All poverty is energy poverty

> require the government to guarantee rights to do what one wants to do, as long as it does not harm others. It also requires a government to enforce contracts and property rights.

That's far from sufficient for sustained economic growth. Most feudal societies had strong property rights - as long as you were on the good side of your king at least, and in times of peace. The population had strong individual autonomy and could even sell themselves into servitude, a right no modern state recognizes. But because all productive capital (land) was controlled by an extractive elite, and alternate forms of capital (human, technological) were undeveloped, such societies were not market economies in the modern sense and living in them was hell for most except select few.

Freedom to do and own anything means nothing when you own nothing.

> It requires equality under the law.

A fair justice system is one of those fundamental inclusive institutions I talk about. We have problems achieving that goal even in the most developed countries.

The discussion is undoubtedly framed developmentally, the author clearly compares affluence among contemporary societies and tries to propose economic and technological determinants for those outcomes.

In that limited frame, my assertion is that all poverty is determined by societal and institutional factors, and is also, by economic definition, a relative notion.

As for the economic development of isolated tribes, we can of course speculate about different historic and economic paths they could take. There is an interesting field of inquiry that proposes an alternative history where the Roman empire sees an industrial revolution in the 1st-3rd centuries. As interesting as those speculations are, they are of little help to someone living in a corrupt and dysfunctional state, unable to benefit from the fruits of an industrial revolution that long since happened. Saying to that person "you are poor because you don't have enough energy" is disingenuous, when the real cause is oppressive and extractive power structures that could easily be dismantled.

There are many secular intentional communities you can join, right now. I used to live on one; it was great!

But you can’t actually achieve what you call localism for the majority of the population without severely constraining the options for that majority.

And it’s exactly those constraints, which you seem to repeatedly ignore in this and other threads, that people are objecting to. It gives people actually working towards a satisfying localism a bad name, being associated with involuntary ideological constraints.

As it happens, I would be happy to argue against capitalism. I agree no one should argue against markets, but capitalism isn’t markets, it’s entrenched power assigned to those who have accumulated capital for themselves, often justified by “it’s just markets!” when in reality the laws are helping the big capital holders more than is required by just “markets”.

But I won’t argue for localism as a power structure. More local control, OK, maybe, but you seem to think that would lead to more local self reliance. I doubt it.

Mind: though I've strong sympathies with elements of TFA's argument, I also have problems with its absolute line that all poverty is energy poverty. It's possible to think of counterexamples extending in both directions --- those who are energy-rich and still impoverished, and those who have little access to energy but live relatively well-off, with basic needs and securities addressed. I've been holding off on a longer reply to TFA itself as I think through this, and have largely lost the useful comment window on this particular article.

In both cases, I'd argue that simplistic reductionism isn't accurate and is probably not especially useful.

I would agree, however, with the following statements:

- Energy is something of a master resource, in that given sufficient energy shortages of virtually any other input can be compensated for. That said, energy works through capital, material inputs, knowledge, and labour to produce goods and services.

- Much actual poverty observed today is far more a matter of inequitable distribution, and virtually all of that socially imposed.

- At societal levels (city, region, state, globally), there's a strong relationship between total net well-being and net energy access, though this probably shows strong threshold effects and rapidly diminishing returns after a point.

- There are alternative service modes which might address needs in low-energy regimes. To take the article's discussion of refrigeration and food spoilage: yes, refrigeration is one way to provide sufficient and high-nutrition foods to populations, but there are other options, including dried bulk grains and pulses, freeze-drying and canning (both require energy in food processing but don't have the hard requirements of a reliable cold-chain distribution and storage network), UHT (ultra-high temperature) milk pasturisation (which permits unrefrigerated storage for months), fermentation, and conventionally dried fruits and vegetables (more texture/nutrition loss than freeze-drying, but less energy intensive), as well as other preserving methods. Fresh produce might be locally sourced fresh where possible.

But as W. Brian Arthur has noted (he's both appeared and been quoted on the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast recently), at a certain scale, economic systems require something analogous to a heart as an active circulatory system to ensure that all people get access to resources and financial capital necessary for survival.