🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bztt8t.9L8@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:

>>world is not completely perfect.  As I said, ON AVERAGE, the world is
>>getting better.  Fewer people (in absolute numbers, not just as a
>>fraction of the world's population) are living in countries that
>>experience famines that did a generation ago.  On average, people are
>>getting more nutrition, and living longer.

>Baloney.  The US economy is in a shambles, and will probably continue
>to go downhill.

The US economy is growing, not "going downhill".  Manufacturing
productivity is growing smartly.  Moreover, the US is not the world.
Less developed countries can and do use technologies that have already
been worked out by the west; naturally, the tendency is for the
underdogs to catch up, if the mechanisms for wealth creation are in
place.

Consider China.  The private sector there will grow more than 20% this
year, and exceed the size of the public sector; aggregate GNP growth
will be in double digits.  At current growth rates, China's GNP could
exceed the entire OECD's by the year 2010.  The per capita GNP could
reach current US levels within a generation, at current rates of
growth.


>>I cannot imagine what you are trying to prove by this quote.  Let's
>>consider a world with 10,000 1 GWe reactors.  It will consume
>>somewhere less than 20,000 tons of uranium per year.  Those 10^14 tons
>>would last 5 billion years at that rate.

>But we cannot build nuclear plants which are safer than the coal plants.

Bullshit.  Existing coal plants kill more people than existing
nuclear plants, and we can build nuclear plants that have accident
rates much lower than the current generation, low as they are.


> Communism may be passe in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
> but some of the worst aspects of it are pervading Western Europe and
> the United States.  What else can one call the government blocking of
> human endeavor, including going to space?  Name ONE sufficiently large
> (to accomplish) country in which the individual with enterprise is not
> boxed in by the  socialists who insist that the wealth must be shared.

Capitalism is quite robust, and can create wealth even in unfree
countries, as the example of China demonstrates.  Again, your argument
confuses perfection (a probably unrealizable libertarian utopia) with
progress (a world in which the aggregate statistics are improving).

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu