Population and Wealth
A magazine article cited, as one reason for improving safety in the home and reducing deaths and injuries to children, the argument that the deaths and injuries were a cost to the nation because of the loss of “production” of goods and services which those children, had they become healthy adults, would have accomplished in their lifetime. … Read more
Chrysler – Criminal Lunatics?
I was reading a popular news magazine last week and two stories followed each other directly. They described events in two neighbouring continents, North and South America. Yet they might have been describing events on two remotely separated planets.
The first story was about an Italian car-industry expert who has, in the past few years, restored the Chrysler motor company to profitability. … Read more
Minerals in National Parks – Leave Them in the Ground?
The extraction of minerals often leads not just to the consumption and depletion of the mined material, but also to the unintended but unavoidable consumption and depletion of rich and necessary biological resources, which are quite wasted in the process. … Read more
More Dollars for Conservation?
So, environmental conservation must be the primary goal, and economic well-being depends on it – not the other way round.
That last phrase refers to the spurious argument that economic “progress” as currently understood, i.e., increasing throughput of wealth, provides money which can be spent on conserving the environment. … Read more
Living Standard and Quality of Life
Another indirect adverse effect of environmental degradation on economic well-being arises from the effect of the degradation on people’s perception of their economic condition.
A further illustration of the erroneously perceived conflict between environmental conservation and economic well-being lies in this frequent reaction to some piece of environmental devastation: “Oh, well, at least it creates jobs for some people who wouldn’t have one otherwise.”
Certainly the degradation will keep some people busy for a while, but because of the depletion of the resource on which their jobs depend, there will be a net loss of jobs. … Read more
Value Inflation – the Trigger, not the Bullet
The direct addition of value inflation to the rate of price increases is quite small. The larger effect arises from secondary influences, in whose shaping human psychology plays an important part. These influences are triggered by the small value inflation component and its corollary, a slowing of the rate of net throughput increase relative to gross throughput increase. … Read more
Digression: Pollution Red Herrings
Litter “Pollution”: A misleading idea, started when environmental awareness really took off world-wide in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, is that “pollution” means “litter” and that preventing litter means doing all that’s necessary to prevent pollution and protect the environment. … Read more
Borrowing to Invest to Get Rich
Governments in many less perfluent countries have borrowed thousands of millions of dollars in attempting to achieve permanent increases in the level of national economic activity and living standards.
The belief was that by borrowing “wealth” from the “rich” nations, they would be able to use it to generate more “wealth” of their own, enough to pay back the original “wealth” with interest and still leave enough to make their own country permanently wealthier. … Read more
Misconceptions in Practice
The inadequate or wrong concepts of current economics lead to a number of misconceptions, some examples of which will be given.
“Soak the Rich”
The “soak the rich” taxation policy sometimes advocated or practiced by the political left is based on a confusion about the nature of wealth. … Read more
Economic Growth Redefined
A more accurate definition of economic growth would be any change in the relation between the throughput and renewal rates, for a given resource for which throughput exceeds renewal, in which change the ratio of the throughput rate to the renewal rate falls, or conversely the ratio of renewal to throughput increases. … Read more