Food and shelter going up?

[william the wie]

I saw this comment on the 3-d printing thread and saw large scale agreement. I find it useful to invert this area of agreement.

Land is more or less fixed and food is generally derived from land with seafood being a relatively minor input.

Likewise shelter competes with food for land but increases in food productivity and distribution seem to be outpacing this problem.

Therefore the supply of all other goods and services must be going down in real terms for people to be seeing what they are seeing.

In order for all other prices to go down in real terms new economies of various sorts must be happening in supply, production and distribution more or less continuously.

So, what I am looking for is a bumper sticker/T-shirt phrase to sum up this argument, Yes I am writing a book. "What's Wrong With Economic Policy" is based on three premises:

Economic competition is in the rest of the animal kingdom is a way of sorting out reproductive competition with minimum violence. Arguing that this is not its purpose in humans is unproven and somewhat dubious.

Economic policy, at our level of knowledge, has to be based on the discarded genetic theory of group selection. Humans do invest in group fictions because such fictions do in fact produce high individual/kin selective revenues but economic policy fails when it ignores those individual/kin selective revenues.

Group selective models ignore individual revenues, relative reproductive success and the fact that new ways of making of good stuff causes booms and busts. The new ways always involve finding new economies that usually are discovered by failure.

I'm looking for a better way of phrasing that third premise, any suggestions?

 

[onecut39]

I saw this comment on the 3-d printing thread and saw large scale agreement. I find it useful to invert this area of agreement.

Land is more or less fixed and food is generally derived from land with seafood being a relatively minor input.

Likewise shelter competes with food for land but increases in food productivity and distribution seem to be outpacing this problem.

Therefore the supply of all other goods and services must be going down in real terms for people to be seeing what they are seeing.

In order for all other prices to go down in real terms new economies of various sorts must be happening in supply, production and distribution more or less continuously.

So, what I am looking for is a bumper sticker/T-shirt phrase to sum up this argument, Yes I am writing a book. "What's Wrong With Economic Policy" is based on three premises:

Economic competition is in the rest of the animal kingdom is a way of sorting out reproductive competition with minimum violence. Arguing that this is not its purpose in humans is unproven and somewhat dubious.

Economic policy, at our level of knowledge, has to be based on the discarded genetic theory of group selection. Humans do invest in group fictions because such fictions do in fact produce high individual/kin selective revenues but economic policy fails when it ignores those individual/kin selective revenues.

Group selective models ignore individual revenues, relative reproductive success and the fact that new ways of making of good stuff causes booms and busts. The new ways always involve finding new economies that usually are discovered by failure.

I'm looking for a better way of phrasing that third premise, any suggestions?

Yo.u got me. Food will be going but not due to some esoteric economic theory.

Three fourths of the country is in drought. Yields are way down. Grain prices go up. Beef is largely fed on grain. Feedlots are slaughtering their beef in anticipation. When that wears off beef prices will skyrocket.

Simple,no?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

"What's Wrong With Economic Policy"

why not take a deep breath and say what economic policy is;

then take another deep breath and say what's wrong with it.