Re:Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years ...
by madez on Thursday February 08, 2018 @10:41AM
(#16332789)
Smaller scale of production usually decreases efficiency, increases costs, and thereby decreases consumption.
Re:Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years ...
by dredmorbius on Thursday February 08, 2018 @11:10AM
(#16333089)
That depends on what's prompting the smaller-scale activity.
If increased capabilities allow more parties to engage in an activity, you'll increase total consumption.
If increased costs reduce the effective maximum scale of operations, you'll tend to have reduced consumption.
One formulation I've come up with is that "bad hygiene leads to decentralisation", where hygiene is meant in the general sense of systemic health and efficiency. Anything that reduces the capability of scaling up operations will lead to more and smaller rather than fewer and larger units of operation. This is something that proponents of decentralised systems might want to consider.
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7h8sqk/open_th...
If you want to reduce the consumption of some thing, make it more expensive.
Paradoxically: increased efficiency reduces costs and so increases total consumption. This was noted by economist and engineer William Stanley Jevons, in the 19th century.
There are different ways of increasing costs, and not all necessarily involve prices (or taxes), though those tend to be the most effective and easiest ways to do so. Legal, social, and moral costs can also be imposed (criminalising use, making use anathema, making use taboo), but these take time to impose and have various side effects.
This is a difficult problem, and even recognising the dynamic is difficult. It's deviled ecolologists, economists, politicians, and others, for over two hundred years (and arguably, for over two thousand).