Comments by "" (@diadetediotedio6918) on "Civilization as we know it is ending, prominent forecaster says" video.
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@asdfqwerty14587
I'm sorry, I don't meant to say that everyone should produce their own things. Maybe I misunderstood your response?
But decentralization is also about division of labor, so the question is more about:
No, it is not better to have a centralized economy in any circumstances, but this don't mean to abandon the same principles we already know that work very well like the labor division. I think, in this interpretation, the main commenter is conflating decentralization with "producing your own things entirely" and it is also worth of a response.
But if we interpret the commenter response maybe more charitably, we would probably understand "people producing their own food" as "people organizing the production structures in a more closer stance to their own needs than with big corporations", and this would probably increase the cost (as it would not have the government funding big corporations have) but would also make for a more resilient to failure production. This should be more reasonable, if this was the intention.
Either way, my response was more about the centralization thing than to defend the "produce your own food" insanity.
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@thomasmarek7310
Well, so I think your vision is really more aligned to the interpretation I gave in the second half part of my last comment.
I think, although, that this vision is both interesting and somewhat problematic.
Needing food and products from somewhere else is not a sign of centralization, the market is pretty much decentralized (as centralization means central coordination, where with markets you have dozens of thousands of independent decision making units and the feedback of the consumers itself to guide their decisions), but I also think that with the interdependence (which is different to centralization) can be a problem for the instances you pointed out (it can be a problem if somewhere in the chain there is a problem). I still think, albeit that, that the problems we experience are generally unavoidable to some extent, it could be your community the affected one by a very problematic destructive event, in which case your community would be then dependent upon other productions, so you should be careful to which extent you move this reasoning. Many of the distribution problems arise, however as interventions from a centralized entity (i.e. the state), but those problems require a different analysis.
Some things are also inherently problematic to do in most places and you need to export their production to be able to have those things (like even water in some places, but this can generalize to a variety of commodities), so even the application of this idea needs many exceptions, and I generally think that producing for external consumption you can achieve higher degrees of mutual benefit (as you can consume products that the other agents are very good at doing while producing things that you are very good doing, or even producing things that you are not so good producing but consuming things other countries are very good at producing that will benefit you). Those are general principles of economics, and I think there are tradeoffs with most things, so we kinda have to take the ones that appear to have the most benefits.
So yeah, I think definitively it is good to have local production of many things, and to avoid relying on government funded big corporations that are not in the normal flow of the decentralized market, but I think we should carefully pick the conclusions of which of those things are truly centralized (and generally worse to rely on) and which of those interconnected things are acceptable tradeoffs between relying versus internally consuming.
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