NC Ch 3 : Waste Not

We waste a lot of stuff.

Wasting people
The most interesting and significant concepts of this chapter is when it talks about labor and unemployment (wasting people). p53

When Work Disappears by W. Julius Wilson is cited. Between 1967 and 1987, Chicago lost 360,000 manufacturing jobs, and New York over 500,000. The US has the highest prison population, which is possibly related to higher rates of poverty especially in the inner cities. (p54)

"Globally, rates of unemployment and disemployment have been rising faster than those for employment for more than 25 years." In 1998, the unemployment rate in Europe was 11%. In the US it was 4.2% in 1999. However, "according to author Donella Meadows, of the 127 million people working in the US in 1996, 38 million worked part-time, and another 35 million, though working, weren't paid enough to support a family. 19 million worked in retail and earned less than $10,000/year. The official unemployed rolls of 7.3 million do not count an additional 7 million people who are discouraged, forcibly retired, or working as temps."

Wasting money
Besides wasting human resources, we are also wasting money. While the United States is the richest country in the world, it is deeply in debt. How can this be?

Well, the authors argue that waste is included in the overall GDP, where waste is defined as money spent where the buyer gets no value.

examples:
highway accidents - $150 billion/year in health care costs, lost productivity, lost tax revenue, property damage, and police, judicial, and social services costs
social costs of driving - $1 trillion/year building and repairing roads, economic losses due to congestion, ill health caused by air pollution, and medical costs for accidents (this number seems like bs, and it includes the first number. oh well, whatever)
military guarding oil in the Middle East - $50 billion/year, could have been avoided with higher fuel efficiency standards, gutted by Reagan in 1986
medical overhead - $250 billion/year


We need to somehow measure net growth, not just money spent. Things we would identify as net growth: quality of life, more leisure and family time, higher wages, better infrastructure, greater economic security. "GDP not only masks the breakdown of the societal structure and etc, it portrays such breakdown as economic gain." Notable economists who are also against GDP as a measure of growth: Jonathan Rowe of Redefining Progress, William Nordhaus and James Tobin, Robert Repetto.