I’m just trying to understand how you compute “income” and “subsistence” for entities like “earth as a whole”. From your tone it ought to be easy, but there isn’t really money, or trade, at this level of organization. Earth as a whole doesn’t buy things from other entities, not with money, nor with barter, so I don’t see how to compute those numbers. The best parallel I can see between human-scale economics and earth-scale is “sustainability”. If a human’s income exceeds subsistence, then I’d say they were in a good situation regarding sustainability. However, the ecological-footprint figures argue that earth as a whole is in a bad situation regarding sustainability.
Very well, at what level is the earth now? At subsistence, above, or below?
I said at OB; median is 5-10 times, mean is about 20 times.
I can’t find the post on OB that you’re referring to, otherwise I would reply there.
Do these (5-20) figures disagree with estimates that humanity is consuming more “ecological services” than the rest of Earth’s ecology can renew?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
I’m just trying to understand how you compute “income” and “subsistence” for entities like “earth as a whole”. From your tone it ought to be easy, but there isn’t really money, or trade, at this level of organization. Earth as a whole doesn’t buy things from other entities, not with money, nor with barter, so I don’t see how to compute those numbers. The best parallel I can see between human-scale economics and earth-scale is “sustainability”. If a human’s income exceeds subsistence, then I’d say they were in a good situation regarding sustainability. However, the ecological-footprint figures argue that earth as a whole is in a bad situation regarding sustainability.
The usual methods use market prices, which of course would not be available if the Earth had no internal smaller units trading.