E-Letter responses to:

editorial: Norman Myers Sustainable Consumption Science 2000; 287: 2419 [Summary]

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Published E-Letter responses:

Sustainability of Material Progress

John McCarthy   (31 March 2000)

Sustainability of Material Progress 31 March 2000
John McCarthy, professor of computer scienc Stanford University Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Sustainability of Material Progress	Norman Myers injects matters of cultural taste into a discussion of resources for the future. From his comments, Myers doesn't seem to like the "car culture." I predict that our descendants will maintain individual transportation, and that developing nations will continue to expand their use of it. Maybe the solution will be cars fuelled by hydrogen produced in breeder reactors, or maybe some other means will be adopted. The measures of economic well-being advocated by Myers are related to his arbitrary cultural tastes. They probably do not correspond to the economists' "revealed preference," measured by where people move between countries and within countries My Web site http://www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ presents evidence from a variety of sources that world material progress as has occurred in this century is continuable with only minor modifications. (I state that I have no conflicts of interest.)