A Saturated Market

When I first hired on at the paper mill, they were in expansion mode. First I should explain that, although everybody called it the paper mill, our primary product was disposable diapers. The two paper machines made one of the component parts, and then the Converting Department combined that with some other materials to make Pampers disposable diapers. For awhile we couldn't make the things fast enough and they kept adding production capacity, which absorbed all the people that were rendered unnecessary by improvements in production technology. Then, in the mid 70s, some other companies got into the diaper business and the market became (ahem) saturated. It was all downhill from there, but it took until 1990 for them to pull the plug. Some valiant attempts were made to keep the plant going, but market forces eventually caught up with us.

Another thing that happened in the 70s was that the U.S. went off the gold standard. Wiki has a lot of information about that, so there is no point in me repeating it here. Richard Nixon got blamed for it but, to be fair, he was dealing with a mountain of debt that had been incurred during the Kennedy-Johnson years. My Bircher friends thought that it was the end of he world, but the world's still here. What we have now is called a "credit based economic system", which basically means that the only thing holding it together is people's faith in it and the fact that it's the only show in town. Last I heard, Iran was the only country still using the gold standard, and nobody wants to go there to do business.

I think that rich people already buy a lot of artisanal stuff, and I don't know how much room there is in the market for more of it, but it's something to think about.

Plants do indeed absorb carbon from the atmosphere, which is how it got into the ground in the first place. I am not familiar with that terra preta theory, but I'll look it up over the weekend.