Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC produces half of the custom microchips in the world and an estimated 90% of the most powerful, it is a near monopoly in a huge, specialized market.
I know. My day job is in electronics. And TSMC isn't the one I find scariest.
When I talked about an optimal level of integration, I definitely don't mean that we are anywhere near it. Near-monopolies are probably inevitable in some cases, but ideally when they appear they should be very resilient, which isn't the case of TSMC. And in any case, there is no good reason for a company that produces custom microchips to be a near-monopoly, except that profits are driving the situation in that direction because of economies of scale. Ideally, we should have mechanisms to fight against making economies of scale too easy, instead of what we actually have, which is greasing economies of scale so that the bigger the company, the more profitable.
A monopoly might be much less than efficient as well as fragile but if it has eliminated the competition what is the alternative?
If the monopoly is what I would call a natural monopoly, that is, a situation where it really is better to have a centralized control (which I think happens with electrical grids, railways, and other companies that are essentially networks), the alternative is to have enough regulatory oversight. If there is no good reason for the monopoly to exist, then it would be a matter of breaking it down and eliminating the incentives that created the monopoly in the first place.
I think the central idea of this thread, maybe the whole site originally, if not environmental apocalypticism in general, is that environmental overshoot and resource depletion either require or inevitably result in degrowth.
Degrowth in economic terms, I would agree. In terms of population, as I said before, my modelling suggests that people don't die all that easily.
Consider the Irish Potato Famine, the Russian famine of the 1920s and again in the 30s, the Chinese famine in the teens through the 40s, then the Great famine under Mao.
True, bad governments can screw things up spectacularly. But in global terms, in order to see a global sharp population decrease, it would require worldwide bad government for a fairly long period of time. Maybe not impossible, but I think it's safe to assume unlikely.
If resources became scarce the distribution will be infinitely worse, there is no doubt in my mind.
If resources became scarce a lot of trade would go away. But the thing is, trade is directly responsible for a lot of famines in poor countries right now. They are encouraged to engage in agriculture for export, at the expense of subsistence agriculture. In the short term, with scarce resources and worsening climate, I'd certainly expect more famines. But once poor countries realise they are effectively on their own, subsistence agriculture would kick in and alleviate the famines.
The ownership always controls, whether it is the capitalists or the politburo and their wealth is as out of proportion now as it ever has been.
As Peter Turchin has noted, inequality doesn't keep going up and up. When a society collapses, it often reaches a point when the elites collapse as well, and then they lose their control and inequality goes down.
Right now, this week, the WHO has condemned the rich world for hoarding vaccines to use as boosters when many poor countries are far from an effective first course level. The result they warn will be the prolonging of the pandemic. A pretty plain warning that should lead to different policy decisions. Do you think it will?
No. But then, I've seen plenty of evidence that most of the world outside of Asia is incapable of making sensible public health decisions. And it doesn't even have to do with the rich hoarding their resources.
We won't share now, we won't when resources bite, the haves will hoard and the have-nots will be lucky to get thoughts and prayers as they die.
I agree that people won't share when resources bite. It's just that my study of history suggests that the have-nots tend not to go gentle, if they think they have the slimmest chance of survival.
I have great faith in humans on an individual level, it's when we gang up against one another that we get scary.
True. And if we have access to vast amounts of weapons, it can get truly scary. But history suggests very strongly that there is some sort of psychological limit to war. It doesn't matter what level of technology they were fought with or the destructiveness of the weapons, the deadliests wars have all reached the same peak of deadliness, in terms of percentage of the population killed, and it's the same as WWII. And when you try to look of the effect of WWII in a global population graph, it's a blip. No consolation to the relatives of those that died in it, but it's a consolation in cosmic terms.