Derek, competition does drive innovation. It's precisely because AMD hasn't been a threat for so long that the CPU market has been stagnant for a long time. As for the car industry, you're reading it the wrong way round, those sorts of issues were as bad as they were because of state interference, subsidies, and the prevention of true competition. As soon as the state sticks its nose in, such as adding on huge tax levies to pump prices, real competition becomes a lot more difficult. Also, a large part of what happened in the last half century was down to artificially cheap oil, born on the back of a distinctly unhealthy economic relationships between the US and China re how trade functions. Again, if the state didn't interfere so much with this sort of thing, a much healthier market would exist where the real costs would be properly absorbed by the consumer, who would then have to make more sensible decisions about what to buy.
Also have to laugh at the notion of being obsessed with effiency. That again can only happen if the consequences of waste are reflected through to end pricing, but state interference means that rarely happens. Frankly, the consumer is just as dishonest for borrowing money to buy crap they cannot afford, building up staggeringly huge private sector debt, loading down the banks with that same debt, then blaming the banks when their income can't cover the repayments. Atm consumers are able to waste money very efficiently. Perhaps it should be more difficult to make stupid spending decisions, the way it used to be when a proper bank manager would refuse a loan if it was very obvious the customer had not a flying chance of paying it back.
Lastly, the notion of less waste is a bit hyopcritical when, let's face it, the vast majority of stuff we buy is not remotely essential to living anyway. Most products are luxury items. And anyone who moans about any of these issues but then spends money on xmas presents/cards, Valentine's day, birthday gifts, etc. is being very hypocritical.
Reminds me of the nonsense about hybrid/eco cars like the Prius; celebs buy them for virtue signalling reasons, not for any real concern about the envrionment, especially given the horrendous waste involved in their construction, the problems with the resource extraction required to create some of the internal parts such as the battery, etc. The real eco choice is to keep an existing car running, that consumes far fewer resources then making a new one, especially a complicated hybrid, but of course that doesn't match the public persona that celebs and the image-concious middle classes want to portray, the kind of people who will drive to a recycling centre in a 4x4 and then sit outside in the entrance queue of cars with their engine running, just to drop off a bag or two of plastic stuff. 😀
There was a time low energy bulbs were very cheap, 25p each in Tesco. Then it became fashionable to have them, rather than an eco choice to save emergy, so now they cost ten times as much.
Derek, it's easy to berate the car makers and oil companies, but the buying public *wanted* cheap oil prices and they imposed the pressure to keep it that way. The obvious response to having inefficient engines was to have large fuel tanks, hence the rise of the SUV, etc. And in the US (remember) there was ovbiously not a problem with having larger vehicles, there being plenty of space for wider roads, etc. Such a solution isn't viable in nations such as the UK, we just don't have the space.
Consumers are just as much to blame for most ills of our time, if not more so. In the UK, if less than 1% of the private consumer debt owed to the banks had been paid back, not a single bank would have needed a state bailout. Ordinary people owe a staggering sum of money, mostly via credit cards. Students alone spend huge sums every year on stuff they do not need, such as booze. Such behaviour changed in the US after the 2008 crash, there was a move away from credit cards, but that didn't happen in the UK for various reasons, where per capita private debt is six times higher than in the US. Nobody *makes* people think they must buy the next best thing; to suggest that would be to say we have no agency, no potential for personal responsibility. The way consumers act is certainly going to be linked to general intelligence, and therein looms the bell curve, but at the end of the day the final choice is that of the individual. If you want to make a difference, then try and educate people to the potential for better or smarter choices, that's what I do.
Ian.
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