The larger point I am trying to explore is the idea that many of the most important aspects of "quality of life" are features of material situations rather than the materials themselves. For example, take food. Food is an important aspect of quality of life. But it is not a yearly total that matters most, nor is it a daily average. Once adequate nutrition is available, it's the variation that counts. Boom and bust cycles make for high stress levels. My argument is that we don't need fast food restaurants on every corner to validate the idea that quality of life has improved. We need a measure of assurance that people will not be malnourished. There is more than one level of disconnect between the two concepts of "quality".
Once basic needs are accounted for, I suspect it's the volatility and response characteristics of the system that influence the way we react. Yet again, I can't help thinking about granaries. We develop agriculture and live on its variables. It is frequently painful but it is often better than before. We develop the granary and build one. We stockpile. We expand into the new steadiness. The grain ferments, the granary explodes. Catastrophe. We think about granary design and we build more than one. And this cycle will continue, becoming more and more abstracted. Because stockpiling - buffering - has proven better than not stockpiling, we collect everything we can. We grow to the limit. Because we only pay attention to the character of the fluctuations, we are repeatedly punished by the low extremes. Because the low extremes are always a shock when they arrive, we react by trying to build a larger stockpile. Once the larger stockpile is there, the 95% lows start to look pretty manageable, so we consume more. But the span of time, the number of conditions, the number of dependent variables... the potential variation of system output... all increase as we try to derive the greatest benefit from the least effort. We need to learn to consume the knowledge we stockpile (not a scarce resource). In particular, I hope we begin to model our systems - which could be directly investigated - rather than the effects of our systems. The historical range of effects does not necessarily disclose the potential range of effects. My point about education is that we do not deplete our stockpile of information and knowledge in times of need. My point about the correlation between quality of life and resource consumption is that we simply don't operate, as a species, in an enlightened way. I agree that increased consumption and increase quality of life are associated; I disagree that the difference is *necessarily* "vast". It *is* vast the way we have done it so far. But indulge me. Imagine a world where we do not overconsume out of nervousness. Where we understand something about the limits of our system and the buffers we require to remain comfortable. We can choose this outcome. And so I think it is not useful to assume that our high standards of living must be satisfied by massive resource depletion and systemic degradation - not just environmental, but in every aspect of life. These are probably the causes of the miseries we still experience. On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 9:20 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > "If I remember correctly, improving quality of life often decreases the > >> population growth rate. Correction or refinement of that belief would be >> welcome. >> >> " > > yes it does; unfortunately an improved quality of life is also accompanied > by a vastly increased consumption of resources. Which explains the much > higher per capita resource usage in developed nations, and increasingly > amidst the middle classes in the urban third world. So there seems to be no > easy way out. > > >
