They hadn't even evolved into secretary birds yet smh
They hadn't even evolved into secretary birds yet smh
Image is captioned: "The dinosaurs didn't "rule the Earth", they were just alive. Stop giving them credit for administrative skills they almost certainly did not have."
Image is an artist’s rendition of dinosaurs in a prehistoric scene
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Hey man, we call senators and congressmen The Government, and they don't do shit...
Also humans. When it comes to resources we are trash administrators. We optimize for money instead of efficiency or any other useful characteristic.
We optimize for money instead of efficiency
The cheapest thing is the most efficient thing by definition, if you eliminate externalities and other market failures and think in the long term.
The trouble is, we don't do those things.
You're talking product manufacturing. I'm talking large scale planetary resource allocation. Broadly we allocate the most resources to people who can make the most money with then rather than people who can serve/help the most people or create the most benefit.
If one guy says, "with all this delicious island water, I can sell it overseas and make lots of money to put mostly in the pockets of 3-5 individuals", and the other guy says, "I can sell it and use that money to keep everyone on the island well fed and healthy, and save them all the time they would spend working for someone else to instead invent or research things that help all humans," we all know who gets the seed money to start the new business.
No, I'm talking about large scale planetary resource allocation too. Your own example proves my point:
If one guy says, “with all this delicious island water, I can sell it overseas and make lots of money to put mostly in the pockets of 3-5 individuals”, and the other guy says, “I can sell it and use that money to keep everyone on the island well fed and healthy, and save them all the time they would spend working for someone else to instead invent or research things that help all humans,” we all know who gets the seed money to start the new business.
The only thing that makes the first guy's business model viable is if he isn't made to pay for the externalized costs of taking away the island's water. So don't let him fucking get away with that, obviously!
What if the profits far outweigh those shipping costs in all cases?
I think I figured out the mismatch here. I believe you're suggesting that the purpose of resources is to produce money, and the most efficient way to do that is to do as cheaply as possible. Not at all wrong.
I'm saying though that the least efficient purpose human beings can have for Earth's limited resources is changing them into money. Instead it strikes me as more efficient (in terms of largest net benefit where leaving then in the ground provides little benefit, and is therefore less efficient), to use resources for the purpose of extending all human lives, and the quality of those lives, so that each resource enables the largest number of humans possible to be able to have the highest chance of producing yet more benefits for humanity and the world.
Put differently, generation of wealth to be mostly stored for only a handful of people is a poor use of resources. Instead, as much wealth as possible should be used to do the work of advancing all of human society. We just can't seem to find a way to make that work, because greed overwhelms all efforts to do so.