Many argue about the need to protect/boost agriculture and industry. Those are declining areas of the economy, especially when it comes to jobs.
Yet little advocacy for making it cheaper to buy services and more expensive to buy goods? Even though most workers are employed in the service sector, and have been for some time.
@LeoSammallahti I find it unclear what you are getting at outside of the lobbying power of big ag/industry. Advocacy for cheaper services, but more expensive goods? Does that benefit the service worker?
I am similarly unsure of the intention here. Leo, are you making a lightweight economy argument, that the service sector permits economic growth with less resource use, while combining that with the observation that we're mostly a service sector economy anyway so why not?
I don't have a clear opinion one way or another on the idea of services stimulus (which I think is what you are arguing for), but I do think that if we intelligently redesigned agriculture and industry there would be more small scale production of necessary goods, which I think would tend to shift the job market away from services.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Services cheaper equals lower salaries for service workers or cost of overhead reductions. I assume goods means nonessential goods or the service worker gets a possible double negative impact.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Maybe I'm focusing on "cheaper" when the meaning is affordable. Cost of essential goods rising would have to be more than offset by tax cuts.
We are probably talking around each other. I think I now understand your original post as focus on services rather than consumption of goods, and achieve affordability through better government spending/more sensible taxing.
Yes I didn't express myself clearly enough.
Alongside taxation another thing that could be good would be to build dense urban areas. Services tend to do better in that sort of environment.
Set up a hot dog stand in a busy location in Tokyo and you will have more customers than you can possibly serve.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic I'm more for tearing down urban areas. I think high population density creates more problems than solutions; it's not ecologically sound, but the only way out is to put the human population into balance with the world resources. i.e., massive population reduction.
OTOH, you're absolutely right about higher population density easing access to services.
In the United States, at least, large subsidized farms are not generally producing food for human consumption, but are instead producing biofuels and livestock feed. Most of the rest ends up in highly processed food. The rhetoric is that our subsidies "feed the world" but that's not really what's happening here.
There's a genuine conundrum globally as to how to manage food production in a way that provides farmers a decent living. Across societies, the farmers that produce staple crops are almost always near the bottom economic rung. I don't think a consistent solution has been discovered, but free markets definitely aren't going to fix the situation for farmers.
There's a genuine conundrum in how to manage food production globally. The farmers who produce staple crops almost always end up at the bottom economic rungs, across societies and looking backward in time. I'm not aware of a satisfactory solution to this issue, but I definitely don't think that leaving food production up to free markets would be good for the economic stability of farmers.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Small densities work just as well as big ones. The corner store, small medical centers, etc.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, Lee. I believe corner stores are largely an urban phenomenon?
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti I'm referring to scale. Small communities used to have stores, that were much like the corner store in a large urban neighborhood. Evan at smaller scale you have producers and services. The rush to capital has driven those things out of the community and into centralized bigger locations. The cost of cheaper goods has been lower wages and less jobs. Urbanization is largely a byproduct of a need for a cheaper local workforce.
Lee, I'm wondering if you can unpack the idea that urbanization is a byproduct of the need for cheaper labor. You probably have some context that I don't.
I don't know a whole lot about the history of urbanization, but thinking about serfs on medieval manors, slaves on U.S. southern plantations, and wage slaves in company towns, it seems like the owning classes have a ton of strategies for ensuring cheap labor that aren't necessarily related to density.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti IANAE. Why are big cities formed? It's surely not just about socializing. Most people don't have millions of friends and family they need to be in close proximity with. Trade for necessities doesn't require it. It limits travel for specialized needs, but how often do such needs arise? It would be hard to find any instance of a large city that wasn't formed around some centralized power structure. i.e., money, religion, government.
I think better articulation than "why are big cities formed" is "why do people want to move from rural areas to cities".
My guess would be that the main reason is because it's easier to provide a variety of opportunities to work and start a business than in a rural area.
You can have a lot of different pubs and restaurants to choose from.
People want more than bare necessities - they like to go to a barber instead of cutting their hair themselves etc.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Yes, some people don't want to be rats in a cage.
I agree with Leo that there's no reason to work against the existence of dense urban centers when there are so many people who choose that. To bring the conversation full circle, though, I'm interested to know whether Leo's model for decreasing the cost of services does or does not include subsidies. Saying that people in urban centers shouldn't subsidize agriculture should be balanced by saying that people who don't have as much need for luxury services shouldn't be forced to subsidize those services either.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti There seem to be a lot of physical and mental health reasons to work against dense urban centers. There's also the self-sustainment issues (food as well as natural resources).
@lwriemen @LeoSammallahti
I think that the big mental health issues with cities aren't so much tied to density as to lack of access to natural landscapes or even just vegetation. There's more than one way to create density and some of them create more of an emotional divorce from nature than others.
@lwriemen @LeoSammallahti
In terms of natural resources, to some extent I agree with what you are saying, Lee, but I don't think that there's a clear environmental case for dedensification *except* in the cases of people who are directly engaged in acquiring natural resources (or the communities that directly support those people): doctors, merchants, etc.
Depending on how society is structured, the fraction of the total population that needs to engage in natural resource acquisition can vary. In an agrarian vision, it might be essentially everybody. In our current global society, it's less than half of the population and declining. In principle, the portion could fall anywhere in between. From a strictly environmental standpoint, I think the ideal situation is for everyone who isn't *needed* for rural economies to live at high densities.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti I think it's easier to visualise the limit of natural resources outside of an urban environment, but that's just me. It certainly isn't tied to density. I live near a city of ~70,000 that isn't very dense, and urbanites can be just as isolated from the rural.
I've started to wonder whether the real solution is to create a civic duty for everybody to spend some time working in agriculture, forestry, or similar.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti Broad exposure is always good for broadening the mind. IME, segregation equals ignorance in racism, classism, etc.
I found this indigenous development concept interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/03/the-bold-new-plan-for-an-indigenous-led-development-in-vancouver.
Whether the development will live up to the vision is a different question, but it's an interesting example motivated by the desire to both increase density and allow people to engage with "nature."
I have to say that for me "we shouldn't force people who live in urban areas to subsidise agriculture" contains echoes of "we shouldn't force people who choose not to have children to subsidize public education," a position which I staunchly oppose.
That's a fair accusation - but I do think subsidising education does make more sense than subsidising agriculture. The positive externalities are greater.
Don't think the service sector should be subsidised, my preference would be to tax natural resources (including urban land) more and use the revenue to fund wages less.
They do have shops and barbers, but the customers are spread out more geographically, meaning they have to travel on average longer distances. Find it hard to reconcile this with reducing car use, which is needed for more environmental living.
It makes it relatively cheaper and quicker to cook at home or cut your hair yourself instead of eating out in a restaurant or going to a barber.
Surely people in higher density areas need to travel longer distances, and therefore need to use more cars?
Like let's say you live in a rural area and need to go to a hospital. Surely it's more difficult for everyone to have a hospital within a walking distance compared to a higher density area?
@LeoSammallahti
I found this thread a bit troublesome. The focus on consumption (as if its an inevitable thing that will always happen at a certain level and can be directed) and using tax incentives to use markets to shift where it will happen
May in a large part be me and my feelings that moving more stuff back outside of market mechanisms is likely part of overcoming many problems we face
re: farm production & subsidies covered much in this thread https://social.coop/@dazinism/105319428630493493
@lwriemen@social.librem.one @dynamic
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic @lwriemen
If you look at the thread I linked you'll get an idea of the huge subsidies in the ag sector.
Economic and political power is often projected and/or focused through this sector (see eg. United Fruit Company in Guatamala, China buying up vast areas of ag land in Africa, all the grain be taken out of Ireland during the potato famine, etc. etc.)
The control of production and distribution of these vital resources are critical.
Can't see ag subsidies ending...
1/2
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic @lwriemen
… without major changes to the way international economic and political relationships are played out.
(do look at the thread I linked for some details of trends in the ag sector)
@dazinism @LeoSammallahti @dynamic I don't think one can make a blanket judgement regarding ag subsidies. i.e., there are societal-valid reasons for subsidizing agriculture. The trouble is that most ag subsidies today are done for invalid reasons.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean about consumption, Dazinism. My own focus on agriculture is based in the fact that we all need to eat, which is a form of consumption we can't really get away from. Markets are just one mechanism that causes concentration of wealth away from food-producers. I am not aware of any society, capitalistic or otherwise, in which food-producers aren't pushed toward the bottom social rungs.
@dynamic
Was talking about @LeoSammallahti initial post in this thread that kind of suggested to me that 'consumption' is something that happens (Guess talking consumption beyond basic needs) at a given level and can be influenced / directed via taxation.
While in many circumstances there probably is some level truth to this, I think theres limits to what would be gained by pushing for such tax reforms. Think we need more fundamental changes that bring a different understanding to how 1/2
@dynamic
We think about what we produce & consume - how and why
With regard to the status of people that grow food. At times (and I imagine probably still in some places) the people that produced food were very high respected by their societies.
Theres some examples at (also some horror stories)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarianism
Guess its not so surprising as their produce is a crucial requirement for everyone. In a way more surprising that this often isn't the case.
I'd love to hear specific examples of societies where staple-food producers were held in high respect. I don't know of examples of this (although the food-vs-status stuff is of course less of an issue in societies where basically everyone needs to produce food), and not knowing of such examples makes me feel both sad and pessimistic.
@lwriemen @dynamic
When trying to enable more ecological lifestyle, like drastically reducing car usage, would find it hard to pursue without more density.
Also skeptical about whether small farms can be productive enough to compete with big farms in providing affordable food to people without subsidies.
Of course people would be free to set up farms and live how they want to live, but don't think we should subsidise farming.