Neoclassical Logic

[Brad DeLong]

>``...At some point in history, the pretense must stop; there must be
>frank acknowledgement and cultivation of broad awareness that we are
>encouraging evil forces that debase human potential in our pursuit of
>material abundance.  There surely must be better way to achieve the
>necessary goal of assuring material security for all.'' Carl Remick
>
>------------
>
>No shit. I remember the night it occurred to me that material
>abundance was already sufficient, and that wasn't the problem.
>
>I was driving back from some where on the Ventura Freeway. I was
>eighteen, so that would have been 1961. There had just been some news
>announcement about a UN study on the global population explosion. I
>was arguing with a buddy over feeding billions. He had been advocating
>population control. I dropped him home and was going up Reseda Blvd
>toward Northridge. It just occurred to me in an instant---the entire
>economic system was bullshit. There was plenty to feed everybody on the planet
>and a bunch of pricks were keeping it all to themselves.

Maldistribution is an enormous problem, yes. But I'm not sure that 
material abundance is already sufficient...

There is enough to feed everybody, yes (and with current population 
projections suggesting that the world population will stabilize at 12 
billion in 2050 the Paul Ehrlich vision of mass die-offs in South 
Asia will not come true). But at the moment there isn't enough to 
give everyone once-a-year vacations at Kapalua Beach in Hawaii a 
broadband connection to the internet, or a large-screen TV-VCR on 
which to watch their own copies of "Don Giovanni," "Casablanca," "The 
Seven Samurai," and "The Rules of the Game" when it strikes them.

And then there is the problem of creating people who will realize 
that they really want to watch "The Rules of the Game" instead of 
"Survivor IX: Eating Rats and Backstabbing Your Fellows in the 
Amazon," and realize that they want to be connected citizens and 
species-beings rather than anomic liberal individuals.

I don't know which problem--the problem of redistribution, the 
problem of abundance, or the problem of taste--is a bigger block to 
utopian aspirations in the long run. I do know that we can make 
progress toward solving the problem of abundance, but that we don't 
have a chance in hell of *ever* moving toward the redistributions 
across national borders to solve the problem of maldistribution.

Brad DeLong