

The War Against Too Much of Everything - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/business/adbusters-war-against-too-much-of-everything.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1356193041-AIz2mW6wAv8pEYkAAFmeWg&gwh=CACE70A4F01C6503EA651D7C6BE8131B&pagewanted=all

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simonsquiff
Reminds me of this very interesting article saying that we're wasting our
resources buying stuff that simply ends up in landfill
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/on-12th-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/on-12th-
day-christmas-present-junk?INTCMP=SRCH)

~~~
guard-of-terra
The problem with money in the modern world is that you can buy a lot of things
you don't really need.

But on the other hand there are a lot of things you want but you struggle to
buy because they are too expensive. That is, housing/real estate mainly,
education in some countries, medical care in some countries yet. You might
stuggle to buy legal protection if need arises. You certainly can't buy a
predictable quality of life after when you retire.

So we have two large classes of people: there are people who struggle
financially with their basic needs - food, shelter, transportation. But there
also is a larger class of people who have some free money and they can buy
loads of stuff they don't really need - such as described in your article -
but they can't buy higher quality of life in terms of real estate, seciruty
and predictability of their future.

And it doesn't make much sense to save because prices tend to inflate faster
than you save.

People end up buying useless crap because it's almost free.

If someone finds out to produce _real_ wealth much cheaper, we'll see a major
redefinition of consumer society.

~~~
csense
> housing/real estate mainly

> If someone finds out to produce real wealth much cheaper, we'll see a major
> redefinition of consumer society.

Please learn basic economics.

The problem is that there's a limited amount of supply of real estate.
Everyone wants real estate, so market participants bid up the price until
supply and demand match.

If everyone in the world gets substantially wealthier in the next few decades,
then they'll just bid higher and higher against each other for the same pool
of real estate, driving up the price of real estate until enough people are
priced out of the market for supply to again match demand [1].

Of course, Le Chatelier's principle [2] says that as the prices rise, changes
will happen that oppose the rise in prices. For example, if you're a company
in a land-intensive sector like agriculture, more expensive land means you
invest more in existing equipment and techniques that can help you use your
land more effectively right now, and R&D into brand new equipment and
techniques that will help you use your land more effectively in the future.

Likewise, if land prices rise, prices of other goods will change to reflect
the cost of land used to produce them. Because land-intensive products are
more expensive in this world, people will naturally make decisions on their
own to use less of them. Falling demand for land-intensive products will
translate directly into reduced demand for land to produce them, opposing the
rise in prices.

[1] Assuming no new supply of real estate is discovered. Of course, it's
possible that new supply sources _will_ be discovered causing a _drop_ in
prices, or blunting the impact of the forces that cause housing prices to
rise. While we can rule out the discovery of a new continent as happened with
the European "discovery" of North and South America, it's conceivable that
within 100 years we'll have some combination of space colonies, artificial
islands, multilevel cities / more high-rise construction, better technology
for doing things in deserts and other presently marginal regions, underground
buildings...

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier%27s_principle>

~~~
aes256
> The problem is that there's a limited amount of supply of real estate.
> Everyone wants real estate, so market participants bid up the price until
> supply and demand match.

In most developed countries, real estate prices are artificially inflated by
restrictions on the construction of new housing stock.

This is far from a simple case of supply and demand.

~~~
brc
It's still a case of supply and demand, just that the supply of build able
real estate isn't just about dirt. It's dirt with a road,sewage, power and
legal status allowing dwellings.

The point still stands - even a radical readjustment in planning policies
could maybe double land supply - but a type of moores law with land will never
happen.

~~~
csense
> a type of moores law with land will never happen.

Never say "never." It's easy to imagine a future where interplanetary travel
is routine, and habitable places are common (either due to the human race
getting lucky in terms of there being an abundance of vacant Earth-like
planets within easy range of future space drives, or due to the human race
being diligent in the development of technology to live on hostile worlds or
asteroids).

In such a future, I could readily imagine the human race expanding
geometrically -- such expansion would end when we reached the edge of the
galaxy, but that would still give tens of thousands of years of unlimited
geometric expansion, assuming our ships are self-sufficient and can penetrate
any within-galaxy area void of habitable planets, and also assuming our space
drives won't allow faster-than-light travel (I think the galaxy is ~100,000
light years in diameter).

Should we count on things turning out that way? It seems irresponsible to
assume so at this point. But it also seems like we shouldn't discount this
scenario entirely, either -- and discounting this possibility is exactly what
you're doing when you say "a type of moores law with land will never happen."

