Revenue - Cost = Profit
Most of the decisions that are made have economic reasons, as long as political interests don't come into conflict.
Profit is the ends of whatever happens in industry, and the means are, among other things, 1. Technology and 2. Management. Every endeavor is directed to maximize the revenue and minimize the cost.
In this profit-centric ecosystem, things like ecological balance may go to hell.
Modern Industry is characterized by Speed and Scale. Every industry is like every other industry - they all want to grow, they want to grow fast, and they want to grow infinitely.
Most of the problems, from personal to social to ecological, are directly and indirectly caused by this speed-scale mania. Growth is not as innocent a word as we take it to be.
Growth means growth of production, which necessarily means growth of consumption, and which necessarily means growth of market (enter the agents of business - WTO, World Bank, IMF etc with non-stop open-yourself mantra, and the 24 * 7 sales representative - Media - since what is produced has to be consumed, demand is identified and even invented to match the growing supply. enter Aishwarya Rai.)
Also, the economy of scale ensures an inversely proportional relationship between scale and cost, so setting any upper limit on production is illogical in this premise. Organizations strive to expand their business, become multinational, outsource their work and acquire firms in order to reduce the cost of production. Sometimes the pursuit of cost reduction goes slightly overboard - when the need to control the means of production leads to war.
If you ignore war, all this business usually looks pretty harmless. But it is anything but harmless. For every commodity that is made in factory, existence of a market is essential. To consume the ever growing supply of junk food and junk entertainment, our homes have become market. For weapons and bombs to be consumed, places like Afganistan where nothing else can be sold have been made market. If they can not dump their goods, they dump their bombs!
Urban India is an expanding market - dumping ground - for expanding supply of junk food and junk entertainment. Rural India, since it doesn't have purchasing power to save itself, gets shiploads of imported nuclear waste piled on it year after year. Did you know that our governments allow this - dumping nuclear waste on our land? I will not be surprised if you didn't - gone are the days when newspapers used to wake us up. Now media sings lullabies. So switch on your TV, watch Sachin playing between breaks, in which he does the real thing - sell Coca Cola.
Technology speeds up things. It all began with the advent of assembly line and now, thanks to the development in Information Technology, things happen faster than ever. Investment bankers earn millions of dollars for their organizations with click of buttons. Manufacturers launch new models of car or mobile phone in months instead of years. No wonder we get to see new products everyday.
However, the text-book of economics talk about free market and* ...
*this is an incomplete post.
Most of the decisions that are made have economic reasons, as long as political interests don't come into conflict.
Profit is the ends of whatever happens in industry, and the means are, among other things, 1. Technology and 2. Management. Every endeavor is directed to maximize the revenue and minimize the cost.
In this profit-centric ecosystem, things like ecological balance may go to hell.
Modern Industry is characterized by Speed and Scale. Every industry is like every other industry - they all want to grow, they want to grow fast, and they want to grow infinitely.
Most of the problems, from personal to social to ecological, are directly and indirectly caused by this speed-scale mania. Growth is not as innocent a word as we take it to be.
Growth means growth of production, which necessarily means growth of consumption, and which necessarily means growth of market (enter the agents of business - WTO, World Bank, IMF etc with non-stop open-yourself mantra, and the 24 * 7 sales representative - Media - since what is produced has to be consumed, demand is identified and even invented to match the growing supply. enter Aishwarya Rai.)
Also, the economy of scale ensures an inversely proportional relationship between scale and cost, so setting any upper limit on production is illogical in this premise. Organizations strive to expand their business, become multinational, outsource their work and acquire firms in order to reduce the cost of production. Sometimes the pursuit of cost reduction goes slightly overboard - when the need to control the means of production leads to war.
If you ignore war, all this business usually looks pretty harmless. But it is anything but harmless. For every commodity that is made in factory, existence of a market is essential. To consume the ever growing supply of junk food and junk entertainment, our homes have become market. For weapons and bombs to be consumed, places like Afganistan where nothing else can be sold have been made market. If they can not dump their goods, they dump their bombs!
Urban India is an expanding market - dumping ground - for expanding supply of junk food and junk entertainment. Rural India, since it doesn't have purchasing power to save itself, gets shiploads of imported nuclear waste piled on it year after year. Did you know that our governments allow this - dumping nuclear waste on our land? I will not be surprised if you didn't - gone are the days when newspapers used to wake us up. Now media sings lullabies. So switch on your TV, watch Sachin playing between breaks, in which he does the real thing - sell Coca Cola.
Technology speeds up things. It all began with the advent of assembly line and now, thanks to the development in Information Technology, things happen faster than ever. Investment bankers earn millions of dollars for their organizations with click of buttons. Manufacturers launch new models of car or mobile phone in months instead of years. No wonder we get to see new products everyday.
However, the text-book of economics talk about free market and* ...
*this is an incomplete post.
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