duminică, 22 iulie 2018

Resource economy versus market economy

Nature manufactures with what is readily available: if it has Hydrogen,Carbon and Oxygen. It uses this to manufacture what it needs.
On the other side humans are driven by society demands (market): if gold is desired and rare and it is expensive, then humans will cross seas, and mill mountains  to get it.
On the plus side this allowed a better distribution of of resources and of people on earth. Some cities in Siberia exists because of expensive mineral resources.
Also high price of resources developed technologies, expensive spices payed the development of new ships. 
On the minus side it lead to exhaustion of the natural resources.
The whales were many,cheap and had plenty of oil.This lead to excessive hunting, this increased price for them which lead to investment in new,better whale ship, which lead the whales on brink of extinction.
Other disadvantage is that the market demands an expensive good that has higher consts for environment and for society. For example natural diamonds: the only purpose of this trinket is to be on the finger of a lady, but for this tonnes of earth are excavated, children in Africa are enslaved.
The demand of Chinese for donkey skin has determined stealing and slaughtering of these animals in Africa, where the are main way to transport goods.
In global market economy the side effects are payed by someone else from the other part of the globe.
In order to be beneficial the market economy must be rational (this is impossible) and the technology development must be directed toward substitution, and efficiency not to exploitation.
In 19 century while other invested in whaling ships other invested in petroleum. Finally petroleum replaced whaling oil in lightning and lubrication, saving the whales.
If the investments for new whaling ships should have been directed to oil industry, the whaling industry would died off sooner, and we would have more whales now.
If the money invested in new oil wells would have been in invested in new more economic technologies, we would not use tar sands, and drill on the Arctic.

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