Re: What is work? (was Re: Writing courses)


Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
"Joann Zimmerman" <jzimm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1efa4805495967eb98975f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <12910ldsmehff2b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, pwrede6492@xxxxxxx
says...

It'll probably be easier to adapt plants -- they're already making
biodiesel
from soybeans, and I've heard tell of cars and trucks converted to run on
cooking oil recycled from the fryers at places like McDonalds. And
that's
without any specialization of crops at all. Of course, if we start
getting
energy-fuel from the same land and crops that are currently used for
food,
it will do interesting things to grocery prices...

You were thinking of corn subsidies?

No, I was thinking of the effect on availability and prices if farmers can
make $X/bushel selling crops for food, or $X*10 selling the same stuff for
fuel. But subsidies would probably come into it somewhere. Possibly from
both ends; right now, there are already subsidies for both farms and oil.
Somebody really enterprising could probably figure out a way to collect both
*and* benefit from $70/barrel crude-oil prices, for a while, anyway.

I'd also get interested in weather effects and monoculture. All of a
sudden one particular crop is absolutely essential to the ecomony's
functioning in a way that there wasn't before. Don't know how you manage
droughts, tornadoes, permanent hurricanes and insurance with all that.[...]

This is a more-detailed look at the operation of the law of supply and
demand. If there's competing demand for crops for both food and fuel,
it'll push the prices of both up and will also increase production by
making certain operations economic where they weren't before. In
particular, the high price required for bio fuel to become an economic
substitute for oil partially reflects the costs of dealing with
unreliability of supply. Presumably these costs include arranging for
a variety of sources, more storage capacity, refineries that can accept
a variety of fuel sources, etc.

By referring you back to the law of supply and demand, I don't mean to
say it's not worth discussing the details. Sometimes in these
discussions, market prices are invoked in such an oversimplified way as
to suggest that they're expected to cure all our problems by magic.
They don't. In general, a higher market price for anything means the
real cost has gone up--which can be the market's way of expressing a
drop in real living standards.*



*This is bound to attract a retort that better technology, etc. will
keep living standards up anyway. In that case, it's not a drop in
absolute living standards but they're still lower relative to what they
would have been without the price increase.

.

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