Is Self-Sufficiency a Fantasy in the Modern World?

Oh, this is our first one where you where we've disagreed, you and I. So I answered, I disagree with that, you answered you agree with it. Modern self-sufficiency is more of an indulgence than a livable reality. Um I take my answer, I sort of uh said, okay, I'm imagining the assumption here is self-sufficiency implies sort of individual or maybe your family, kind of homesteading, you know, we're surviving off the land, back to the land. And uh that's an indulgence insofar as you could LARP that way if you have other uh means, and me too, yeah. I do like my chickens and all that. Uh it's a great thing to do in New Hampshire is LARP as a homesteader. Um you can actually do more than LARP, you can engage in small economies and things, it's really cool in New Hampshire. But self-sufficiency, I mean, this is a really self-sufficiency is a very interesting topic to me because what you really need to think about is what do we mean by self-sufficiency?

We mean, so in in biology, there's this idea of auto-poesis, and that means that uh auto-self poesis make, create, and it's the idea that living one of the characteristics of living organisms is that they continuously physically rebuild themselves constantly, right? You have like a network of components, and those components are doing things, and the things they're ultimately doing is rebuilding those components. So there's like a loop, there's like a causal loop. And so, what is self-sufficiency? It's sort of autopo-poesis at some other scale, at the family scale, at the town scale, at the state, nation, globe. And the question that I really have, and I don't have a clean answer to this question, is at what scope does self-sufficiency in the sense of this sort of social autopoesis become feasible?

And um and I think in principle, that could be a very like we can go live in the mud and we'll make it, you know, we'll do it. But uh so my sense is basically the global economy went too far in the non-local direction, and we could be doing a lot more as say a nation, more as a state and more as a nation to be self-sufficient in that sense. So is modern self-sufficiency an indulgence in the sense that maybe think people think, oh, I'm gonna be self-sufficient, you know, hoe the dirt and and and eat the turnips or something. Yeah, it's more of an indulgence in this world for sure. But the idea of pursuing self-sufficiency at smaller scopes than we do today, which is like where what is self-sufficient today? Is the globe self-sufficient? I I guess so. It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell if we're actually like reproducing ourselves in a uh stable trajectory, if we're kind of like off in some transient wandering into the wilderness, and it's not really clear where it's all headed.

Um, you know, if you come back to the same state you started in, you kind of have a fixed point. If you're going somewhere else, you don't really know where you're going. Um, so um I don't really know what the proposition means, if I'm honest, but I wanted to disagree so that I could uh kind of think think through that, or at least offer to think through that around uh what what is self-sufficient? Who? Over what scale, over what scope, how? And you know, obviously it's part of the MAGA movement, all that. There's a sense among people that wow, we offshored all of our physical manufacturing and production, and that was probably a mistake. Let's try to see what we can do to bring it back. Um there are um there are benefits to having economic loops, closing these loops more locally. And in certain ways of doing, you know, seeing like a state type stuff, you make your Excel sheet, you have your assumptions, you do your formulas.

Oh man, look how much we end up uh benefiting from outsourcing it all to China. Well, it turns out there were things not on the spreadsheet that are intangibles or at least intangible from that perspective that do matter. And uh so I'd like to bring self-sufficiency closer back to home. I am not living under the illusion that me and my wife are gonna like uh live off the land or something like that and have any decent quality of life, but it's not merely a self-indulgence to pursue self-sufficiency over tighter, more local scales, is what I would say. Um probably half the audience knows this, but just quick background on this topic. Uh I'm a homesteader, I've raised pigs, I've got a flock of sheep, chickens, uh vineyard berry patch, two orchards, etc., and I do all of the butchering and make my own bacon and we heat the house with wood, which I log on the uh property.

Um, and so uh I forget the exact phrasing of the question. Ah, there it is. Um, more than a livable reality, right? So um on the continuum of those, you know, trying to achieve it, I'm probably like in the 1%, you know, pretty hardcore out there. Um, and yet there's you know nothing close to actual self-sufficiency. Uh when some hydraulic lines blew out of my tractor, I went to Napa Auto Parts this morning, had them uh fabricate some you know custom hydraulic lines, which you know probably used steel mined in Australia and you know, flare fittings made in China and the rubber came from South America and on and on and on. Um so if if we take self-sufficiency as an absolute you know binary or a Boolean, um, I would argue that uh there is no such thing as self-sufficiency at any scale less than 300 million people, sort of bare minimum.

I I think that uh if we cut off a hundred percent of trade from the United States to the rest of the world, you know, first of all, our chip fabs are outside. So how far back would we fall in technology? The year 2000 to the year 1950, I think we could probably sustain a 1950 or a 1975 level of technology inside the US. And then if you went further and said, okay, uh that cutoff is permanent, so now we've really got to optimize, because of course there's going to be sort of transition uh, you know, transient effects, et cetera. And so if we spent the next hundred years sort of trying to onshore stuff, I think that perhaps in a population of 350 million, um, Jeremy tells me that the next prompt is the global division of labor. So uh I didn't even know this, but that's exactly where I was headed.

Um we were talking earlier about uh quality of life comes from a division of labor economy, and there is you know some factor, I don't know if it's the logarithm of the total population size or the square of the total population size. Um, but this plays into my thoughts about the future. I think that to continue to develop, you know, we need to colonize the solar system and we need a trillion human beings, um, and hopefully most of that trillion or all of that trillion have American Western enlightenment norms. That's my ideal utopian version uh vision of the future. Um so I I think that there is something to be said about being selective, not having off books accounting, where hey, look, if we offshore stuff to China, and I remember the 1990s, and suddenly tools got really cheap. I mean, people don't remember, like a wrench used to be an expensive item.

A hammer used to be expensive. Now these are effectively free at Harbor Freight, right? I mean, you can just buy a new wrench every week and throw it in the woods when you're done with it, and it's not gonna impact your quality of life. Um, so there is something to be said for that rather than I dropped a wrench, I've got to spend two hours walking back and forth in my field looking for it because wrenches are so expensive. So there are some benefits, but obviously the hollowing out of uh the American working class and blue collar and the rust belt.