stocking up food

[Roberto Verzola <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org>]

The suggestion to stock up food and other necessities highlights the
importance of fine-tuning rules of behavior for confronting the
Millennium Bomb crisis as well as for post-2000 societies. Poorly
thought out rules may contain flaws which will lead to problems later.

I have earlier suggested that risk-minimization be given greater
importance than gain-maximization, both in meeting the crisis and in a
post-2000 ruleset.

Stocking up food is obviously a risk-minimizing strategy. Preparing to
GROW your own food is probably an even better risk-minimizing
strategy, though it may not make much sense from an efficiency (ie,
gain-maximizing) viewpoint.

Here's an interesting observation: stocking up food, while a valid
risk-minimizing strategy, will definitely not work for society as a
whole if every individual member stocked up a three-month's supply.
There's not enough to go around, and those who overstocked may even
see some of their stocks rotting in storage, while others who couldn't
afford to stock up go hungry. Such a well-stocked family will
obviously face another type of risk, if it finds itself amidst
families who are going hungry.

Clearly, a risk-minimizing strategy such as stocking up food is better
undertaken NOT individually but collectively, among individuals who
obligate themselves to be responsible for each other. That it pushes a
community towards cooperation instead of competition is a nice
confirmation that the risk-minimizing strategy is a move in the right
direction.

It doesn't make sense either that every family will likewise stock up
a generating set, with enough fuel for several months. It makes more
sense for a cluster of families to share a few gensets among them, or
even for a community to collectively own the gensets. Then the risks
of a breakdown are distributed and minimized. Again, it is interesting
that a risk-minimizing strategy recalls the importance of collective
ownership, in contrast to the present race to privatize collectively
owned assets.

Through such detailed analysis and fine-tuning, this list should be
able to help communities which are today already reorganizing
themselves to confront the Millennium Bomb. We can expect that their
community rulesets, if well thought-out and finely-tuned, will
continue to guide them way beyond the year 2000.

Roberto