🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 14074@cco.caltech.edu, carl@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick) writes:
>Just what specific problems did Malthus and Muir foresee?  In Malthus' case,
>did he foresee that we'd have enough food to feed the people who are starving
>but wouldn't distribute it for political and economic reasons?  Foreseeing that
>there will be problems is by no means equivalent to foreseeing what those
>problems will be, and what techniques will be available to deal with them.

People are starving for the economic reasons that they lack the resources to
produce enough food for themselves or the capital to earn enough to buy enough.
The political reasons arise from the fact that given the above, the only
other way to feed them is charity (or loans they will never be able to pay
back, which amounts to the same thing), and there are limits to how much
charity the more developed peoples can afford to give, especially when it only
results in more hungry people.

>McCarthy didn't propose diverting entire gross domestic products.  He didn't
>even propose diverting money from defense cutbacks.  He pointed out that your
>figure was over 30% lower than could be achieved WITHOUT DIVERTING ANY MONEY AT
>ALL.  If we do, indeed, build ~1.5 million new housing units a year (and
>remember that quite a few of these units house more than one person) in the
>United States, and if arcologies are in fact more efficient than current
>practices, then we should be able to build more than one 1.5-million-person
>arcology per year using the resources that would have otherwise been used to
>build the housing for these people.

Most of the capital for new housing units is not under the control of public
policy, and, as a practical matter, cannot be massively diverted thereby.
Any such compact cities would be public-private partnerships which would
attract some private investment but by no means most of it, which would 
address the more immediate, short-term needs of the market. The time to
completion for the nucleus of a compact city (which would expand by increm-
ental accretion) would be 10-20 years (in giving annual production figures,
I assume staggered starts), and would have a payoff in the 50+ year range.
In that regard it is similar to many of the giant public works projects of
the past. Little private capital is that patient.

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jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141