[cortesoft]

Well, the guy who invented the horseshoe died thousands of years ago.

And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.

Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.

Basic Ricardian Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_economics

Of course, that doesn’t mean the blacksmith isn’t out of a job, but I always hate that so many people think the solution to that problem is to just give up the economic benefits of specialization instead of working to improve the distribution of the gains.

[coldtea]

>And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.

Ignoring all the possitive other effects as well.

[pluralmonad]

I've come to view the goal of things being cheap as an anti goal. The biggest contribution to us speed running killing our ecosystems. Maybe all of us going without more often would end up with a significantly higher standard of living in the long term.

[cortesoft]

You do that by properly pricing in externalities, not by making everything harder to do so we can't put as much strain on the environment.

You are probably right that we need to have less stuff, but if we are going to have less, I would rather work less, too.

[wat10000]

Externalities must be accounted for. Once that’s done, cheap should correlate well with being less ecologically harmful.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.

And for a village that had 50 such specialties... they can make do with 49 specialties. Then with 48. And 45 as well. 25 eventually. But some day in the future, their great-grandchildren wake up, and there are no jobs. That Korean factory even ships in tractors, so there's no farm labor work to be had for the 200 who didn't have a specialty. But the food still costs money. And it doesn't matter if the village is gone because those people moved to the city, there's not much work there either. And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.

Who is this good for? Is it good for you?

[scbrg]

> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.

> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?

Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).

Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.

[inigyou]

It's unethical to reduce population by making people starve to death.

[scbrg]

Of course it is. I have no idea why you'd suggest such a thing.

[tonyedgecombe]

The population is still growing because people are living longer. There aren't many places left in the world with above replacement birth rates.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed,

Retards in the 1960s believed such. But the reality is that it's not even needed a little. And subreplacement fertility isn't "population reduces for a bit, then stabilizes"... subreplacement fertility is actually "the population continues to shrink, accelerating and shrinking faster until extinction inevitably ensues".

So you're not really a "I want a lower population", you're part of a death cult that wants humans gone. Forever.

>this is good for pretty much everybody.

It hasn't been good for anyone, except some tiny minority that is measured as much less than 1%.

>There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).

Already shrinking. Visibly, indisputably shrinking. And the western world isn't doing the polluting.

>Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.

No, it already stopped growing. Ran out of gas, but as the car coasts to a stop you can delusionally pretend that the engine's still on, and that we aren't coasting up the hill. If somehow I were wrong, it wouldn't be unfortunate at all, it'd be a wondrous miracle.