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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (51286)	3/1/2008 10:04:46 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543310

How about the national highway system then? How about our vast industrial refit for WWII? Great illustrations. It's a matter of political will which grows from mobilized awareness.

To: epicure who wrote (51286)	3/2/2008 4:15:09 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 543310

The build out of the interstate system was a smaller change then redoing the world's or really even just the US's energy infrastructure. The refit for WWII might be more comparable (although we were refitting an economy less than a tenth of its current size), but was done in the context of full scale global war, and involved rationing of many staple materials, as well as greatly slowing down or even stopping the production of many durable items for the consumer markets like cars. Also our production methods are often more specialized now, they are more efficient and productive now, but harder to completely change over to something else. It was much easier to change a factory building 1930s/1940s trucks in to a factory building 1940s tanks than it would be to change a factory building 2000s trucks to 2000s tanks. That last fact doesn't directly address the issue, but does help illustrate how goods and infrastructure are in many ways harder to change over than when our designs and techniques where simpler and more primitive. How about the switch from whale oil to kerosene? That involved infrastructure, and took a remarkably short time. It was a straight replacement in a simple device. Lamps that could burn the whale oil, could also burn kerosene (and even if they couldn't its pretty simple to build new lamps). Also it was not a command decisions from above, but rather a natural response to the economics of the situation, with whale oil becoming more expensive and distilled petroleum products becoming cheaper, it made sense to change over. Have you read the book the Black Swan? Its in my wish list at Amazon (but then I use my wishlist there to dump anything I might possibly be interested in considering buying and its gotten to big to be really useful)