MoreFromLess

More From Less (Andrew McAfee)

  • Some good ideas. Too much repitition. Could use an editor. Fell off a cliff half way through.
  • This book is about how we turned the corner and started getting more from less, and what happens from here forward.
  • The strangest aspect fo teh story is that we didnt make many radical changes to eliminate the trade-off between human prosperity and planetary health. Instead we just got a lot better at doing the things we'd alreadly beed doing.
  • "Four horsemen of the optimist" tech progress, capitalism, public awareness and responsive government.
  • It was hard to let go of the notion that as economies grow they must consume more resources.
  • While Malthus was badly wrong about the future, he was broadly correct about the past.
  • The Industrial Revolution changed everything, the steam engine unveiled 22 years before Malthus published his Essay assured that the widespead famine he predicted would rank among the worst predictions anyone has ever made.
  • Steam changed the course of humanity not by helping plow farms, but by helping to fertilize them.
  • Life magazine reported: "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support the following predictions: In a decade (80s) city dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution. By 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by 1/2/
  • Noble Prize winner George Wald estimated that "civilization will end withing 15 to 30 years (from 1970s) unless immediate action is taken.
  • An advanced country may be able to decouple economic growth and increasing volumes of material goods consumed.
  • Natural gas produces 50% less carbon per kWatt hour than coal does.
  • CRIB stratigies – consume less, recycle, impose limits, and go back to the land – have NOT been important contributors to the dematerialization we've seen.
  • To get the same harvest homesteaders use more land, water and fertilizer than "factory farms"
  • A Nov 2007 cover story in Forbes magazine touted that the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia had over 1e9 customers around the world and asked "Can anyone catch the cell phone king?"
  • Fracking makde natural gas cheap enough that it became preferre over coal for much electricity generation.
  • Rare earths arent rare at all. However they're difficult to extract form ore. Obtaining them requires a great deal of acid and generates tons of salt and crushed rock as by-products.
  • Resource scarcity isnt something that we need to worry about. Earth is finite, but very very big.
  • Heyek realized that fluctuating prices for such things as aluminum and wheat are signals about scarcity and abundance.
  • The 1st principle of Econ 101 is that markets should be left alone by governments, the 2nd is taht markets dont deal with negative externalities, and so the governments need to intervene.

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