Easy Think

This move I can get behind…

Its weird but for a supposedly poor country, it just seems like the city was designed to make it easier for cars to go around than it is for people. If you look around in the metro area in the Philippines, I bet you that you can even count more cars on the road than there are people on the sidewalks.

Why my obsession with sidewalks? Cause thats going to make going around easier and make car-ownership less necessary then decrease traffic then make the outside parts of the cities more accessible and finally make those housing projects not too distant from the workplace then decrease the amount of people inside the city.

Cebu might only be working on one this one project for the meantime but pull this off then everything will eventually start falling into place.

A Jesus Condom perhaps?

pinoytumblr:

A Catholic Church official on Monday warned the Department of Health (DOH) against distributing condoms to couples on Valentine’s Day, saying this may further increase the risk of Filipinos contracting Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

“We should (instead) impart the right message to the people particularly the youth which is faithfulness within the marriage or if they are not yet married, total abstention,” said Fr. Melvin Castro, executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Commission on Family and Life, said in an article posted on the CBCP news site.

He said giving out free condoms, like what the DOH did last year, would only send the wrong message especially to the youth that it is all right to engage in pre-marital sex as long as it is “safe and protected.”

Read more

If I could, I wanna get these tools…bring them to a small province and use them to create a small town the way I want it to.

lovewesay:

easythink:

lovewesay:

Can someone explain to me, in layman’s terms, how measuring economic success and progress in terms of GDP and GNP and per capita income, to name a few evaluators, is sustainable and an accurate description of quality of life?

Can the world’s aggregate income really be infinite and…

Always thought about starting an economics/tech/business blog but I figured this is perfect timing with your question.

Measuring GDP per capita is supposedly able to give us a glimpse of how much the average wealth is per person. Its not really spot on but it does give a decent estimate. Problem is though when you have a situation where lets say in a population of 2, 1 person has $100 and the other one has $0. Sure the GDP per capita is $50 per person but 50% of the population has everything and the other has nothing.

Also another problem with GDP and GNP is that it only shows you how much money a country has, but it doesnt tell you how much things cost. People in Tokyo may be wealthier than people in the Philippines but if you ask them how big their houses are, an ordinary person in the Philippines will most likely have more space in their homes (quality of their house is another thing). You might want to look into the “Big Mac Index”. Its a bit informal but since McDonalds are everywhere and they offer the same product while making use of local ingredients, its a decent indicator of how long it would take to work to create the same thing while taking into account the local costs for the ingredients.

As for the world’s aggregate income, it depends on how you measure it. If you count it by the amount of money a country has, the country is always going to print more money if there are going to be more people being created. But more paper money doesn’t necessarily mean more productivity. If there’s more paper money and no productivity, you got inflation. A question that would be more appropriate to ask would be how much work do we need to do until we’re satisfied. If you think about it, people only really need a few things to continue living; food, water, clothes, shelter. Supplying these things for us back in the day would have been harder. It was hard making clothes, making homes, farming for food, getting fresh water. Maybe in the past it would have taken 40 farmers to harvest a hectare of land. But eventually when people became smarter and better at making tools and machines that helped them, productivity increased as well. So instead of having to stick with one set of clothes for every year, it then became easier to make clothes and cheaper for people to have more than one set. When back then it would take 40 farmers per hectare, with some fertilizers and tractors now it would take just 2 farmers. So in theory, people right now are supposed to be satisfied with whatever they have once their needs are met with the least amount of work possible.

But people have unlimited wants, and they’re capable of constantly creating. We might not need as many farmers as before, but those people who used to be farmers need to feel needed if they want people to do favors for them and so they need to do other jobs. Maybe we need more doctors, more lawyers, more engineers, more programmers, more actors. So we might be doing the same amount or even more work now despite being more productive than the generations before, but we sure have more things to offer than them. They’d never be able to take unlimited pictures with cameras that never run out of film. They’d never be able to travel around the world and still be able to talk to with their families through computers back at home. They’d never have doctors who’d be able to look for cures for diseases. If people just stopped working and became satisfied with the basic necessities, we’ll never be able to do some magical things now.

Wow! Thanks for actually taking my question seriously! I didn’t think anybody would bother to answer.

I didn’t imagine that when the GDP is optimal that people would stop working, what I meant was that how can a goal of ever-higher GDP/GNP be sustainable considering scarce resources?

Setting aside GNP GDP per capita, since you’ve demonstrated that in extreme cases it would be a poor appraisal of the economic landscape of a country, is productivity necessarily linked to continued economic growth? I don’t just mean productivity quantity-wise, but productivity for a healthier quality of life? Can the Economic Machine keep turning without growing but still maintain efficient cities?

Given, it takes money to develop these great ideas and systems and things that we now have in the modern world, but will it necessarily take even more money in the future to reach greater heights? If so, where will that money come from?

Sorry for all the questions, it’s just, college classes weren’t exactly the best place for me to voice my curiosity.

If you look back at history, people always had to deal with the problem of scarce resources and usually they always find a way around it. One example would be back then, if people had to go somewhere they could only rely on horses to get them around. But the upkeep of a horse is pretty expensive so only a few people could really afford them. So it made sense that people would want to enjoy the same thing without having to pay the huge price. With the market demand there, eventually someone had to come up with the automobile. Now we have more people getting to places faster and farther than any horse can take them. Also steam engine trains dealt with the same problem. Wood was a pretty expensive thing back then and eventually people would have to come up with a more efficient alternative to steam engines. The diesel engine may not be known as the cleanest thing now but back in the day when compared to wood which gave up a lot of smog, diesel was the better and cleaner alternative. Like all things, all it takes is a little time and a good amount of work then anything can become better. Just look at computers in the early 1940’s where they were made of large tubes, cost millions of dollars and could only act as giant calculators. Now we have things that cost a fraction, make use of fewer materials and can do way more with very little.

Overall if humanity cant afford to become bigger then they just stagnate but once they find solutions to their problems then they progress. Thats why after the industrial revolution, humanity experienced large growth in GDP per capita and had a growth in population as well. As for the GNP/GDP increase in relation to scarce resources, there will always be problems and people willing to pay for solutions to those problems. So if a group of people comes up with a solution/alternative to expensive oil, expensive food, expensive homes, expensive water,expensive energy, expect more people willing to pay for what they have to offer and their GDP/GNP to rise as well.

As for a higher quality of life, there was this report that came out that mentions that when a group of people reaches a certain level of wealth, that is when they start caring about their surroundings more. You can find the report here:

http://futurismic.com/2009/04/22/best-way-to-clean-up-the-environment-make-everyone-richer/

If you think about it, it does make sense. If you can barely afford to have the basic necessities, you cant really care about other things. But once your basic needs have been met, you have more time to worry about other things.

I also understand what you meant by better quality of life but with recent scenarios, the statement can sometimes be subjective. If you look at the case of Beijing, back then they could only afford bikes and while it takes some amount of effort, it didnt really take long for them to get to their work. Now that they’re getting wealthier, more of them could afford “better” forms of transportation such as cars but with everyone having cars and being on the road, traffic is starting to become a common thing and it takes them longer to get to their daily commute. If enough people want it, people in Beijing would want to look into more efficient forms of commuting. Things are going to be interesting there for the next couple of years.

For things to get better, it is going to cost some money but its going to come from the money that we already have. Lets try out a scenario where in the beginning the world had $100. With things still in the beginning, it wasn’t easy getting food and for us to get our food fix it would cost us 100% of our time and a $100 of our money to get our food requirements. But once the world became more efficient at producing food, we could produce more food at a cheaper price bringing down the cost of food around lets say $20. Now that we only need to spend $20 on food now we have $80 to spend on other things. Maybe we want to spend that $80 on clothes and with some time and research eventually that cost is going to go down. So as things get cheaper, we’ll have more time and money to come up with other things to create and eventually the cost of those things are going to go down as well.

(i know its not very likely that the world would just stick with $100 in money for the rest of its existence but for the sake of explanation lets just say it would)

I hope I was able to explain it okay. If you have any other questions, dont hesitate to ask. And about the college classes, don’t worry about them. I got a pretty low score in my economics but after some reading in various things and a good amount of thinking, things started to make sense.

If you’re really interested in learning about the economics and history and how they come together, a good place to start would be the video series PBS Commanding Heights. You can torrent it or view it at their website. It may be a bit hard to grasp at times so I had to rewind a few parts just to really get what they were saying.