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Morris Dovey

Robert Sturgeon (in ) said:

| On Sat, 5 Aug 2006 19:02:58 -0500, "Jeff McCann"
| wrote:
||
|| I think the reverse is true. Technological advancement gives a
|| society options, redundancies, flexibility and the ability to
|| assess and remediate problems.

Probably two sides of the same coin. Along with the advancements and
capacity for flexibility come increasing specialization and narrowness
of focus that leads to brittleness. One of the advantages we have is
the wide geographic distribution of our assets - which means that as
long as damage is localized, workload can be picked up in undamaged
areas.

| Perhaps. I don't know. I was thinking the other day of
| what would happen to the metropolitan area just to the
| northwest of where I live -- millions of people who are
| primarily living in the symbolic economy -- in the event of
| a societal collapse caused by, say, a series of nuclear
| detonations in 5 or 6 of our major financial and
| governmental centers: say, DC, NYC, LA, Chicago, Seattle,
| etc. People smarter than me have estimated that even such
| "limited" destruction would inevitably cause the collapse of
| the U.S. economy and society. I don't see these millions of
| symbolic workers being able to survive a return to a more
| material economy.

I don't think there'd be a complete collapse. There would be
substantial changes and restructuring. The agricultural areas would
continue to produce food, for example, and there'd still be a demand
for what they produced, but the marketing and distribution systems
would likely change. The food producers would still want equipment,
chemicals, seed, etc and that demand would likely be satisfied.

| My (possibly wrong) conclusion is that the post-modern
| symbolic economy/society is much more fragile than the
| industrial economy/society it replaced. Too many of us are
| no longer able to create goods, including food, and instead
| are now only able to engage in symbol manipulation -- the
| information/entertainment economy, a.k.a the post-modern
| economy. Lawyers, data entry clerks, web masters, writers,
| actors, singers, photographers, programmers, personal
| trainers, relationship counselors, what have you. Can any
| of them put actual food on an actual table? What happens to
| them if their post-modern services are no longer in demand?
| And that ignores entirely those dependent on
| "entitlements"...

In some ways, yes - and in some ways, no. It might be an interesting
exercise to look back and ask just how long it's been since some
majority of the population of any primary city engaged in the creation
of goods. Haven't the cities tended to be marketing and information
centers almost from the time they became regarded as "cities" rather
than "towns"?

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto