The Industrial Revolution came to pass because there was a shortage of labor relative to the amount of available natural resources. To put it in extremely simplified terms, there simply weren't enough people to plant, harvest, comb, spin, and weave, for everyone to have as much cloth as they wanted.

Along came industrial capital, to help with the process at all steps along the way. Now we have $3 shirts from China.

But we've never stopped to ask whether the same conditions that fostered the Industrial Revolution still obtain. In fact, we now seem to have a great excess of labor -- serious unemployment and underemployment problems, around the world -- and a shortage of natural resources, whether you're talking oil, copper, or just clean air and water.

The time has come to seriously consider shifting the structure of our industries to use more human labor, and less natural resources. This doesn't mean reverting to how we did things 200 years ago, it means getting smarter. Organic agriculture using integrated pest management (creating tailored ecosystems that naturally minimize crop losses, and even improve yields by giving plants just enough stress to encourage growth and production of micronutrients), drip irrigation (where water is dripped directly onto the roots, rather than sprayed through the air to evaporate), and so on, can have overall yield per acre just as good as industrial monoculture.

It also has the side benefit of creating a huge new demand for low-end labor, boosting wages at the low end.

Similar considerations apply to many other industries.

Alaskans' income is boosted considerably by leveraging scarce resources that they happen to have access to. All of America could do the same thing, if we just understood which resources are scarce, and valued them properly.

Sorry, but just about every premise of your post is incorrect.

First, "there was a shortage of labor relative to the amount of available natural resources." There was no shortage of labor, there was a shortage of output - there always is. Increasing outputs per input of either labor or capital is how wealth is created, and how we have ended up with more than enough food to eat, as well as $3 shirts from China.

Second, "we now seem to have a great excess of labor -- serious unemployment and underemployment problems, around the world" To put it mildly, there is no evidence of this at all. There is certainly no massive global unemployment, and globalization has both increased nominal employment rates and the incomes of those who were previously involved in less productive work - small, ineffecient farmers, for example.

Third, "a shortage of natural resources, whether you're talking oil, copper, or just clean air and water" Well, there has always been a shortage of these things; that's why they are called commodities and the standard units have tradable, market prices that fluctuate in accordance with their availability.

Fourth, "The time has come to seriously consider shifting the structure of our industries to use more human labor, and less natural resources." It is not all clear what you mean by "naatural resources". But it is an economic fact that increasing labor inputs relative to other ("natural resources" inputs?) will increase the cost of production. This means more expensive food.

Fifth, "creating tailored ecosystems that naturally minimize crop losses, and even improve yields by giving plants just enough stress to encourage growth and production of micronutrients." Yes, possibly, with expensive inputs not only of labor, but with intensive and expensive crop management.

Six, "can have overall yield per acre just as good as industrial monoculture." To my knowledge this kind of thing has been discussed in ag circles for about the past 40 years, but I think you can pretty much prove mathematically that the cost of getting these yields up using these "natural" techiniques is extremely high and probably not feasible on a large scale.

"It also has the side benefit of creating a huge new demand for low-end labor, boosting wages at the low end." Um, I'm sorry, but I must have missed the recent batch of New Yorker articles about how young Americans are no longer able to find employment as farm laborers. I guess what you mean is, if farm wages become high enough, people will flock to work in the fields. Perhaps. In any case, even assuming that yields hold constant, where would these new wages come from? The increased cost of food, of course.

"If we just understood which resources are scarceand valued them properly." This makes no sense. Either something is scarce or it isn't. Either soomething has "value" - people are willing to pay for it, or it doesn't. "Value" is the price people are willing to pay for something. How do you artificially set a "value" for something that is already being valued by the price people pay for it?

Your conclusion about Alaska's economy is correct in that the rest of the world wants what Alaska has to sell. Of course, every part of America sells something. Cars, for example, used to be scarce, which is why people in Detroit started making them. But you can't force people to buy something - such as a car - that they don't want. Which is why the Michigan economy is going through a tough period as it transitions to a more rational service based economy.

Hey, I'm all in favor of increasing the cost of food, if that is what people want, or at least, eliminating the immoral trade barriers and price supports that provide cash to American farmers while leaving third-world growers frozen out of the market. But don't pretend that your plan to make the entire world food economy into a giant version of Whole Foods is anything other than what it stacks up as: a system to create a vast increase in the price of food while greatly lowering the world standard of living. It might even be a template for producing global starvation.

I like many of the innovations of sustainable and organic agriculture, and feel that our society as a whole should be making everything sustainable instead of persisting in our delusion that unlimited growth is possible or desirable. Sustainable, renewable and clean should be our goal for our entire way of life. With human population being what it is, to do anything else is to risk a pretty severe collapse.

However, Palin is not the woman to lead that charge. Anyone who comes out and says, "Yes, we CAN drill our way out of this," is no friend of sustainable anything.

The excess labor is the people who are to lazy to work, not counting disabilities.

quillsinister, you make two very different points.

I agree that we should try to make everything 'sustainable'. Of course, most of what is already being done is sustainable - the problem is simply whose definition of sustainable one uses. If 'sustainable' is shorthand for certain uneconomical (in fact, unsustainable) mandates, then it won't make sense.

Has Palin actually said "Yes, we CAN drill our way out of this."? I would be surprised if she has. So you have based a conclusion about someone on a statement they never made, which makes no sense at all.

I don't have time to reply to all of this point by point, but for starters, here are a few studies, or articles with links to studies, on yields from organic ag:

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Then there's the fact that, from the point of view of all actual farmers -- as opposed to agribusinesses -- the current industrial monoculture system is irredeemably broken. It demands they go deeply into debt every year, for GM seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and if they have a run of bad luck they go bankrupt. Organic has higher variable labor costs, but far lower fixed up-front costs.

And there's the fact that industrial monoculture itself is starting to fail, as soils mistreated for decades begin to just die and wash away, and yields correspondingly decline. Soil isn't an inanimate surface like bare rock. It's a live ecosystem, filled with all kinds of bugs and microbes that contribute to making nutrients, including micronutrients we barely understand, available to plants. Carpet bombing with high-nitrogen fertilizer is no substitute for real soil.

As for prices: Would it be so terrible to increase the relative price of food, if there's an associated reduction in other costs? Health, environmental damange, etc? That's stuff we end up paying for eventually anyways. Industrial monoculture asks us to accept a false economy: get cheap, non-nutritive crap in exchange for also accepting a lowered wage structure and a lot of externalities. And there's good reason to believe that inequality and poverty, themselves, create drags on economic growth. (Which is to say, policies that raise wages and living conditions of the low end, turns out to benefit the rich more than just handing them money.)

If food costs more, while consuming a similar proportion of our budget -- or even if it consumes a slightly large proportion of our budget, but we spend correspondingly less on healthcare, pollution cleanup, etc. -- is that such a bad thing?

auros, I'm sorry that you don't have time to adequately defend your positions.

As far as the comments you do make, I doubt very much whether "all actual farmers -- as opposed to agribusiness" agree that the current system is irretrevably broken. Really? Do you know ALL farmers? How do you segregate "agribusiness" (which seems a dirty word for you) from "real farmers." This is a perfect example of a false distinction. ALL farmers are in agribusiness.

The current farm system is broken because the ineffecient price support system that gouges consumers within necessarily helping all farmers - because it helps the most efficient farmers (as it should).

I think you paint to dire a picture by far. Increased ag production in no way increases poverty, or decreases health.

Returning to a point on which we agree: I will happily pay more for food (although I know I won't have to) if the idiotic farm price support programs that currently exist were removed and farmers were left to do what was economincally and ecologically feasible IN THE LONG TERM. If farmers, including agribusiness, are not incentivised to work their land to death they will preserve it by managing it properly, over the long run (as I think many already do). I disagree that more labor inputs are needed; just the opposite probably. If we open up farming to global competition and reduced cost of labor inputs, more produce will be produce, for much less money, and on a more sustainable basis (since unsustainable farming will cease without government hand outs). It will mean more jobs for people who need them, mostly in the third world, more food for everyone at less cost, and no "hidden costs" created by artificially creating scarcity, as now exists.

You're right. I was paraphrasing. The exact quote is, "I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem." A slightly more winding path to the same faulty conclusion.

As far as sustainability, we're completely dependent on a resource that will not be with us much longer. It's all well and good to cite the usual free market arguments that alternative energy sources will become available naturally as current energy production becomes cost-ineffective, but considering the magnitude of the necessary transition, I don't think that will give us enough time. Even major oil companies are admitting that peak oil will be on us soon. Unless the free market can be foresighted and nimble enough to preempt it, we're looking at a world of pain. So far, our preparation for an event we know to be inevitable has been sluggish at best. Americans by and large are still looking for a way to continue indefinitely in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, which seems to me an irresponsible reaction to the forces at work.

Sounds like an out-of-context sound bite to me, since it doesn't square with anything else I've heard her say.

I agree that oil is getting more difficult and expensive to find - but that will just continue to raise the price of oil, making other alternative energy sources more economically efficient. So, I disagree that the free market won't eventually solve this problem. it already is solving it, and different and alternative sources of power - including nuclear energy - will start to fill the gap. Oil, however, will be with us for a while yet, as the displacement caused by alternative energy sources will free up oil, relatively speaking, for other purposes. Eventually, of course, social, economic, and geopolitical forces will force oil usage to a minimum, and the consensus is we will be driving mostly electric cars (rather than gasoline or hydrogen fuel cell powered cars) in 10 or 15 years or so.

Anyway, even if oil imports stopped tomorrow, there would be a massive dislocation, but it would temporary. We survived the oil shocks of 1973, and our usage of oil as a percentage of GDP is half now of what it was then.

Personally, I am all for government giving this oil consumption reducing process a shove in the right directions - through gas tax increases and some targeted investment in alternative fuels. However, you echo a common misguided refrain about our 'unsustainable lifestyles.' It is this type of negativity that voters refuse to respond to, and is just nonsense - as far as human purposes are concerned, the amount of potential energy available is practically limitless.

Yes, potential available energy is practically limitless, but not with our current energy sources. And it isn't just about oil supply. We're doing serious damage to the system upon which we depend for our lives. Modern economics isn't good at calculating consequences like that. Too much "future discount" nonsense creeping into the equations.

Water will also be a huge issue in the not-so-distant future. Many areas with high population density are using available groundwater faster than replenishment rate. Desalination plants and long-distance water pipes are a potential solution, but only is we see the problem early enough to build them before the problem is visible to most people. Like oil, we have to preempt the problem, not merely react to it.

Whether voters respond or not, our lifestyles are unsustainable in many ways. They can accept that through reason or they can accept it through famine. As a good child of the Enlightenment, I vote reason. I'm not talking about our standard of living per se (which is what I think you think I mean), but our lifestyle. We can maintain our standard of living by changing the means by which we maintain it, but not until we recognize the problems with our current means. We ignore them at our peril, and nature is not known for her pity. Civilizations have destroyed themselves in the past through ecological mismanagement. I'd prefer ours learned from their example.

auros, I'm sorry that you don't have time to adequately defend your positions.

Well, I'm sorry you're so dogmatically attached to BS that would earn you poor marks, for failure to understand basic concepts like market failure, in the MBA economics class for which I'm a teaching assistant.

We all have our crosses to bear.

I think I can define market failiure pretty well, or at least I could when was a graduate student in agricultural economics twenty or so years ago. I guess that when I was a teaching assistant in graduate school, we must have had higher standards for our TAs. Oh, and when I went back for my MBA, I was the TA in economics as well.

Your failure is in attempting to misapply a set of theories to situations where they don't properly belong. I was actually attempting to agree with you at the end (I was under the misimpression that you were some sort of misguided idealist of an agronomist, and took it on myself to try to help you out with a little economics. As it happens, you appear to know nothing about Agriculture or Economics). Applying theory to reality is often helpful, but first, you need to understand the theory, and be cognizant of the reality.

Quillsinister, I agree with all of your specific comments.

It makes we want to break out my Jared Diamond collection, for while his examples are extreme, they get his point across.

I agree with the manner in which you have defined our lifestyles as unsustainable - overreliance on fossil fuels, inappropriate incentives to wasteful agriculture (growing rice in central california, etc.). I am not a blind believer in the free market (since in the long run, as Keynes said, we are all dead) but believe that messing with the free market needs to be done very deliberately and carefully (many of the wasteful problems we have are due to non-market mechanisms). I do believe in a coordinated effort of incentives to nudge us in that direction to decrease pollution (tradable carbon caps), increased windpower and photovoltaic credits, and some private/public infrastructure development of green technologies. In places like Australia, where I currently temporarily reside, solar-powered desalinazation plants are already coming on line (why - because Oz is a dry place and its citizens are already scared).

And, although I disagree with our friend Auros in approach, we need further implementation of non-chemical pest control and investment in other sustainable methodologies (although much of this has already been done and much more would be accomplished simply by the elimination of subsidies).

My disagreement with you was in my presumption that you were advocating a reduction in the human standard of living, which you are plainly not advocating. So, it might just be a matter of degree...and since even the Republican candidates are at least talking about sustainable energy and global warming, it is high time that we use a combination of market mechanisms and government incentives to lurch in a greener direction.

Yes, my mistake. In the interests of clarity, I should have drawn the distinction between "standard of living" and "lifestyle" sooner. Admittedly, it was a bit fuzzy. Believe me, I have no more desire than you to live in a lean-to and wear a loincloth. :-)

I agree that mucking about with the free market creates more problems than it solves. In general, greater freedom is always preferable to greater control because the system does regulate itself. What I'm advocating might better be described as improving the free market's ability to calculate true and long term costs and consequences. Giving it better information, as it were. For example, we can calculate with an astonishing degree of accuracy how many board feet of lumber a forest contains, efficiently coordinate the harvest and marketing and reinvest the proceeds into new capital. But let's say that forest contributes heavily to the replenishment rate of a local aquifer upon which a large city depends? We're not set up to calculate that. Holistic economics is, IMHO, a necessary shift we're going to have to make. Not to restrain the free market, but merely enlighten it and give it a more complete picture so it can avoid blundering into disaster. That's more of a philosophical shift than anything, but one which may need some encouragement, just to shake the cultural intertia. As I said, preempting problems is always better than reacting to them. I really think we would do this willingly, but not as long as our theory of economics is so shortsighted. Even so, given the recent emergence of fields like biomimicry, there is reason to believe that we're already moving in the right direction. The danger now is more that certain entrenched interests in our economy will move to stifle those seedling efforts using political connections, which is also a distortion of the free market and should be avoided.

I enjoyed Jared Diamond's books, too. True, they were extreme examples, but what those cultures did in their ecological microcosms, we are more than capable of doing to the entire system. I take it as a warning against hubris and hope we're advanced enough to save ourselves. He seems to think we are. :-)

And I think that with the use of more sophisticated computer models due to the vast increases in computer power available these days, you should be able to practically model a biosystem, I would think. The rain forest might just be our "Easter Island Tree Problem" on a global scale.

Probably my underlying theme is that, if we are smart, we can continue to solve the problems that our very active species creates. Crises will always emerge, but we are a pretty bright species, when we let ourselves be. And I am hopeful that the cultural shift is in the right direction these days - probably, frankly, to some extent because we now have the ability to be more green than we used to be - it takes a lot of wealth to be both productive and green, I think. As you say, working proactively is always preferable - a little nudge in the trend line today can have huge consequences down the road.

Whew, I'm glad that is settled! Now we just have to fix the world. And if I could also stop wondering about what really happened to those Norsemen in Greenland....