Some musings on scarcity...
There's a user by the name of @professorgollum with whom I disagree on many issues, but who makes really good points on many subjects that most people never waste a minute on.
Today's subject is scarcity, and global goods manufacturing, and how both form what we call "free market economy".
Let's start with something simple. How many months of wage do you need to be able to afford a car (of whatever kind you need for personal use, whichever that may be), without factoring in bank loans? Now, how often do you buy a new car? How often do you think most people buy a new car, even those people who can buy any kind of car?
Now let's follow on that thread. How many vehicles are produced yearly, daily even? Consider how many models, and the several types of model of vehicle each manufacturer/brand has on the market, and that they're produced in increasing amounts yearly (not always but often).
Now let's think for a minute. Even in countries where some (not even the majority) are able to replace their vehicle every 2 or 3 years you could hardly justify these production quotas without seeing massive declines in market value. And indeed we do have some cheap models of vehicle these days, their lower price however is more a reflection of poorer quality, rather than due to the fact we keep producing massive amounts of vehicles that no one can buy entirely. So much for demand and offer then no?
Upon reading the following article, on the esteemed @professorgollum 's blog I quickly did a cursory search on the global production and global consumption indexes of a basic consumer good, just to have a simple grasp on the matter. Both indexes were pulled from statista.com, a website that lists many such indexes publicly, and in seeing both articles I then stumbled upon some mischievous misdirection tactics (but more on that later). The article from the professor's blog was this:
https://academyofdeprogramming.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/example-post-3/
And here are the indexes I consulted from statista.com, here is the global production of cow milk (yearly report):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263952/production-of-milk-worldwide/
And here is the equivalent index for consumption (also yearly report):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272003/global-annual-consumption-of-milk-by-region/
Now, if you consult these links as I did, you may notice an oddity that jumps out into sight like an eyesore. The production index is translated into million metric tonnes, but the consumption is listed in thousand metric tonnes. I can guess why easily, but my guesses may not be entirely correct. What matters though is that you can convert a value displayed in thousand metric tonnes to million metric tonnes by dividing the former value by 1000, and yielding it into a result in million metric tonnes. Furthermore if you do, as I did, sum the values given you'll easily discover that we are producing, yearly, twice the amount of cow milk that we consume, globally.
I'm not interested in checking the indexes for every product because that is a tedious task, but I bet a vast majority of consumer goods are also being wasted in the exact same manner. We can ponder on why it is so, but more importantly we should question what effect do goods really have on market prices, wages, and standards of living if we produce most of what we consume at a much faster pace than we can consume it? Stockpilling? That would be a rational line of thought, if a lot of these products didn't have incredibly small lifespans in terms of safety for human/animal consumption.
What seems painfully obvious is that we are exploited, lied to, and forced to participate in the extraction of any and all meaningful value we produce, in order to sustain an unsustainable status quo. How much longer will we endure this path towards complete extinction of humanity before we finally say "ENOUGH!"?
ADMontblanc, August 19th 2021
#supplyanddemand #falsescarcity #enslavedhumanity #prisonplanet #economics