
The Economics of Mad Max and Star Trek - fitzwatermellow
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-economics-of-mad-max-and-star-trek
======
lotu
>Imagine a machine that creates gourmet meals out of thin air. It is solar
powered, _cheap to use_ , can be manufactured for less than a plasma screen
TV. ... Every restaurant in the world goes out of business. Chefs, waitresses,
and dishwashers lose their jobs. The marginal cost of manufacturing goods
falls to nearly zero, but if the technology for such a machine remains
proprietary, then the replicator’s food is only as free as its designer
decides. Our Silicon Valley whizkid, free of competition, _charges as much for
the food we now make in our kitchens as we might’ve once paid in a five star
restaurant._

If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the
fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽

Furthermore why are we assuming that no other company on Earth will think the
food market might be profitable? Even if a design is propriety that doesn't
prevent independent invention.

~~~
mmariani
That bit also caught my eye, yet I think the point stills hold true given the
following constraints.

Even though this food synthesiser is incredibly cheap to produce it needs some
sort of source of molecules to produce its goods, think of it as a cartridge.

In the beginning to attain a sizeable market share the cartridge cost can be
amortised. Once the goal is achieved the company can sell it for whatever it
wants.

It's true that other companies could see an opportunity there, and develop
competing synthesisers. But, they could be easily driven out of the market by
legal costs when the original company uses its enormous corpus of meaningless
patents to sue them.

These constraints can be seen today at play with devastating results for
innovators and consumers.

~~~
mseebach
TFA's scary scenario assumes a number of things that just aren't, and
empirically won't be, true.

In no industry, ever, has an inventor with however many patents succeeded in
permanently keeping substitutions away for more than a very short period of
time. You mention cartridges with brings to mind famously uncompetitive coffee
and printer toner parallels.

Yet, there is a rich market for third party toner cartridges that the
incumbents has totally failed to shut down, and there's a rich market for
different brands of printers, which even in the face of uncompetitive
cartridges caps the price any one manufacturer can charge. Despite the
popularity of printers, HP is NOT a healthy company.

Pretty much the same thing is true for the capsule-coffee-market. There are a
ton of different kinds of cartridge/pad/pod/foo systems, and again, it's
trivial to find third-party capsules. On top of that, the capsule-coffee-
market is under pressure from the non-capsule coffee market: If you feel
ripped off by capsules, you have a good number of options to brew beans
direct.

The same thing will happen with the magic food machine - _people will just
cook regular meals_. Sure, the 5 star restaurant experience might be hurt ,
and that's a real shame, but it's not like a silicon valley whizkid can just
charge $INF because otherwise humanity starves.

------
tiatia
"The only people who believe in infinite growth in a finite world are madmen
and economists". Kenneth Boulding

I think the Max Max scenario is far more plausible.

"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"
[http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-
stat...](http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-
economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/)

Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized
[http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-
growt...](http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-
our-doorstep-but-not-recognized)

Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable
[http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-
energy-...](http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-
consumption-are-inseparable.html)

Galactic-Scale Energy [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-
scale-e...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-
energy/)

------
mseebach
The author doesn't even seem to agree with himself.

This line:

> "We have never yet failed to become richer; as a species, our lives have
> always gotten better. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but Greece
> today is more affluent than the Germany of 1974. Even the least among us own
> technology that would have been science fiction just a dozen years ago. Our
> ancestors would be amazed at the splendor of our lives, and by this I mean
> our grandparents, not cavemen."

is directly at odds with this:

> "What if the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one
> percent, as they largely have been for most of the past 30 years?"

If the benefits had been large monopolised by the 1%, Germany in 1974 would be
substantially the same (for the 99%, that is) as today, and there would be
little splendor for our grandparents to be amazed at.

Sure, some amount of wealth seems to have accumulated at the top, and that's
generally undesirable, but the fact that there has been huge leaps in quality
of life _for all_ is so blatantly obvious that the author, despite trying to
drive the opposite point, (accidentally?) uses it as a throwaway rhetorical
device.

------
tiatia
Quote from the article : "There is a third option. It is likely and it is
ugly.

Even a technological wonderland can create a pernicious society. Technological
progress can create dystopia even if ecological disaster is avoided. What if
the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one percent, as
they largely have been for most of the past 30 years? This is the world of
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a terrifying, but familiar world of gated
communities and genetic engineering, with generalized poverty for everyone
outside the corporate elite."

That is an interesting idea but not likely to happen in the long run, but
maybe during an intermediate state. Taking historic events as an indicator,
the "upper 1%" see little incentive to try to prevent a coming collapse. It is
not their children not getting jobs, only the children of the other 99% are
not getting jobs and not getting opportunities. So the disaster will grow
slowly through all ranks. The "top 1%" will fall last, but fall they will.

"Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources
in the collapse or sustainability of societies"
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615)

~~~
tiatia
From the article I quoted: "In scenario 5.3.2, with a larger depletion rate,
the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still
thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the
Elites. It is important to note that in both of these scenarios, the Elites –
due to their wealth – do not suffer the detrimental effects of the
environmental collapse untilmuch later than the Commoners. This buffer of
wealth allows Elites to continue “business as usual” despite the impending
catastrophe. It is likely that this is an important mechanism that would help
explain howhistorical collapseswere allowed to occur by eliteswho appear to be
oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman
and Mayan cases). This buffer effect is further reinforced by the long,
apparently sustainable trajectory prior to the beginning of the collapse.
While somemembers of societymight raise the alarm that the system is moving
towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to
society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making
these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory “so far” in
support of doing nothing.

------
Hermel
In a world as depicted in Mad Max, people would probably choose to live in the
mountains and near rivers, not in the middle of the desert.

~~~
lotu
Did you watch the latest movie? It is heavily implied that the rivers had all
dried up or were poisoned. The people lived near an under ground aquifer
controlled by the local warlord Immortal Joe.

~~~
Gys
I did not see the movie. But without rivers the mountains would still be a
better option then ground level land: cooler and rainy because of the height.

~~~
saiya-jin
well, movie (heck, all MM movies took place in Australia, which is anything
but mountainous land.

and it goes on - if rivers are poisoned, rain is some sort of hardcore acid
pouring down. you actually want to avoid that as much as possible. so no, even
for people that would be able to travel far, mountains might be a worse
choice. plus, they are so deep into apocalypse, that they don't know geography
beyond what they can reach by cars

~~~
eru
We have mountains in Australia, too.

------
laaph
I think this is a poorly written essay that has all sorts of interesting
things to say. I say that because I feel about half the comments here seem to
miss the point and are focusing on nitpicks.

I wish he had looked at the hamburger making machine that was being developed
rather than "a machine that makes gourmet meals". When talking of that concept
to friends and family, I realized for many people that caused them to think of
the plight of minimum wage workers, and I literally found out who of my
friends and family had Luddite reactions to that and argued they shouldn't be
built and shouldn't be legal if they were to be, just for the sake of
preserving jobs.

I also wish he spoke to the current state of music and/or video. We literally
are in the Star Trek universe with music and video. I can open my computer and
find enough music and movies that I couldn't watch or listen to them all in my
lifetime. We can imagine a button on our stove that you could press (or voice
activate) and it would duplicate an apple for you. Meanwhile we literally have
a machine that will duplicate music for you, at near zero cost, and we've had
many people do all sorts of things to restrict usage of them. The head of the
MPAA compared the video cassette recorder to the Boston Strangler in terms of
how much it would destroy society.

There have been many economists who have argued that people will find always
find new jobs. After all, there is always something more to do, or at least at
jobs I've worked at, although not always money or will to hire more people to
do more stuff.

It might be worth exploring the ideas if those economists are wrong and we do
end up in a world where you can have a computer make you a hot earl grey tea
from nothingness, but few people can afford it, when the hardware is
completely locked up under patent laws and the inventors insist on being
compensated for creating such an impressive thing.

------
erikb
It's so strange. First the article explains in Star Trek land most people
don't need to work and don't need to buy things because production is
essentially free. But in the end he argues that making production more and
more free people won't be able to afford to buy them. What about the not
buying part?

~~~
calibraxis
Because we have the wrong social structure. Humanity is sufficiently advanced
that our problems are basically solved problems. But our methods of
organization keep us from applying the solutions, except under heavy
constraints.

For example, we could have access to every book and video ever published. The
history of human thought. And creators could be compensated. But our systems
do not allow this.

Underneath it all is violence; attempt to act as if it weren’t the case.
Openly share books and movies you’ve experienced. An armed bureaucrat will
come after you.

~~~
pmontra
If/when production is free you don't even need to compensate the creators.
They can get whatever they want, like any other guy, and they'll create only
when they feel like it and not (say) once per year to pay bills and buy stuff.

However there are goods that are scarce by definition. Example: that house on
the beach you've been dreaming of. Even if you don't mind getting a different
one (maybe in a different place) there will be only a finite number of houses
on the beach all over the world. So, even in that kind of society we'll need
something similar to money to get access to scarce goods. Hopefully that will
be linked to the value or the social stand of a person. We almost always
measured that as price times the number of sold items but there are zillions
of other possible metrics, especially if the price is zero. It could be who
has the biggest free gun but that's undesirable, so probably some form of
police will be necessary.

~~~
norea-armozel
"If/when production is free you don't even need to compensate the creators.
They can get whatever they want, like any other guy, and they'll create only
when they feel like it and not (say) once per year to pay bills and buy
stuff."

If history is a guide, I'll say that the inventors themselves won't want to
share with you or I. They want to be compensated in some fashion for their
inventions. Be it money or power, they'll demand control of our use of their
creations. So, I can see how an inventor in our current social structure would
become like Immorten(sp?) Joe but without the nuclear wasteland.

~~~
pmontra
The real answer is we wait and see but my belief is that with prices falling
to zero the greedy kind of person is going to be at a disadvantage. Probably
there is a threshold. If there is need of very little money then enough good
content will be made available for free because authors will keep creating no
matter what and there will be little money to pay them anyway. Then the ones
who insist getting more than claps or a legion of followers (that's power)
will get less and less.

------
gonvaled
> What ecological pessimists forget is that so far scientists have always been
> able to stay ahead of resource scarcity. They have always found better, less
> toxic replacements for what we’ve lost.

Wrong. Very wrong. Humanity has been living over carrying capacity since the
beginning of time. We _always_ produce more offspring than what the
environment/society can sustain. It is only recently (last 50 years?) and in a
very limited area (first-world) that we are living below carrying capacity (of
that region). The world as a whole is very much living above carrying
capacity.

And no, it does not matter that we are "wasting food" in the first world. For
all intent and purposes, that food is not available to the rest of the world.

Until we are able to first feed and then procreate, keeping the demographic
curve well behind the food production curve, we are doomed. But that will
never happen: as soon as scarcity is not an issue, we tend to reproduce like
rabbits.

We are very much a virus.

~~~
treerock
This makes no sense. The evidence (we still survive and population keeps
growing) suggests that we a living well within the carrying capacity of the
earth. Technology, invention, social adaptation all help to increase that
carrying capacity, making more efficient use of available resources. That may
not continue indefinitely, but also population growth may not continue
indefinitely. We are not a virus.

~~~
facepalm
There have been occurences mass starvation throughout history, so human
ingenuity does not always find a way out. I think many Irish people live in
the US today because of one of those starvation events not that long ago.

Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" lists several civilizations that only went
down after hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.

Our current practices are in effect for less than 100 years, so we really have
no idea yet how it will all play out.

Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a
sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. So we don't
know how that will play out in the long run, either.

Meanwhile, as you know, world population has exploded. So if our current way
of producing food might turn out to be unsustainable, even more people could
die.

~~~
eru
> Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a
> sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. [...]

If we were ever to hurt for cheap energy really badly, we could just opt for
nuclear. At the moment politics prevents nuclear, but that's not an immutable
fact of physics.

~~~
gonvaled
The balancing act that we have to pull whenever free energy (in the form of
petrol) starts to show signs of depletion will have to be played not at the
pre-industrial 1000 million people level, but at the current 8000 million.
That is a very difficult act to pull - specially without the jackpot that
petrol has meant for humankind.

Can you make the transition to nuclear or to another energy source? Maybe, but
that's far from sure. We do not even know if nuclear (or any other energy
source) is a good enough substitute for petrol at the global level, not even
clear that it is an energy source (it has a much lower eroei than petrol,
maybe even negative if you account for disposal costs).

Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-
jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that
seems far-fetched. And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics
problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.

~~~
eru
Nuclear has ridiculously high eroei, if you ignore one-time capital costs to
build the reactor. The capital costs to build the reactor are high at the
moment, but they don't have to be. (Mostly political reasons.)

> Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-
> jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but
> that seems far-fetched.

We can invest (nuclear) energy to make artificial petroleum, if that turns out
to be the most energy-dense battery.

> And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning
> it has just been kicked down the road for another while.

You mean the problem that lots of rich countries are aging rapidly? Population
growth has pretty much ceased to be a problem.

------
eru
> The economics of Mad Max echo those that followed the fall of the Roman
> Empire. During the Dark Ages, precious resources became scarce, and men from
> regions devastated by famine swarmed more prosperous lands.

Citation required.

~~~
simonh
No it isn't. I can't stand citation culture. My wife does courses as part of
her Nursing practice and has to write papers full of citations in the modern
style. You can't even say it was a sunny day without referencing an official
weather report. The thing is, most of the references you see in books and
articles are to sources no more authoritative than the one citing them. If
you're dealing with research then yes, sources and standards of evidence are
important, but in many cases it creates an illusion of authority.

This is an article on the Internet, not a historical thesis. If you doubt
something it says, say so and say why you doubt it. If you think it's worth
challenging, it should be worth some time checking for yourself or at least
explaining why you doubt it. Just tossing two word over the fence is lazy and
provocative without making any actual contribution to the conversation.

~~~
austinjp
Sometimes I think it's worse even than that. As you say, providing a
supporting citation gives a gloss of authority and acceptance, whether in an
academic paper or on a chat forum. The reader should ideally appraise the
cited source and decide if they agree. I doubt this happens in even 1% of
cases.

Ideally I'd like to see citations that both support and disagree with the
point being made. Then I could take a more balanced overview and decide my
level of trust in the evidence.

However this would lead to a systematic review for every sentence
written/read.

To my mind this is a major problem in the peer-review scientific process, and
I don't know of a decent solution. This is where I'd like to see a really
potent AI: systematic reviews.

~~~
sgt101
Have a look at deepdive from Stanford.

[http://deepdive.stanford.edu/](http://deepdive.stanford.edu/)

------
saiya-jin
the guy has some interesting points (hard to say valid ones since we are all
just guessing how future will shape up), but constant mentioning of minimal
guaranteed income as cure-it-all-for-our-bright-future is a bit too much to
swallow (mentality of quite a few nations i know is, hand out anything, and
you remove the only motivation for them do do anything positive or even
neutral to society)

The last line of article says it all - Tom Streithorst has been a union
member... - in my own personal experience, unions are plague, nothing to be
proud of, but that's another topic altogether. This makes it automatically a
left-wing-orientated article, which is OK by principle, but not in sync with
my inner beliefs and all experiences in my whole life so far (and I've seen
the world a bit here & there)

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Unions are why we have the forty hour/five day work week.

Guaranteed income is probably the only sane way to move forward. Your
description of "mentality of nations" make very little sense, and doesn't
actually mesh with the many studies on what happens when you invest in people.

~~~
saiya-jin
I don't have problem with concept of minimal income, likewise i don't have so
many issues with theory of communism. It's this harsh reality we call life
when these utopias fail so spectacularly, because of... so many things. World
is fragmented, people have so vastly different mentalities and goals in life
(if at all), and I cannot imagine one realistic way to enforce this globally.
I am more interested into iterations striving for improvement of our lives,
rather than massively under-planned revolutions which might look appealing at
first glance.

And as for unions, another poster expressed it perfectly. The current
political reality of them is pure shame, nothing I would ever, anywhere put
into my signature as something to be proud of. So that tells you/me soemthign
about author.

Btw, why unions left for example doctors out of that 40-hour work week? Or you
think that having over-exhausted expert, who hadn't slept for a day or two,
decide on your best treatment for some acute life threatening state, when you
take your own medications, have your own allergies and set of other important
conditions to consider?

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Unions didn't "leave out" anyone. Doctors have a professional association,
which as you point out isn't quite sane in what it allows in terms of
overtime. But as a result becoming a doctor is a far more exclusive endeavor.

Doctors are also paid quite well, in large part because of that exclusivity.

Not trying to defend the worst of current union behavior, but even now unions
are useful; thinking particularly about teachers' unions, which fight to get
teachers decent pay. It doesn't work, unfortunately -- teachers are paid less
than babysitters -- but they'd be paid even less without unions.

That said, teacher tenure is too well protected by unions; a teacher who is no
longer trying should be able to be fired.

Not sure what a better alternative to union organization is. Probably workers
earning equity in companies they join, as much as possible. And I'm not
talking communism; there are companies today that practice this. But it could
be that unions are like democracy: A terrible way to run things, but all the
other options are worse.

~~~
dagw
_teachers are paid less than babysitters -- but they 'd be paid even less
without unions._

Maybe in the median, but certainly not in the right tail. Lots of schools and
their 'customers' are well aware of the value of great teachers, and freed
from the 'fear' of being stuck with a bad tenured teachers combined with the
competition to hire the best possible teachers will no doubt push their salary
up.

The real down side I see is that once the salary gap between the best and
worst teachers starts to widen, then the schools in poorer areas and with
lower budgets won't have a chance to afford employing good teachers and will
be stuck with the 'leftovers' to an even bigger degree than now.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Private schools that entirely lack unions (or protected tenure) actually have
significantly lower teacher salaries than public schools, so your theory is
incorrect. Add to that the fact that public schools in most states are
terribly underfunded, and teacher salaries are pathetic across the board.

 _Administrator_ salaries, on the other hand, are often _way_ too high. A law
(covering government-run public schools) that limited administrator salaries
to 120% of the median teacher salary at that school would likely to more to
raise teacher salaries than a union could, I think.

