Re: How many years left

Posted by Robert Howard-2-3 on Apr 19, 2009; 9:13pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/How-many-years-left-tp2660167p2660577.html

It reminds me of the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/

EXCERPTS:

·         Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.

·         Of course, urban civilization was not buried in manure. The great crisis vanished when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles.

·         No doubt in the Paleolithic era there was panic about the growing exhaustion of flint supplies. Somehow the great flint crisis never came to pass.

·         We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications.

·         These prophets of doom rely on one thing—that their audience will not check the record of such predictions. In fact, the history of prophecy is one of failure and oversight.

·         The fundamental problem with most predictions of this kind, and particularly the gloomy ones, is that they make a critical, false assumption: that things will go on as they are. This assumption in turn comes from overlooking one of the basic insights of economics: that people respond to incentives. In a system of free exchange, people receive all kinds of signals that lead them to solve problems. The prophets of doom come to their despondent conclusions because in their world, nobody has any kind of creativity or independence of thought—except for themselves of course.

 

Rob

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 11:36 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] How many years left

 

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/26051202.jpg

 

 

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org