Episode 20
Transcript:
Michael Sandel:
What should be the role of money and markets in our society? Over the past three decades, almost without realizing it, we've drifted from having a market economy, to becoming a market society. The difference is this. A market economy is a tool, but a market society is a place where everything is up for sale. It's a way of life in which market values and market thinking begin to reach into almost every sphere of life. Family life, personal relations, health, education, civic life, politics.
The question I would like to put to you for discussion this evening is, why should we worry? The more things money can buy, the more it hurts to be poor, the more it matters whether you're affluent or poor. If the only thing money governed access to were fancy vacations and BMWs, inequality wouldn't matter all that much. But against a background of rising inequality, putting a price on everything, the rampant commodification of social life makes it harder to be poor.
If money governs access to where you live, whether you live in a safe neighborhood or a crime-ridden one, whether you can send your kids to a good school or a not very good school, what political voice you have, then inequality matters a lot more than it otherwise would. One reason to worry is that if more and more of life is commodified, how much money you have looms much larger.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now! Episode 20, March 10th, 2021. This is currently a biweekly program occurring every Wednesday about progressive ideas in the context of a structuralist train of thought, with the understanding that until we change the structure of how our society, and specifically how our economy works, there is very little hope for future sustainability and social stability.
Love will not change the world; an improved moral compass will not change the world. Individual behaviors, no matter how well-meaning, will not change the world, as long as the current social system and resulting institutions and incentives remain. The opening audio sample was from a lecture by a man named Michael Sandel, who is a professor of government theory at Harvard University Law School. I've actually quoted from his book a few times in the past.
A work called What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, from 2012. Mr. Sandel is a traditional supporter of capitalism, but his elucidation of moral quandaries within it are relatively unique to him and are rather rare for a person in his high academia established position. Usually people that reach such levels of institutional stature tend to preserve normative traditions more than argue against them. Not to say of course, that he goes far enough at all.
He likely wouldn't agree with conclusions presented on this podcast regarding the fundamental instability of the market economy, nor would he likely understand the fundamental amorality of market behavior in and of itself from a system's perspective. Hence, the reality, you simply can't have socioeconomic balance in the culture or general high levels of public health across the board.
The system is slanted by its very nature to ensure extreme class division and hence the majority suffer disproportionately. Not because of some lack of will or initiative, but by force of the structure itself, a gaming outcome, ensuring a degree of relative suffering all the time. From a moral standpoint, to agree with this outcome is to agree that some people are simply more worthless and deserve to suffer. Is that a morally-sound disposition?
I'd like to hear a Christian sermon on that one. "All rise, please refer to Luke 15: 9978, where the disciple said, 'Let there be musical chairs where one soul will inevitably fail at all times. Amen.' " Sandel's work is at least going farther than most realizing that an entire society governed by marketization and commodification, where literally everything is for sale without exception as a growing cultural trend, in fact, is not a healthy trajectory.
I've talked about this overall trend in the past. It's not only commodification and marketization. It's also financialization, which will be the subject of my next Medium article, by the way. We're stuck in an ever-evolving trend where life is becoming increasingly detached from true first principles of public health, sustainability and social stability. It's like a virus that keeps mutating and expanding.
The value distortion is not only with respect to the sickness of putting a price tag on literally everything, where even people just become walking numbers, increasing class-based elitism and lack of access, as Sandel implies in that audio sample, it's also with respect to this now more abstracted commodification, again known as financialization. Financialization is not only about putting a price tag on literally everything.
It's also about decoupling things from any actual earthly utility, turning them into pure widget-based gambling abstractions, or of course I should say investment instruments, if we want to be euphemistic. Ooh, investment. It sounds so sophisticated. I'm investing. "I just invested in a hundred shares of Microsoft. Ooh. Bully for you!' The term financial investment is simply code for gambling on the outcome of putting money into something. That's it.
Yes, if there's a startup company that's trying to do good and they need money to get going, maybe renewable energy investment, helping out could be a socially-positive force. But even then, the incentive is of course financial return and the probability of that return will govern the success of gaining such investment. I've already talked about this in the prior two podcasts, but it's important to reiterate. Think about geothermal.
We're not seeing real investment in geothermal, even though it is the most critical form of renewable energy to focus on as a baseload mechanism. Compared to wind and solar, geothermal gets very little interest. Not because it isn't important, but because the numbers are not there when it comes to gaining financial return, compared to returns calculated from the growth of wind and solar. People are looking for growth patterns to invest in.
At this point, investors in geothermal would have to focus on research and development for applications to more regions than we see closer to fault lines, such as in Iceland and beyond, increasing scale step by step. Projects that would not have any kind of immediate financial return. It would maybe even take decades. The financial incentive just isn't as powerful and the world is run by this. The proxy relationship of financial investment gain is not to be equated to true social progress.
They are mutually exclusive, even though they do overlap, giving the illusion they operate in tandem. The reason we do not have full renewable infrastructure in the world today is not due to technical limitations in and of itself. The problem is, more money is being spent and invested into hydrocarbons and nonconventional oil extraction and beyond. Why? Because there's more money to be made there in the current circumstance, so we become paralyzed.
Just one more way the capitalist order paralyzes progress. Wall Street and pure proxy trading is a more extreme version of this very problem. Rather than be relegated into the barrel of immaturity, addiction and gaming neuroses, common to places like Las Vegas, Wall Street has actually become a respected institution. One of civic gambling where people have been conditioned to believe the stock market actually has some place in the functioning of civilization.
You see it on the nightly news, right next to actual economic issues, as if the stock market isn't literally just the proxy institution that could be deleted from the earth tomorrow and it would change nothing in terms of how we survive efficiently. In fact, it would make everything substantially better. It would be different, of course, if the institution was like Las Vegas and detached from the real world and people can play their games at their own risk, isolated in a little bubble with no real world effects.
You don't hear about Tesla investing 1.5 billion in Blackjack or roulette, do you? But Tesla did just invest 1.5 in Bitcoin, which, as an aside, is pretty revealing since Tesla claims to be concerned about the environment. Yet, Bitcoin transactions require an enormous amount of energy, huge ecological footprint. Today, global processing of Bitcoin actively uses as much energy as the entire country of Argentina.
For what? See, the thing about Wall Street is the games being played, in contrast to Las Vegas, do have an actual effect on the real world and the global economy, and the public wellbeing by nature of how entrenched common commercial institutions are with the system, when they don't have to be, and really should not be. Look at all the banking collapses and panics that have caused periodic havoc across the world.
Those are not natural boom bust cycle dynamics coming from natural patterns of humans trading for goods and services. It all comes from the financial system and financialization and Wall Street. The financial markets are the most destabilizing force on the planet when it comes to economic integrity. The Great Depression of the 1930s had literally zero to do with people's ability to work. It had zero to do with main street, as it were.
The factories were all there, just sitting there. Yet the link between enabling people to be productive was broken by a collapse of the financial system. It was the contrived financial infrastructure and Wall Street gaming that brought the Western economy to its knees at that time. You can expect it to happen again and again, and again, whether it's a housing bubble or a dot-com bubble or a currency crisis or whatever.
Wall Street as a conceptual institution is the most toxic outcome of the evolution of market economics to date, a fantastically abstracted perversion of economic value and wealth where everything is reduced to widget status, traded for profit and profit alone. It is a deep characteristic of what we know today as the cancer stage of capitalism, even though this system was always toxic and cancerous. It's just going to keep getting worse, as long as this system structure and its incentives remain.
Anyway, that tangent aside and back on point here, as I said, I'm going to produce a Medium article on the subject of financialization and this evolution soon. I also want to point out that my prior Medium article on conspiracy culture was finally released. It's about 7,000 words and ultimately I need to start making these a little bit shorter, to be a little bit more prolific. I tend to approach these like I'm writing a book and that's why they take so long.
I really do want to get two out a month, but the intensity of it and other projects I have, tend to inhibit that a little bit. I'm going to try and tone down the length so it doesn't take an hour to read these things either and be a little bit more active. Also, as mentioned on March 28th, at 6:00 PM Pacific Time, my lecture on the future of civilization will occur in Los Angeles. It will be a live event that will be live streamed. There's no public attendance.
You can go to the description of this podcast to see the Facebook event page, if anyone here still cares about Facebook, but it's there. I'll also update Peterjoseph.info with the syllabus and more information about the live stream. What I'll talk about on March 28th will be introductory in regard to a new kind of out-system activism and community building, and some programming concepts, setting the stage for more detailed development in time.
All of that stated, let's jump into the main content of the podcast today. That is, the future of food and the future of food abundance in the context of post-scarcity once again. Today, we're inching close to 8 billion people on the planet and by 2050, we will likely have over 9 billion conservatively. According to various studies, there needs to be about a 50 to 70% increase in food production.
Keep that in mind today, as we waste about 30 to 50% of all food due to gaps in storage, transportation utilization and so forth. I point that out because it's just as important to do something about the waste through localization and strategic design, as it is coming up with new, not only sustainable methods, but high efficiency methods to produce more food to feed the growing population.
Now, when it comes to conventional crop methods, land-based methods, we have cleared an area, the size of the continent of South America for general crop production, while simultaneously cleared an area, the size equivalent of the continent of Africa, for animal, livestock-related production. Likewise, 70 to 80%, depending on your source, of all the used fresh water on this planet goes toward agriculture.
Hence, if we do actually need a 50 to 70% increase in production, it is axiomatic to assume water usage and land usage would have to increase proportionally, if current methods are the only application. I'm sure strategies could be created to continue to utilize land-based methods, but the truth is we need a completely different solution, at least in part.
Keep in mind, there are far more sustainable practices that have been talked about for years and years and years, trying to get away from monocultures and the incessant use of top soil, destroying hydrocarbon fertilizers and beyond, working to integrate a philosophy of what's called permaculture, which simply means mirroring natural systems. If we were to do this, as we should, we could reclaim and revitalize many areas of the planet.
However, the idea that such a method would compare in its output to the brute-force monoculture, GMO, hydrocarbon-based fertilizer method we use today, which does have a robust output, is a bit naive. I would love for someone to prove to me how you could transform all land used right now for agriculture into permaculture style approaches and achieve the same output.
Therein lies part of the problem and why we need another approach to handle a growing population, and of course, to increase efficiency, and to hopefully generate a post-scarcity abundance, sustainably. It's also important to point out that we already grow enough food for 10 billion people. Global hunger is not the result of scarcity. It's the result of inequality and poverty and basic inefficiencies.
The capitalist structure does output a great deal, as would be expected, in a scarcity-based competitive environment where your very survival is contingent upon you selling yourself in some way, your skills, what have you. What capitalism cannot do successfully, even remotely, is create equitable distribution. Distribution is and has always been the most fundamental problem.
Hence, of course, the near billion people out there that are still today not getting their basic nutritional needs met. Also, when you consider what's happened, since we began this brute-force kind of agriculture that has ruined topsoil, polluted the environment, not to mention facing increased stress due to climate destabilization, climate change, as areas further dry out and other areas flood, we see even more of an argument to find other methods.
Over the past 50 years, one third of all arable land in the world has been made virtually unusable and that trend will no doubt continue. While creative problem-solvers are coming at this from many angles, the prospect of using vertical farm methods, vertical farm systems, is showing great promise, as we will explore. We're still in our infancy with this approach and more concentrated focus needs to occur.
But if you look at the trajectory, the potential, if engineered properly, you find that there's really no reason localized vertical farm production can't allow for a kind of efficiency and abundance and variety where nobody needs to starve. More importantly, nobody even needs to pay for the food produced as per a post-scarcity ethos, as we approach zero marginal cost.
Now, as an aside, before I go any further, there's been a constant knee-jerk reaction when it comes to giving somebody something for free. The argument goes like this. People will, for some reason, always want more and hence, if there's some kind of open distribution mirroring what we know today, as say for example, an electronic store, what would stop someone to go in and just take a hundred TVs and pile them into their car and drive off?
First, if the society and the city was arranged properly based on an access system, as opposed to an ownership system, there's literally no incentive for someone to do that, unless they're going to create a really interesting art project somewhere. It's not like they can resell the TVs because there's no market. Also, it's not unreasonable to have certain limits, like we often see today in fact, there's only so much of one thing you can buy, allowing for exceptions after more investigation.
The point here is that the logic of this becomes more obvious and even less problematic when it comes to food. It becomes even more irrational for a person to walk into a supermarket, a distribution center, I should say, that's open for free access and then take back more food than their family or themselves can possibly eat. Why? Because it's going to spoil.
This is why the creation of food abundance should happen as one of the first transition stages through localized systems, as it does not require the same kind of value shift or reorientation or larger system redesign, in fact, that you would need for other forms of free good distribution. Unless somebody is choosing to resell food they get, for whatever strange reasons, since there's no reason to, if the society succeeded in a post-scarcity yield to meet existing needs of the population, people's behavioral patterns would become inherently respectful of limiting waste.
Food hoarding makes no sense. Therefore, abuse of a completely post-scarcity food system would be self-inhibiting. It would be rare. You don't need a total system redesign to create a food abundance in a post-scarcity context, is my point here. You just need a redesign of the actual food industrial production system alone, moving towards zero marginal cost while still having market activity in other areas, as we continue to such a transition.
That said, let's now come back to the subject of vertical farm food production. Given land stress and continued arable land declined due to monoculture, climate change, loss of top soil, pollution and beyond, vertical farm systems have proven to be highly efficient and scalable with a particularly useful feature of being localized. Remember, the average American food plate travels about 1500 to 2000 miles before you eat it.
This is because of the globalized system of food production, which is really quite insane. By the way, I'm going to talk about this thing called "food miles" here in a second, because there's some debate. Point being, with vertical farms, you can recover so much lost efficiency due to transport energy alone, reduce pollution resulting, not to mention dramatically reducing the amount of inherent food waste itself as touched upon before, which is truly huge.
For those that don't know, vertical farming is about stacked horizontal systems or vertically inclined methods with the goal of producing far more, up to 300 times more in many cases, more food per square foot than common land-based agriculture. It also requires substantially less water and substantially less nutrients. I did a rudimentary calculation in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, extrapolating work done at Columbia University a few years back, using a vertical farm model they had constructed.
Based on their model, only 0.006% of the current amount of land used today for agriculture would be needed to meet global needs with a vegetarian diet. Even more, if we extrapolate the theoretical potential of this method and all agricultural land on earth currently being used was modified to only use this vertical farm method output by Columbia as a model, the output technically would be enough to feed 34.4 trillion people.
Yes, that's purely theoretical based on a spatial efficiency alone. However, since it appears we need to feed about 9 billion by 2050, only 0.03% of that theoretical potential is actually needed, which kind of makes moot any seemingly practical objections to such an extrapolation, even though there are many variables to take into account. What we find today with the entrepreneurial development of all of this, is that some of the most efficient applications reduce water use by about 90% compared to land-based methods.
Hence, of course, freeing up an enormous amount of freshwater, while fertilizer requirements are also far less. There's a startup called Green Sense Farms and they claim their method requires only 1% of general fertilizer use, as compared to land-based farms, with no pesticides needed at all. Of course, an equally proportional dramatic reduction in ecological footprint when it comes to CO2 emissions and other forms of pollution, both by way of direct agricultural method and the reduced need for mass global transport.
Now, before we go any further, let's address some real or perceived cons of all this, as many critics point out, and rightfully so in some cases. I commented that the average American food plate travels about 1500 miles and localization intuitively makes far more sense if possible. This is a basic intuition that's obvious, but it's not necessarily universally applicable. It has to be considered on a per case basis.
It certainly makes sense to localize food production or in fact, all production, if possible. However, the method of localization and how it works has to be taken into account more specifically, and compared to mass industrial methods as they also exist. Just because something is transported a long distance doesn't necessarily mean something produced more closely is going to be more efficient.
A common criticism of this nature argues that those huge shipping containers that are crammed with tons and tons of goods are moving so much that it offsets the carbon footprint and energy needs when compared to more sporadic localized behavior, which in some cases could actually be more inefficient. A common example used is a society of people in a town that have localized food production, but they have to drive a fairly good distance individually to acquire that food.
When they do so, individually, as opposed to mass concentrated movement, coming from international sources through huge shipping containers and so forth, you actually find that more energy is being wasted in contrast to the huge shipping container. This kind of analysis is called "life cycle assessment." Anybody out there working with sustainability theory needs to understand this idea, this systems-based idea, "life cycle assessment."
It attempts to account for all the systemic inputs and outputs and relationships to evaluate how efficient a production system really is. The critical argument, with respect to these "food miles", which again is the distance food travels from farm to table, is that apparently some statistics prove that localizing is not necessarily more efficient than large-scale high-volume transport at great distances. The two factors have to do with volume and the method of transport.
It's so bizarre when you realize how silly this debate actually is, because it presupposes the nature of the localization process, when there could be so many different design varieties in how localized production and distribution is done. Again, everyone looks at this kind of stuff through a market-based lens, without any regard for alternative design or efficiency trends. The first thing to consider is that there's very little localization happening anywhere, at least in terms of Western commercial society.
From the food you eat to the source of pretty much every good you own in Western society, you can rest assured it was probably assembled and manufactured somewhere else. Usually through technicality, someone slaps the label, made in America, on it when really it's not made in America whatsoever. The reason I bring that up is because where is this assessment coming from that comes to the conclusion that giant tankers full of food and goods is more efficient traveling halfway across the world than people strategically localizing?
As stated, if it's basically an efficiency equation between volume and method, then you simply strategically adjust volume in localized transport and the medium of transport as need be. Such arguments simply make no sense as they are only factored in current methods and comparing them. A design revolution and localized agriculture or the localized production of anything, will no doubt prove more efficient once the interest is there to actually make it work properly.
It is indeed mathematically true that more efficiency could be obtained if you use very large integrated systems to feed say a hundred thousand people, versus a whole lot of fragmented systems that do not have the benefit of the efficiency manifest from large system integration. This is the balance. It could very well be that a large integrated system, including the energy and footprint used to transport that food, is more efficient than a small isolated system each located in those regions respectively.
Hence, that simply becomes part of the logical equation. Localization has to be a balance of large scale and small scale. It's not difficult to calculate such things based on net energy efficiency and beyond. Let's not confuse the concept of localization with something like literally five people have their own independent food source and then every five people has their own singular system. Obviously, that lack of integration is illogical.
In the same way that if you want to make a bunch of soup and feed a bunch of people, you don't put all the soup in individual pots. You make one giant pot. You have to find the proper efficiency middle ground between huge mass production and hyper-individuated production. That equation is not difficult. Now, moving on, the second issue frequently brought up is energy used related to the light required along with general material needs.
This of course is always presented in the form of cost, which is inherently misleading. Just because something costs something, doesn't necessarily mean it reflects anything occurring in the natural world. The thing about cost is that cost can change based upon industrial design efficiency. Hence, ephemeralization and the more with less phenomenon. But critics will say something like, "Well, it costs X amount of money to build one of these vertical farms versus how much cheaper it is to run normal agricultural farms."
It's always framed from a business standpoint of course. The truth is, this is an emerging field in the same way solar technology is and was. All of it, in time, if focus is kept, will get less resource-intensive and hence by extension less costly over time, if you want to frame it that way, in the same way solar has. Increased efficiency, lower cost. These criticisms also omit negative market externalities.
While it may cost on paper, more per pound to produce certain things with vertical farms in contrast to traditional agriculture, at this time, you have to account for the dramatic reduction in water, in pesticide use, in fertilizer, in land and pollution. Once you factor in the negative externalities, downstream effects from traditional agriculture, it changes the equation entirely. So few talk about that.
Dickson Despommier, if I'm saying his name correctly, who has written multiple books on vertical farms, has stated, "If every city can grow 10% of its food indoors, that shift could free up 881,000 square kilometers worth of farmland, which could then revert to hardwood forest. That's enough to take 25 years' worth of carbon out of the atmosphere."
More specific to the lighting and energy issue, LED lights have advanced rapidly, including even the ability to isolate parts of the wavelength because not all plants need the entire spectrum. Since these kinds of technologies are governed by information technology, once again, as an extension of Moore's law, we have already seen exponential cost reduction and efficiency increases in LED lighting. Those patterns will no doubt continue.
Critics, once again, avoid the efficiency trajectories, and simply look at the numbers of some company and extrapolate from there. Today, it is energy-intensive naturally to use artificial light, but even in the market system, it has already proven to be competitive, hence, increasingly efficient. If it wasn't, none of these companies currently producing vertical farm produce would be profitable at all.
Not to mention there's all sorts of unique creative innovations occurring such as open light and mirror-based strategies, as an aside. Imagine a gutted glass structure, such as a commercial office building with floor to ceiling windows; a flood of light will come in throughout the day, strategically manipulated through mirrors. Then when darkness falls, artificial light comes on and guess what? In that circumstance you've instantly gained a 50% reduction in light requirements.
The third and final critical complaint I want to address today, which is the most important and viable of all known complaints as far as I'm concerned, has to do with limitations of what can actually be grown in this medium. Obviously, we can't all live off of lettuce, kale, and tomatoes. Yet we are still in a developmental phase when it comes to more complex vegetables, grain production, and beyond.
You have plenty of naysayers out there that say something like, "Oh, it's impossible to grow rice like this." Mark my words, it will become possible in time. I compare the same mentality of those that say it's impossible for vertical farm systems to achieve this or that, with those that claimed it was impossible for humanity to go to space or the moon. We should also reflect upon modern debates in nutrition to see where our priorities should rest.
We all know the notorious food pyramid, at least I do in the United States. In the late 20th century, this pyramid was introduced, highly influenced by lobbying business interests, polluting the recommendations, as business does with just about everything to this day. Remember, business can buy science just like it can buy politicians. It's called the free market. If you look at the 1990s version of the food pyramid, dairy gets an entire section.
Why? Because the dairy business lobby was big and knew this ostensibly public health promotion could increase profits greatly. For, as some might remember, if you are my age, this stupid food pyramid was on the wall in every elementary school. The fact is, today one can live their entire adult life without consuming any dairy products and will probably be healthier for it.
In fact, historically speaking, it wasn't until refrigeration was invented in the early 19th century, dairy consumption became more widespread and custom, unless of course you lived on a farm with cows. The bottom line is it appears humans really don't need dairy at all, with nutrients related easily found in other sources. The food pyramid is from meat to bread suggestion and beyond, really a result of various food business lobbies, which is of course yet another indication of how sick our markets society really is.
Business interests literally have controlled the assumed science around positive nutrition and we wonder why cancer, diabetes, and heart disease continue to be epidemic. By the way, anyone who wishes to learn more about this can look up Luise Light. Luise Light was the USDA director of dietary guidance and nutrition education research in the 1980s, and was responsible for the team that provided the recommendations for the very first food pyramid, only to watch corporate lobbyists come in and change most everything as she writes about.
Anyway, I point all this out because so many in culture today firmly believe in ideas of nutrition that are really not backed by science. There's a lot of ambiguity out there, but they become commonplace and hence backed by tradition, identity, personal comfort, addiction in fact. It is my personal view, take it or leave it, that a plant-based diet will prove over time to be generally more healthy and sustainable. Yes, I know the jury is still out and different people also have different needs.
This is just food for thought, no pun intended. Vertical farming has the potential to tackle at least most of the core nutritional needs of humankind if developed properly and with intent. I'm not arguing here that we stop all land-based agriculture. There is, and could very well be, certain kinds of agricultural outputs that are not efficiently embraced by vertical farming methods as we know it. Permaculture really should be introduced when it comes to land-based farming for the future.
Hence, the need once again, for an integrated mixed use systems approach, just as we also need to do with renewable energy, as I talked about in prior podcasts. The path to success is integration and combination. There is no silver bullet. That does it for me today. I'll return on the 31st of March to talk about more of these issues. The 31st, basically because I'm skipping a week due to the lecture I have on the 28th, which I know right now will not allow me to do the podcast on the 24th because of the content development.
This podcast is brought to you by my Patreon and all you kind folks. You can also join the subreddit, which I often read looking for ideas. Sorry, I don't interact a little bit more there, but I'm going to try and do so in the future. I appreciate everybody listening. Take care out there. Talk to you soon.