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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 10 2020, @09:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the tiny-homes dept.

Downsizing the McMansion: Study gauges a sustainable size for future homes:

What might homes of the future look like if countries were really committed to meeting global calls for sustainability, such as the recommendations advanced by the Paris Agreement and the U.N.'s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development?

Much wider adoption of smart design features and renewable energy for low- to zero-carbon homes is one place to start -- the U.N. estimates households consume 29% of global energy and consequently contribute to 21% of resultant CO2 emissions, which will only rise as global population increases.

However, a new scholarly paper authored at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) assesses another big factor in the needed transformation of our living spaces toward sustainability -- the size of our homes.

The paper published in the journal Housing, Theory & Society makes the case for transitioning away from the large, single-family homes that typify suburban sprawl, offering new conceptions for what constitutes a more sustainable and sufficient average home size in high-income countries going forward.

The article surveys more than 75 years of housing history and provides estimates for the optimal spatial dimensions that would align with an "environmentally tenable and globally equitable amount of per-person living area" today. It also spotlights five emerging cases of housing innovation around the world that could serve as models for effectively adopting more space-efficient homes of the future.

"There is no question that if we are serious about embracing our expressed commitments to sustainability, we will in the future need to live more densely and wisely," said Maurie Cohen, the paper's author and professor at NJIT's Department of Humanities. "This will require a complete reversal in our understanding of what it means to enjoy a 'good life' and we will need to start with the centerpiece of the 'American Dream,' namely the location and scale of our homes.

"The notion of 'bigger is better' will need to be supplanted by the question of 'how much is enough?' Fortunately, we are beginning to see examples of this process unfolding in some countries around the world, including the United States."

Maurie J. Cohen. New Conceptions of Sufficient Home Size in High-Income Countries: Are We Approaching a Sustainable Consumption Transition? Housing, Theory and Society, 2020; 1 DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2020.1722218


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2020, @04:42PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2020, @04:42PM (#969157)

    Every Jack Ma needs millions of customers. It's mathematically and physically impossible for every single person in the bottom 50% to do the same thing. It's impossible for 1% of the population to do the same thing. Run the numbers: I start a business that makes 40 billion. If you can get 300,000 people to do that, that's 1.2 quadrillion dollars.

    But you don't need an extreme, Jack Ma example for the math to fail. In the US alone, 45 million workers make $15 an hour or less. Say you have some brilliant training program and turn 5 million of those people into doctors or robotics engineers. That's 5 million people with $200k salaries, right? Of course not, the job market doesn't need 5 million new doctors or 5 million robotics engineers.

    How about restaurants? Or cleaning services? Or training? Again, the market only has a certain amount of demand and a few thousand or maybe hundred thousand people can find niches and make a small fortune. A few people might find niches and make a huge fortune. But supply and demand means you'll never uplift half the population, or a third, or even ten percent that way.

    Last but not least, your rags-to-riches billionaire works hard and applies incredible intelligence, but he or she still does not deserve compensation at that level. I'm an average veteran software engineer making six figures. Say Jack Ma's incredible perseverance means he worked 10 times as hard as me, and say he's 5 times as smart. Neither of those is true, but even just accept them for the sake of argument. Then he should be getting 10x the work multiplied by 5 times the intelligence = 50 times my compensation. Instead, I would have to save my income from a thousand lifetimes to get the same wealth. I'm not lazy or stupid, either. That's beyond ridiculous. It's outright criminal. There are smart, hardworking people with less money than me and there are brilliant, desperately motivated entrepreneurs working for years that 'only' ever got millions of dollars. They would still have to work for centuries to reach his wealth.

    The existence of billionaires is a crime against humanity. They earned an insignificant fraction of their wealth, the rest is theft. Jeff Bezos could fire his 650k employees and replace them all tomorrow, but they only way he deserves his wealth is if he could ran Amazon as a one-person operation. He can't.

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  • (Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:27AM (1 child)

    by ChrisMaple (6964) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:27AM (#969433)

    Then he should be getting 10x the work multiplied by 5 times the intelligence = 50 times my compensation. Instead, I would have to save my income from a thousand lifetimes to get the same wealth. I'm not lazy or stupid, either. That's beyond ridiculous. It's outright criminal.

    Sez you. Your conclusion cannot be logically reached from your presumptions.
    You claim you're not lazy or stupid, but you're obviously envious, and envy corrodes minds.

    You completely fail to understand that the free market is inherently virtuous; in fact you completely fail to understand the free market.

    Yes, if everyone worked as well and as wisely as Jack Ma, the rewards would not be as high as Ma's for everyone (that's comparative advantage), but the total wealth and the wealth of every segment of society would be much higher. Compare wealth at all levels in a country like the US where people are free to use all their abilities, to central African countries like the Republic of the Congo or Zimbabwe where repression is general. Freedom encourages people to produce, and that benefits everybody, including (alas) thieves and supporters of thieving ideologies.

    • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 11 2020, @12:34PM

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @12:34PM (#969594) Journal

      > Freedom encourages people to produce, and that benefits everybody

      Except we are now in a situation where the freedom to persuade everyone to buy shit they don't need is encouraging everyone to OVER produce and OVER consume leading to environmental meltdown, bringing us full circle back to the point of TFA.

      So no, it doesn't always benefit everyone.