Thursday 24 March 2005

Pic of the day: Save fuel costs, fly with cape! Sadly only possible in City of Heroes. Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Plane truths

The day was sunny, the sky a rich blue. As I looked up, an invisible hand drew a white line slowly across the sky with a magic crayon. I am so old, I remember being amazed at the sight. (Then again, the west coast of Norway was not seeing a lot of air traffic and probably still isn't.) Now I recognize it automatically as the contrails of a plane.

And I thought about how people use planes more and more. I can certainly understand them. There is simply nothing to compete with the speed of planes, at least over long distances. From city to city, fast trains may do the trick, but as soon as some stretch of sea intervenes, there goes that option. And the longer you travel, the more hopeless any other means of transportation when compared to flight. And of course, people do travel longer these days, not least because the planes are there anyway...

It's not just when time is money, either. When going on a vacation, people will hurry to get to the fun part. The vacation is so short, after all, and they have worked hard for it. Of course, if they did not have such expensive vacations, they might not have needed to work that hard or that long.

***

There's a lot of this, really. You need a good car to travel to your job far away, because the job that is far away pays better. But then again, you need that extra money to pay for the good car. So you don't actually have more money left, at least not after tax, and you spend time in the process. I hope you enjoy the ride. Because if not, it is like a dog chasing its own tail. Not very meaningful when you look at it from outside.

Long-time readers will know that I am skeptical of this lifestyle. I'm not a rabid anti-consumerist. If I were, I would not have several computers in my apartment... But I also work only 90%, and at the same workplace where I first got a job more than 25 years ago, nor have I been looking for a more "challenging" and better paid job even there. Some of my furniture may quite possibly be older than me, although surely not by much. I'm willing to work for a new computer, because a new computer can do things the old could not. A new bed or chair however does exactly the same as the old, so they don't interest me.

I think many people would benefit from being a little more like me in this regard. But I'm not sure it would be a good thing for society if everyone went all out that way. Even if they were as pragmatic as me, it might still be quite a shock for society. If suddenly every family started playing scrabble together instead of going out and buying that new big plasma TV, what would become of the people who made plasma TVs? They would have to look for something else to do, people probably already have an old scrabble board lying around. (Actually I don't, but then again I'm not a typical family. If I were two, scrabble would be high on the buy list.)

***

On the other hand, what would happen if all the world should live a life of excessive consumption, like we do in Norway and the USA? We may be getting a taste of that recently, with China's economy growing by 10% each year. And remember, for each year those 10% are 10% of more. So each year, more and more millions of people make the transition from poverty to middle-class life. And like the middle class here, they want more meat instead of vegetables and rice – but it takes 10 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of pork. And they want to travel too, and they want new stuff like we do. And so China has been vacuuming the world for metals and oil and such things that are needed for its people to produce and consume.

You think petrol is getting expensive? What about when 500 million more Chinese want to drive all over the place and travel by plane all over the world too? What about India? There are a billion people too, and 90% of them are still too poor to chase our dreams. What when 900 million more Indians try to live like us? I'm not saying it is not possible. But perhaps it might be an idea to set the target a little lower when it comes to consumption. Not just for them, but for us too. It's not like we're twice as happy as when we spent half as much, after all.