how “some people even grapple with the existential question of whether to have children because of the human toll on the planet’s resources.”
Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another. Ms. Tolentino relates how one patient she interviewed realized through deep reflection that “he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.”
Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.
Outstanding article from the WSJ:
July 20, 2023 11:50 am ET
The world’s population has increased eightfold since 1800, and standards of living have never been higher. Despite increases in consumption, and contrary to the prophecies of generations of Malthusians, the world hasn’t run out of a single metal or mineral. In fact, resources have generally grown cheaper relative to income over the past two centuries. Even on the largest cosmic scale, resources may well be limitless.
How can a growing population expand resource abundance? Some of the ways are well known. Consider increased supply. When the price of a resource increases, people have an incentive to find new sources of it. Geologists have surveyed only a fraction of the Earth’s crust, let alone the ocean floor. As surveying and extracting technologies improve, geologists and engineers will go deeper, faster, cheaper and cleaner to reach hitherto untouched minerals.
Efficiency gains also contribute to resource abundance. In the late 1950s an aluminum can weighed close to 3 ounces. Today it weighs less than half an ounce. That smaller mass represents considerable environmental, energy and raw-material savings. Market incentives motivated people to search for opportunities or new knowledge to reduce the cost of an input (aluminum) to produce a cheaper output (a Coca-Cola can). Technological improvement drives a continual process whereby we can produce more from less.
Innovation creates opportunities for substitution. For centuries spermaceti, a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales, was used to make the candles that provided light in people’s homes. Long before the whales might have run out, we switched to electricity. Are you worried about having enough lithium to power all those electric vehicles on the road? Quick-charging sodium-ion batteries are already on the horizon. There is far more sodium than lithium on or near the surface of the Earth.
We’re living in an era of dematerialization. Not long ago, every hotel room in the U.S. was equipped with a thick blue copper cable to connect the guest’s laptop to the internet. Nowadays guests use Wi-Fi—no cables necessary. Likewise, the smartphone has minimized, if not eliminated, the need for paper calendars, maps, dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as for metal or plastic radios, cameras, telephones, stereos, alarm clocks and more.
Perhaps less appreciated is that apart from a minuscule amount of aluminum and titanium that we have shot into outer space, all of our material resources are still here on Earth. Vast quantities of steel may have been “used” to build our skyscrapers, and copper in power cables, but all that metal could be recovered and reassigned. During World War II, 14,000 tons of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s West Point Bullion Depository were made into silver wire for electromagnets as part of the Manhattan Project. Virtually all of it was eventually returned.
Common sense implies that since no physical resource is infinite, the cupboard will eventually grow bare. Given ever-increasing consumption, we will reach a level where all useful atoms are physically incorporated into objects that make life enjoyable. Won’t economic growth plateau or reverse course entirely at that point? You can’t have unlimited growth on a planet with a finite number of atoms. Or can you?
This argument has no bearing on any real resource issue. It invokes a hypothetical future when we are mining the Earth’s very core for rare elements and draining its oceans to sustain billions of thirsty humans. This is so far in the future as not to be relevant to any present-day policies or planning. Today, the bottleneck isn’t physical resources but knowledge of how to use them to our benefit. Not just theoretical knowledge but down-to-earth, practical engineering knowledge. We need to improve that as fast as we can.
For millennia, learned people and charlatans dreamed of transmuting elements. In 1919 physicist Ernest Rutherford achieved the first artificial transmutation by turning nitrogen into oxygen. Today, transmutation is all around us. Smoke detectors contain americium, an artificial element produced by transmutation. Nuclear physicists achieved the transmutation of lead into gold decades ago, though the process requires far too much energy to be a viable alternative to mining.
But the cost of energy is bound to fall. The sun is effectively a nuclear fusion reactor converting millions of tons of mass into energy every second. Someday soon we will be able to capture as much of that energy as we like via super-efficient solar panels. The difficulty won’t be harvesting that energy but getting rid of waste heat by radiating it into space. We may find it more convenient to make our own fusion reactors. All the elements found on Earth other than hydrogen and helium were made by transmutation in various kinds of stars. In the distant future, we could use artificial fusion not only for energy but for artificial transmutation, to make whatever elements we like. All we need is abundant energy and hydrogen, which is plentiful in the water that covers most of the Earth’s surface and is the most common element in the universe.
Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created. And nothing prevents us from improving that rate too. Knowledge is the ultimate resource and there are no limits on creating it.
Mr. Tupy is a co-author of “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.” Mr. Deutsch is author of “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World.”
Electroverse @Electroversenet Astrophysicist Dr Willie Soon says the climate is driven overwhelmingly by the sun, not by human carbon diox...
