Population Density, Industrial Agriculture, and Poverty

just thinking about population density for a minute: the population density of Bangladesh for example is tremendous, perhaps the "vent for surplus" theory has a larger parallel to equality and growth of industrial capitalism

also i heard a comment the other day ... i think it was a rural indigenous person in bolivia which was something like "we are rural people -- we do not need much -- we make what we need." i was thinking of something a day or two previously about the unending role of the city in driving consumption -- the cultural engines of the city in turn thrive of of it and drive it to further heights (and consider what that does to our urban centered world and our own understandings thereof!) -- investing in education and other things that boost marginal productivity through borrowing -- the rural way to mantain your own demands so that they do not surpass your own output. when production outpaces demand this surplus is expected to be used for investment and to make up for lean times.

Form and Unity

So salient are themes of form and unity in the modern setting, that by going unmentioned in so many connected discussions, highlight the acceptance which with they've been treated.

The repetitive discussion of "culture wars" within bounds of the "left/right:liberal/conservative debate" is just such a discussion, "clumsily" standing in for "deeper" conversations about the proliferation of form.

Latent trends of market and technological growth are responsible for much of the differentiation we are seeing. This shift has been widely been interpreted as a movement in the opposite direction. Yet, the market is implicitly based upon differentiation -- with technology but a tool of the market.

: how big could the market be if demands were simple? What if my desires could become reduced to food, shelter, and companionship. Furthermore, as scholars of command economies could confirm, the failure of the command economy is due to (besides the technological challenge of adjusting industrialized agriculture with differentiated growing conditions) the inability to create the many differentiated intermediate inputs going into modern scale economies.