Growth: Capitalism’s problem

When people talk about Marx, we struggle to look at him objectively and see him for what he was which was a great critic of 19th century capitalism. Left on this level and viewed in this way his material is interesting and insightful. As a predicator of history, of an idealised society, of how to cure society’s problems he was no better than a London cabbie and probably a lot worse.

The one problem he did articulate was capitalism’s need for continued growth and expansion. This problem is something we are suffering now, we need growth everything in the world depends on it. Growth comes, at the moment, from two things increased consumption and growing populations. Here lies the problem how can we, in an ever more crowded world, continue to see increased population growth, increased consumption and not run out of natural resources; not begin to push more people into environments where survival is marginal.

Marx talked about the declining rate of return of capital this is not our problem, our problem is more Malthusian. How can we continually extract more from less without inflicting damage on our rotating sphere? The Economist would say the market will find solutions, lets hope so. Our generation, living in the developed segment of society wherever you are is probably the most fortunate in the history of the homo sapiens or any of the other two legged up right chimp that has had the luck to make the earth his or her home.

Statistics and Risk.

When ancient man went out hunting buffalo or as it is thought by some trying to run down an animal, as two legs are more efficient than four over distance I wonder what he thought about risk.

Should I have some insurance? What will I do if I break a leg, what will happen to the mother of my children, well I think she is the mother, but who could be sure before DNA testing.

Now though we are all intent on reducing the risk in living, reduce the possibility of being in pain, yet life by its nature is risky, it is a dangerous world and always will be. We should take sensible precautions against unnecessary risks but mankind must accept that life is dangerous and the individuals, countries and governments are not capable of anticipating and dealing with every possible situation in which somebody is negatively effected. That is not to say that we should be complacent about issues and problems but we shouldn’t be obsessed about the obliteration of risk.

Statistics, I remember a friend of mine telling me that at school she had a psychometric test that came back with very negative results and she was told that she should therefore, have psychological treatment, she was devastated, and as far as I could see perfectly normal.
Statistics can help us understand the world and people however, there is no telling for exceptionalism, the people that go against the statistics are often the most remarkable. Statistics might help explain them but we will never completely understand them. Sometimes very different groups of exceptional people have more in common than we like to admit and perhaps in pre-anticipating one group we may infact damage the more positive group.

If we aren’t careful in the future our fear of risk and use of statistics might damage our societies creativity, and reduce the number of exceptional people who positively contribute to the world and our society.