That's not the analogy. (Nor is the depletion of fisheries, for example.) The analogy based on what you are saying would be that we would have to severely constrain, or try to eliminate, the growing of crops,0 for what is being advocated as a “solution” to the “crisis” are measures that are destructive as well as highly unrealistic and beyond what sensible people understand is necessary. (Additional details would include the claim that we're going to deplete the soil within a season or two, when fertility would take many years more to decline, for example; but the most important element is the radicalism — along with the familiarity — of the “solution” that is being sought, even more than the hype about the “problem.”)

There are a lot of issues here, but a parallel I think of when reading your argument is crop rotation. The mechanism is pretty straightforward. Plants use various nutrients in the soil to grow. If the plants of a crop extract those nutrients and we then ship the plants elsewhere, those nutrients are not replenished fast enough for future crops. Eventually, the soil will be unable to grow a healthy crop of that kind due to lack of the proper nutrients. “Scientists” (meaning just people who studied this topic; no idea if it was a professional class of scientists, farmers, or who) figured this out and recommended that farmers rotate crops to stop that cycle of nutrient depletion. Now, we add nutrients back in through fertilization.

The point if we follow your argument, we should have been deeply skeptical of crop rotation. “After all, the earth has been growing plants successfully for a billion years. And suddenly now we need to control how plants grow and put certain people in power to regulate this? I'm deeply skeptical.” But of course this is an erroneous way to understand the situation. It's not that the earth can no longer grow plants. Instead, humans stepped in and changed the relationship between plant growth and the soil cycle. Because we were making that change on such a large scale, we then had to modify how we operate that in the future.

Similarly, no one I am aware of believes that the natural climate cycles can't keep a stable climate for the next few centuries if humans weren't affecting things. The problem is that we aren't allowing those cycles to work. Instead we are releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year for our power needs. Whenever nature does do things on such a vast scale in such a short amount of time (such as a major volcanic eruption), it does indeed affect the climate for a substantial timeframe (at least on a human scale).

Going back to crop rotation, of course the analogy falls apart in various ways. I believe that most farmers themselves adopted the innovation without a governmental regulation because there was a clear medium-term economic advantage to doing so. The ones who did not eventually ran their farms into the ground and had to move on. I am on record on TMV for posting that I'd like everything that can be handled without government intervention to be handled that way. (Though I now see it's not a very good post.)

There are two major problems with simply hoping that private actors will take care of the issue. First, there's no strong mechanism in the markets today to take into account the full costs of certain activities. Here in Hawaii, we use imported oil to bring in almost all our goods from other places. If the sea levels rise in a century to destroy our beaches, our economy will be devastated, because of the impact on tourism, and businesses will have a substantial loss. But no grocery store today worries about that when they can sell some good bananas from Ecuador and raise profits today. There is no cost to the long term destruction of beaches for that grocery store. If the markets did have some way of considering this, I think that would be far more important and successful than any governmental regulation.

Second, if a farmer of old decided to let his fields go kaput, well, the impact was largely on him. But with global climate change, we are all tied together. Hawaii could switch to all renewable energies tomorrow and the sea levels would still rise if no one else acts. Such comprehensive action could require governmental involvement.

Of course his world doesn't exist in reality. He has to completely revise history in his mind to make it true. It's amusing and more than a little sad that in one post he says that labor laws would close a factory and eliminate jobs and then in another he gets indignant when it's pointed out that he believes we shouldn't have labor laws.

Dr J, do you truly believe that 10-year-old children, or young women like these, are setting their own labor laws?

Dr J, can I have the last 19 minutes of my life back? I just wasted them, thanks to you.

Either you're not capable of having an adult conversation on the topic, or you're not interested in doing so. Not much I can do about either, so I'm done.

Ditto…

Finally something we can agree about…

This is related to what I've warned people about, to come in future decades, in paying for government, and exploding entitlement costs (and growing taxes). “Equal amounts of pain”: I have specifically decribed what will be sought, in fact, as “equilibrium.” (in practice, equalizing the pain and howling)

“No, lol. It's the opposite. Social and political change does not happen unless people make it happen.”

You had said that often little or nothing happens, and then a magic moment happens. That viewpoint is dissociated with people making it happen, people doing things. It is fatalistic or hints at it (it's out of your hands), and more importantly, is definitely passive (you're waiting for something you can't control to happen — this is hardly the same as “making it mappen.”) More in a moment (later in this posting).

“Americans both black and white had been actively calling for change, working for change, and all too often bleeding and dying to achieve, first legal freedom, and then equal rights, for black Americans for literally centuries.This was not passivity; it was activism. My point is that these activists were working for full equality under the law; they were not working for 'incremental' little baby steps. It was the *other* side — the people who did not want to see *any* change or who were so terrified of and intimidated by white supremacy that they were afraid of “riling up” white authorities with too rapid change — who were always urging the activists to slow down, take it one step at a time, don't push things, let's go for incremental progress. Martin Luther King, Jr., took on the incrementalists with his pen in 'Letter From a Birmingham Jail.' He rejected incrementalism utterly, because what on earth kind of meaning does 'incremental change' have when the change has been waiting for 350 years?”

Change was happening before that — it was just “incomplete” or insufficient, that's all (and as being resisted, especially in the South, in the case of civil rights). Certainly with this case, the full goal or complete goal was what was being sought (“Eyes on the Prize,” not on a partial prize); in cases like this, you probably view the objective as complete or absent, without “partial credit,” and viewing it as an objective no differently than you'd say there are no degrees of perfection, uniqueness, or — being pregnant, say.

I would point out that many goals are reached by steps, rather than all at once, and while sometimes you can be ambitious and even demanding, at least with defining your (eventual or ultimate) goals, at other times it's unrealistic, trying for too much, too soon, or seeking what isn't immediately reachable. (After all, gestation when you're pregnant isn't instantaneous, but requires nine months.)

“Long story short, meaningful change takes time, but it doesn't come at all if the people who seek it don't pose a threat (figuratively speaking) to the powers that be. Incrementalism does not pose a threat to any power authority and never has. That's why they promote it.”

No. You're mistaking being offered scraps or sops by people in power with what Dr. J and others like me are writing about, true progress, which comes from effort and achievement (eventually making others yield before it), and perhaps you are mistakenly discrediting the smaller, incremental achievements that are concealed (in various ways) or obscured by preoccupation with what's ultimately sought (which isn't always realistically achieveable promptly).

I believe you'd have been on firmer ground if you had stuck with noting that not all efforts achieve the same gains, which actually is true not only about political change or progress but everything. In the business world, for example, many businesses fail, or pioneers (as in political movements) are too far ahead of their time (there is no “conspiracy” or magic spell inhibiting them) and make little or no progress. The best example you could have provided (which I believe best illustrates the reality of what you're trying to explain) is Thomas Jefferson: “One-tenth inspiration, nine-tenths perspiration,” and how many experiments did he make that failed before he got the incandescent light bulb to be successful and practical? And what actual progress did he make, learning from his failures, that are obscured by the history we all know, that (finally) he invented the light bulb? (Promptly, from scratch? No) Usually the achievements that are made are incremental, not all at once. Think of Europe and Japan, rebuilding from the ashes of World War II, and Japan in particular becoming competitive with the West. All at once, promptly? No. It was incremental, and many of the steps are lost to most of us, vague, or only documented in obscure places by specialists. But obviously it didn't happen overnight.

We didn't instantly occupy and “own” the Pacific islands when fighting the Japanese in World War II. It took time and steps to do it.

Note that federal takeover of health care cannot happen overnight. The public won't tolerate it (as a goal, and because it distrusts government as well as the current politicians, if you care to know why not). But it's possible to get that toehold, that beachhead, and we know which way such “progress” moves in the future, once the precedent has been set. Goals like these are unrealistic to achieve all at once, and it is a waste of time to be conceiving them primarily in this way.

D-Q: Both of which are cheaper than an F16, an F22, an F35 or any of the drones that we are using to kill defenseless people through out the world.

[sniff] Those poor terrorists. The USA kills them, Israel kills them (Yassin — like father, like son! HA)

Sure, let's do better than crazy Barney Franks wants to, and not only rob and gut the military, but end it completely. We're the evil colonalist-imperialist hierarchy-patriarchy alpha nation that's responsible for all the strife in the world, anyway, the most evil thing ever to evolve. If we eliminate our military, the rest of the oppressed world won't feel threatened and upset by us any longer, and they all will rush to be our friends, and we'll all sing around the campfire and live happily ever after.

Better still, let's get rid of all government, as that will prove to be cheaper still, and in fact, cheapest.

Starting with federal entitlements, and progressing from there elsewhere in the federal government …

cut, cut, cut…

What I said was “those are their decisions to make, not yours.” You somehow read that as “throw their bodies into an incinerator.” Either you're not capable of having an adult conversation on the topic, or you're not interested in doing so. Not much I can do about either, so I'm done.

I'm arguing that these people should be able to set their own labor laws, and that they're not as incompetent to do so as you apparently like to think.

What you are arguing is that there should not be any labor laws, unions, nor environmental standards and that Corporations/The wealthy should be able to do whatever they damn well please.

When the people decide to pass laws to protect workers and elect leaders that will enforce them, people like you can be relied upon to back the coup that will bring back “liberty”…

Your attitude is elitist and demeaning.

FU

Profit Uber Alles.

What an idiotic comment. I'm arguing that these people should be able to set their own labor laws, and that they're not as incompetent to do so as you apparently like to think. Your attitude is elitist and demeaning.

Wow, when you're wrong, you're wrong big. Why don't you put your mindset up against this data set?

The effects are the same. Making it more expensive to run factories means fewer factories.

Well, I sure that we could shangai teenagers of the street, throw them in a factory, whip them into submission, chain them to their work stations, force them to work, feed them 1200 calories of gruel a day, and shove their bodies into an incinerator the minute they fell below an appropriate standard of productivity or died whichever happened first.

It would do wonders for manufacturing, productivity and profits…

Again, I don't recognize your moral authority to impose that list of your values on people in other countries.

And I don't recognize yours either.

And if it was up to people like you, I have no doubt the above scenario would be standard operating procedure.

The effects are the same. Making it more expensive to run factories means fewer factories.

Again, I don't recognize your moral authority to impose that list of your values on people in other countries. How safe is safe enough? What should the minimum working age be? Those are their decisions to make, not yours.

Most developing countries have made huge progress in the past 50 years, and they've done it through small steps.

What huge progress?

If you made a list of industrialized countries prior to WWII and made the same list today, you would find the same countries on both list, with the exception of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. The vast majority of the population of China & India live in abject poverty, Indonesia isn't any better, South America after having followed the Washington Consensus for the last thirty years is no better of than it was in the 70's, Africa is a disaster. The only parts of the world were substantial improvements are happening is Eastern Europe were Western European Corporations are shifting their manufacturing and Coastal China were US & Japanese Corporations are shifting their manufacturing.

To lobby to close the factory, with the likely result of forcing them back to the fields, is despicable.

I wouldn't lobby to close the factory, I would lobby for strong labor laws in order of importance:
1) The right to work in a safe environment.
2) No Child Labor.
3) No Prison Labor.
4) 8 hour work day with time off for lunch and appropriate breaks.
5) 5 day work weeks.
6) A minimum wage that lets you support yourself and your family.
7) The right to have an independent Union.
4 or more weeks of paid vacation.

Like midnight basketball, or a rain forest park in Iowa? [snicker]

Both of which are cheaper than an F16, an F22, an F35 or any of our drones that we are using to kill defenseless people through out the world.

Kathy, I'm talking about economic and social development of poorer countries, and it doesn't follow the Martin Luther King pattern at all. It's gradual and steady. No one brings the process to life better than Hans Rosling.

No, lol. It's the opposite. Social and political change does not happen unless people make it happen. Americans both black and white had been actively calling for change, working for change, and all too often bleeding and dying to achieve, first legal freedom, and then equal rights, for black Americans for literally centuries.This was not passivity; it was activism. My point is that these activists were working for full equality under the law; they were not working for “incremental” little baby steps. It was the *other* side — the people who did not want to see *any* change or who were so terrified of and intimidated by white supremacy that they were afraid of “riling up” white authorities with too rapid change — who were always urging the activists to slow down, take it one step at a time, don't push things, let's go for incremental progress. Martin Luther King, Jr., took on the incrementalists with his pen in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” He rejected incrementalism utterly, because what on earth kind of meaning does “incremental change” have when the change has been waiting for 350 years?

Long story short, meaningful change takes time, but it doesn't come at all if the people who seek it don't pose a threat (figuratively speaking) to the powers that be. Incrementalism does not pose a threat to any power authority and never has. That's why they promote it.