
Post Scarcity Economics - tosh
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/post-scarcity-economics/
======
everettForth
We are already post-scarcity for pornography. Cracked Magazine said it best:

"If I gave you a budget of zero dollars and said, 'Get me as much Internet
porn as you can for that amount of money,' how much porn would you come back
with?

I'm thinking the answer is, 'All of the porn.'"
[http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-
will-b...](http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-
ruled-by-b.s..html)

~~~
InclinedPlane
Yet you're missing the other half of the equation. The porn business still
makes a crapton of money. Maybe not as much as in its heighday (it's hard to
tell), and maybe not by the same sort of folks that were doing it a few
decades ago, but it's still a thriving and lucrative business.

~~~
Amadou
I knew a guy who paid for porn. The way he explained it boiled down to
curation.

Those youtube-for-porn sites are pretty random, and places like usenet and
bittorrent are even less organized, and require a bit of, er, delayed
gratification. By paying a site to exercise editorial control he got exactly
what he wanted with zero hassle or delay.

~~~
pornthrowaway
I run a few (very) small porn sites - throwaway account for obvious reasons,
though I'm a regular contributor on my main account. The sites I run are
single-girl sites owned and operated by a single model - I'm the technical and
business side.

People are still very willing to pay for original, quality content that would
not otherwise be produced. The value proposition is that you're not paying for
porn that _has_ been produced, you're paying for porn that has _yet to be_
produced by making it lucrative for the models, photo/videographers, editors,
technical folks on the back end, etc to stay in the market.

Without that sort of sponsorship, I couldn't stay in business, and the women
that own the sites I operate wouldn't be in it either - they'd be stripping or
working minimum wage retail - and there'd be less porn in the world, and some
people are still willing to pay for that.

The main thing is that it's about the interaction - people can chat directly
with the models, there are forums, requests are often fulfilled with no
additional hassle, that sort of thing.

~~~
sansheriff
You assume the reasons for your throwaway account are obvious, but they aren't
to me. Is it because you objectify and dehumanize women for money, or because
the content you serve is addictive and distorts people's views on
relationships? All of the above?

~~~
aaronem
I suspect it's mostly because any association with pornography is considered
to taint one's professional reputation outside that business, and at least
somewhat because mentioning, without shame, any personal involvement in
erotica or pornography -- be it tangential and innocuous as it may -- tends to
provoke Internet feminists into hurling overheated accusations of being the
next thing to a slave factor.

The former reason suffices quite well on its own, but the latter is not
entirely inconsiderable, much as one tends to choose among the sturdiest of
one's footwear when dressing for a visit to one's friend the chihuahua
breeder.

(The sheer, blinding gall of flinging vitriol at a declared and justified
sockpuppet, under the guise of an _un_ declared sockpuppet, I shall leave
uncommented save briefly noting the fact of it; while I know your ilk of old
and thus suspected your hypocrisy on the instant, readers lucky enough to lack
such experience probably wouldn't be so likely to spot it on their own.)

~~~
pornthrowaway
> tends to provoke Internet feminists into hurling overheated accusations of
> being the next thing to a slave factor.

If it ever actually became a problem, I'd point the women I work with at them.
One of them is a gender studies major and perfectly willing to systematically
dismantle "think of the poor defenseless women" arguments about the adult
industry.

~~~
Nimi
Sounds like she should write a blog post on the issue - it will probably be a
very interesting read (totally serious here).

------
jayfuerstenberg
It is difficult to convince people that an abundance economy can work.

But these very people don't understand that they are currently enjoying one
abundance right now: Free air.

The question is: How many things can we make as abundant as air?

OSS is there in fact. I would argue that electricity is next, then education
(Khan Academy and the like), and one day fresh clean water.

We just have to keep knocking down one scarce resource at a time. The same way
we don't take a single leap straight up the staircase, but instead take small
steps to get to the top.

~~~
ahomescu1
Is electricity really abundant, or about to be? I don't really see any options
for plentiful energy in the future. Most people have a very negative attitude
about nuclear plants, so those are a no-go. Solar/wind/hydro have relatively
low output, in addition to taking a lot of land/resources and requiring very
specific placement. Coal pollutes like crazy. In other countries, the
electrical network already can't handle peak load, so they get occasional
blackouts.

~~~
smokey42
Nothing grows as fast and crazy as Photovoltaics right now. It's doubling
roughly every 2 years (slightly less than 2 years). I don't know if we can
scale up coal/nuclear at the same rate, but I guess that's not even possible.

So when PV prices fall to the bottom (trends indicate they will), electricity
prices produced by PV will fall as well. Coal/Nuclear/etc will become
unviable. What do we do then? Electricity will be basically free then.

~~~
tomp
No. What is missing is batteries. Remember, photovoltaics only work part of
the day, and not every day. Same with wind.

In reality, what is happening is that because of "alternative" sources of
energy, electricity is plentiful during the day, and scarce during the
evening. Also, only turbines (hydro/thermo power plants) can be adjusted to
keep current and voltage in the network constant, so we still need them, but
because of the "green" sources, they are becoming less profitable for the
operators.

TL;DR: alternative energy sources cause us to have too much electricity during
the day and too little during the evening, both of which is costing us money.

~~~
mcv
At some point the turbines may have to be treated as part of the
infrastructure, rather than part of the production.

If you produce energy, you get paid for it, but also pay a levy depending on
how well your supply fits the demand. The levy goes to whoever fills in the
gaps.

~~~
tanzam75
Some deregulated markets are already paying for the turbines as
infrastructure.

For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This
essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at
idle. The cost of actually running the turbines is covered by a separate daily
auction for actual electricity production.

------
ChuckMcM
Reading the 'manna' link [1] was interesting in that it posited a way that a
group might transition from a scarity economy to a post scarcity economy
(Libertarian idealism aside).

One of the more interesting questions we will face is given the productivity
leverage, how do we get there rather than a big apartment of rich people and a
sea of slums.

[1]
[http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

~~~
Daniel_Newby
If the IQ-mutation load hypothesis[1] is true, the sea of slums problem will
be taken care of by trivial genetic engineering. Smart people with good
software are pretty good at entertaining themselves and making do with basic
resources.

[1] The hypothesis is that the baseline human genome encodes a master race,
but has been spoiled by a handful of mutations. Fix the mutations with
"simple" proofreading and out pops a race of handsome, athletic geniuses.

~~~
samatman
Hi! Genetic engineer here. Your idea of "trivial" is weird: we have no way to
replace chromosomes, or even edit them. All we know how to do is add things.

The idea is fascinating: although you're getting downvoted for saying "master
race", the notion that the vast majority of random mutations are "bad" while
the DNA we hold in common is "good" holds a lot of water. We have _no idea_
how to edit our own DNA, however. We simply can't do it yet.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Trivial in the sense that it would cost on the close order of $10 billion to
figure it out, and the rewards would be in the $100s of trillions.

Trivial also in the sense that the general path to proofreading DNA is
"obvious". Make a DNA segment that aligns upstream of the mutation. Glue a
dicing enzyme to one end. This breaks the chromosome upstream of the mutation.
Repeat for the downstream side, chopping out the mutation. Then incubate with
the correct sequence and DNA repair enzymes. Voila, the mutation is repaired.
This is nearly off the shelf. The not off the shelf part will be getting
methylation and histone packing to come out right, otherwise you get subtle
but appalling birth defects.

------
jaggederest
I think a basic income is a reasonable way of handling this sort of issue.
Getting people to accept it is another matter altogether.

~~~
vbuterin
IMO, the best political solution there is to maximally decouple it from
"government". Obviously this would be hard to do given the current
organization of society and technology since tax revenue is the only
sufficient source of money, and anything that relies on taxes is necessarily
influenced by politics, but there are examples; Georgist systems like Alaska's
oil dividend combined with endowment funds would be best, although we would
need to actually create these institutions somehow. In the medium term,
technological advances to make food, housing and medicine cheaper are probably
the best bet.

------
vorg
> From 1938 to 1945, war created that demand. From 1946 to 1981, prosperity,
> rising wages, and advertising created that demand. From 1982 to 2007, debt
> fuelled consumption financed by ever rising asset prices created that
> demand.

The next phase of US prosperity will be fueled by Asian immigration. They want
to spend their money on college fees and houses, cars and city apartments,
legal fees and taxes. They kept Australia, NZ, and Canada afloat for the last
20 yrs, but they prefer America. By 2050, half of all Americans might be
ethnic Asians.

~~~
tanzam75
Australia was not kept afloat by Asian immigration, but by digging up their
land and selling pieces of it to China. 30% of Australian exports are to
China. More than half of that is coal.

As for immigration, it is much easier to immigrate to the Commonwealth
countries than to the United States. They all have point systems for skilled
immigration.

It's possible to immigrate into the United States by making a $500,000
investment. But that policy really only captures the upper middle class
looking for a backup plan.

~~~
ido
I don't know what your definition of "upper middle class" is, but I am pretty
sure even in the top 10% of the economy in any given western/industrialized
country almost nobody has half a million $ laying around for investment (i.e.
that isn't tied up in the homes).

------
anovikov
My pet theory of today's economic problems (by 'todays' i mean approximately:
since mid-1970s) is different. I think the problem is that approximately by
that point, the pace of technological and therefore, economic and social
changes exceeded the limits of average people's adaptibility. In part that was
because of limits imposed by 'slow' institutions (like education), but mostly,
simply mental.

Therefore, GDP growth have slowed (because most people are underperforming or
doing wrong jobs as their view of the worls is lagging behind). Therefore,
there is a redistribution of income to the top 1% because to all previously
existing factors of success, a new a huge one added being the ability to adapt
to change quickly.

Bad thing about this is that it is a permanent condition and is only likely to
get worse. And, we don't want that to stop because there is little growth
factors except technology left out (all free and good soil is taken 100 years
ago, cheap labor is also gone, capital is abundant and cheap, too - we can't
make it any better). Even change in how we grow children is unlikely and
undesirable (imagine telling your child 'you don't need to be loyal or do a
good job, just look where the money goes and follow'). So, this is here to
stay.

~~~
svantana
Really? What kind of jobs do you think people are not adapting into? Twitter
hashtag analysts?

I would that argue that since the 70's, technology has mostly improved the
stuff at the top of Maslow's pyramid - entertainment, communication,
computation - while the stuff at the bottom (housing, food, clothing, energy)
has been fairly stagnant.

~~~
icebraining
_(...) Over the last several decades groceries have been one of the real
bargains in America, and the average rate of inflation on dozens of food items
tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently been less than
increases in the purchasing power of the average American family. As a result,
the percentage of income that families devote to their food purchases has
fallen sharply since the food inflation of the 1970s (...). Recent price
spikes have done little to reverse years of moderation in the cost of food._

 _The good news started for most consumers in the 1980s and has continued
since then. In the decade before, food prices rose at average annual clip of
8.4 percent, which was more than a full point above the overall inflation
rate. But in the 1980s, the rate of inflation on food items declined to 4.6
percent annually, nearly a point below general inflation. That downward
momentum continued in the 1990s, when food prices rose by a mere 2.8 percent
annually, a trend that has pretty much continued in the new century until the
last few months._

[http://www.manhattan-
institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=301...](http://www.manhattan-
institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=3016#.Uk6ge3jwDzo) (2008)

------
D_Alex
According to the article, massive spending on _something_ , even war, will be
beneficial to the economy.

Okay, Lets fund science.

------
contingencies
Capitalism's problem is this: it's totally goddamn imaginary. There _is_ no
worker, no consumer, no manager, no government. When you get down to reality,
we're all in this shit together - and that includes the non-human parts of the
ecosystem and non-renewable resources that we're systematically screwing over.
The profit motive has its place, but we've clearly demonstrated that it's not
a viable, holistic modus operandi for the world at large.

So where to next? _IMHO_ what we need is less people looking backwards to
theories but rather looking forward to systemic change that is more closely
based on reality. A system in which tropical fruit in December is either
produced locally, taxed in some way or otherwise socially frowned upon. A
system in which a dildo that's imported half way around the world for a
frigid, antisocial society of sterile worker-drones living in a fantasty of
fear and loathing becomes unnecessary.

How do we get there? I think significant change in financial systems is the
most realistic path. I think the way to achieve that is by systems that allow
the exchange of new asset types that can represent social or environmental
value, and also by allowing innovation in financial services (currently next
to impossible), and by governments eventually wising up to grant tax or other
types of incentives to parts of their community contributing to more educated,
peaceful, sustainable, locally-grounded, holistic ways of life.

Put it this way: big capital which controls much of politics says _no_.
Environment says _your days are numbered_. IMHO there's really no option but
to engineer a more holistic/realistic modification of the existing system
operating closer to reality - in which big capital can profit from
environmental and social concern. Pure capitalism - selling fresh air - is not
an option that will preserve biodiversity.

------
cottonseed
The Affluent Society by Galbraith is worth reading on this subject.

------
devx
Wired's Chris Anderson wrote a great book called "Free: The Future of a
Radical Price" and is relevant to this "post-scarcity" future.

He has a speech here and the book is on Amazon:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8l64NpaCnE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8l64NpaCnE)

------
kokey
I keep wondering if he's missing the point of why deficit spending and putting
money in the hands of the workers is also bad thing. When the consumers have
limited money, they will spend that limited amount of money more wisely, and
it will put the companies that rely on them buying things they don't need out
of business. It will drive wages up in the right industries and down in the
wrong industries. With deficit spending you will distort that information
which could lead to even bigger problems. That said, deficit spending will
always be more popular under democracies, because it provides a benefit to the
individual voter first, so it's the easier thing to argue for and taken up by
young people as they become political.

~~~
kmdev
Unfortunately, your assumption that less money to consumers translates to
wiser financial decisions is incorrect. It's well studied that quite the
opposite behavior occurs and for good reason; more stress and less access to
time saving goods and services. On top of the huge disadvantage that levies on
a person, the things that person DOES need start costing more. In the vast
majority of the states, having a car is a necessity to work. Loans cost more
if you can even get one so you end up spending what little is there on a
clunker and all the time and energy that goes in to that heap. Uh oh, now you
can get to your job, but if you're working anywhere near minimum wage and have
a family (that doesn't just include kids and spouses, but also elderly parents
(whose social security and medicare aren't enough), you won't have the
cashflow to keep everything going. So you end up with a payday loan and so on.
I think everyone has the picture by now.

You mention that the 'right' industries will shrink and the 'wrong' will
expand. Let's make that leap and follow it through, ignoring the pedantry of
arguing what's a 'right' and 'wrong' industry. I get the point you're trying
to make with that. There are two obvious paths. First, that as it stands now,
increased corporate profits has not translated to increasing wages or
employment. Regardless of whether the 'right' or 'wrong' industries expand,
that still translates to less money in the hands of those that have the most
need to spend it. The article does a much better job communicating the
consequences of that. On the second path, I'll ignore the previous and just
look at the overall growth consequences. If we assume that indeed only the
industries producing things consumers need expand that eliminates a ton of
research, development and source of unexpected discoveries (and jobs and wages
and... I digress). How many 'useless' web apps and services are out there that
also contribute to open source? Did consumers really need Google? Not at all,
but damn if we don't all enjoy many of the things Google has contributed to
our sector.

The following isn't in reply to you, Kokey, but I want to get it out there.

Of course government spending on things that don't contribute to real growth
are a terrible idea. Government spending on infrastructure, education and
healthcare, however, contribute more than the sum total of their costs. Most
like to use the NASA example to illustrate that point, but how about finally
investing in upgrading our power grid? A nationwide upgrade would put hundreds
of thousands to work including a huge number of engineers and other knowledge
jobs. Not to mention, we'd also be increasing our knowledge, expertise and
intellectual property as a nation in a sector vital to every country on the
globe during the process. What about using the next few billion we were going
to subsidize telcoms with to upgrade our internet infrastructure (I don't know
anyone who has been informed of the billions given to telcoms to upgrade
infrastructure that wasn't used for that at all, that wasn't furious about
it)? But what about healthcare? Surely that's just a money pit, right? A
healthy population is more productive. Simple as that.

I doubt anyone reading this can't see that these kinds of large government
spending projects and programs pay for themselves many times over in all sorts
of varying ways.

------
rdmcfee
It seems that we need to map and better understand the relationship between
innovation and demand. If our basic needs (food, housing etc) can be satisfied
for a fraction of what they used to cost due to innovation, where will the
excess demand come from? We're left with population growth as our only growth
factor.

If our basic needs as a society can be met by a small fraction of the working
force due to innovation then we're left trying to expand the definition of
what our "needs" are to create demand for the remainder of society.

As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have
technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago. It's the relationship
between innovation, needs and demand that I find most intriguing.

~~~
crdoconnor
>As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have
technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago.

Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare,
education and housing.

I'd happily ditch my smartphone if I could reverse the price increases on
those things.

~~~
rdmcfee
>Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare,
education and housing.

Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be
least disrupted by technology.

The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939
as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic
antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare
that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Healthcare costs may be drastically increased in the US (although just $60/mo
here in Canada) compared to what they used to be but the offering has changed
completely as well.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be
least disrupted by technology.

Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry isn't.
Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.

>The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939
as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic
antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare
that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Generic antibiotics may be a few cents a pill for a hospital but that's not
what you end up paying for it as a patient in the US, and to get the
prescription you have to see a doctor and the price of THAT has gone up, and
the doctor will also do tons of useless tests (which increases the price still
further).

~~~
vbuterin
> Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry
> isn't. Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.

Coursera is not disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. Github is
disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. There are plenty of businesses
today that have absolutely no concern for your education of you have
alternative proof that you can put out solid, high-quality results, and it's
the internet's high information density that's making that possible.

~~~
crdoconnor
Github has helped make programming a bit more meritocratic I guess, but it's
not like it's destroyed the relative value of a degree from Stanford or
Harvard.

And it's only made headway in computer science jobs.

------
InclinedPlane
Seeing gross misunderstandings of economics like this and the degree to which
these ideas are popular (as witnessed in the very comments right here,
including one implying that about 2/3 of the population of the world is
"useless") disheartens me more than almost anything.

No, Keynesian economics is not how America recovered from the depression, nor
was mobilization for wartime production (checkout the book "Keep From All
Thoughtful Men" for a truly in depth analysis of the US economy during that
period). No, abundance and worker productivity are not why unemployment is so
high and the world economy is on shaky ground. None of these things are
correct, and buying into these theories leads to erroneous decision making
that will serve to exacerbate the problems rather than make them better.

Much of the problems describe are due to government action, not economic
transformation. The labor laws that exist today are tightly coupled to a
particular model of employment and work which is no longer dominant in the
economy today, and the impedance mismatch causes a huge reduction in economic
efficiency as well as misery and limitation of opportunity for many workers.
Onerous regulation, as exists today in every aspect of economic activity,
heavily favors the consolidation of economic activity into large corporations.
And that disadvantages the individual worker in a variety of ways, as well as
limiting the innovation and responsiveness of the market, down to the scale of
the lone entrepreneur.

Add to that the deterioration of public education in America over the last
quarter century (to such a degree where even basic literacy cannot be presumed
of the holder of a high school diploma) forcing the escalation of
credentialism for many entry level knowledge worker jobs toward college
degrees. Meanwhile, the widespread availability of cheap, government backed
student loans combined with the disruption of public funding for many public
higher education institutions has led to a massive explosion in the cost of
higher education. At the same time "trade school" education has become
denigrated in society even though many of those jobs are high paying, well in
demand, and the necessary education is often quite affordable.

Add to that the bursting of a real estate bubble of unprecedented size in the
US and the follow-on worldwide financial crises. Much of it caused or
exacerbated by the same reasons as above, regulation and government backing
creating banking institutions that were "too big to fail", but not too big to
gamble to the tune of trillions of dollars. The worldwide economy still has
yet to fully recover from that disaster.

Add to that the profligate borrowing of the world's governments as if there
was no tomorrow. Except tomorrow has come, and governments that have been
collecting as much revenue as they possibly can and using it on social
programs that everybody likes are finding that they've created a system with
insufficient slack to deal with any disruption, even disruptions such as
paying the debt they owe before it blows up in their faces.

It's facile to blame the economic problems of today on technology. It makes it
seem as though these problems are some sort of inevitable consequence of
advancement when in reality they are the product of specific choices that are
now coming home to roost.

~~~
IsaacL
Thanks for your post. It's refreshing to hear more realistic opinions on this
situation.

I opened up the Hacker News homepage to see if anyone was discussing the US
debt crisis. (I'm not American, and I find HN a fairly good source of
commentary on US events). There's a non-negligible possibility that the world
is about to be plunged into another round of financial crises. I guess from
one point of view the current state of the world economy is just a temporary
downswing in our epic quest from the caves to the stars. But I'm becoming more
inclined to believe that industrial civilisation has already passed its apex,
and is now growing increasingly unstable as it attempts to continue infinite
growth on a finite world.

What's the no #2 article on HN? How our biggest problems are dealing with too
much abundance!

------
cliveowen
I don't know why the author keep talking about world economy while the only
examples he presents are U.S. only: mortgage crisis, debt fuelled spending,
etc. In Europe there wasn't nothing like that and yet Europeans have been hit
hardest by the recession.

~~~
rythie
We've got all that in the U.K.

~~~
cliveowen
Fine, U.S. and U.K., my point still sticks.

------
kennethh
This article basicly says that money printing is good and we should do more of
it. If one increase the amount of money with 10% then your money and your wage
has decreased by 10%. Those who get access to the new money first would be
able to buy things for the old price before everyone is aware of the increase
in money supply. In practice this is the big banks and their best customers
(hedge funds). I would rather say there is no problem with demand, it is just
the prices who are to high. Espesially with housing, gas and other fixed
costs. Lower the prices and the demand will increase.

~~~
kmdev
Not at all. While the author does end with a curve ball on the arts (which he
then admits in the commments), the point is valid. Spending on infrastructure,
education, reasearch, healthcare, exploration and the like contribute _much_
more than the sum total of their costs. NASA is a well known example of this.
DARPA as well.

What you're describing contributes to a vicious cycle. Lowering prices means
less revenue which translates to lay-offs, scaling back and cutting corners.
That means worse quality and less demand, which means lower prices again - so
on and so forth. Unfortunately, a simple supply and demand curve doesn't come
close to describing a functioning modern economy.

------
eschnou
This article, and some of the comments, seems to suggest that stimulating
demand is the solution. It fails however to address if continuously increasing
demand is realistic in a finite world.

Increasing demand and thus supply, requires increasing use of energy, land,
raw material, etc. Which is at some point limited by the physical realities of
our world.

There is a limit to growth. Have we reached it?

~~~
sillysaurus2
_There is a limit to growth. Have we reached it?_

Depends. Growth of what?

There are aspects of life I see as having unlimited growth. Evolution has a
way of crashing through barriers and trampling anything that stands in its
way. If humans somehow exhaust a resource, we'll evolve a new one, as we
always have. Perhaps painfully, but it'll happen.

------
captainmuon
"I said it before, and I'll say it again, Capitalism just doesn't work!"

------
guard-of-terra
Nitpick:

 _Send us back to ancient Greece... and startled peasants would worship at our
feet._

Ancient Greece was not so much about peasants as about citizens. People with
some capital and some position in their world. They aren't going to worship
you, they would try to figure you out.

------
waps
The fundamental misunderstanding here is that a nearly steady-state economy is
not a situation like the 1970's. It's a situation where 90% of the population
is unemployed and unnecessary. Our expectations for a steady-state economy
should be adjusted to mean the situation that existed from the fall of the
Western Roman Empire to 1850 or so.

Vast majority of people on unemployment, barely subsisting. People who have
viable businesses dig in and isolate themselves (if necessary declaring
independence). Ever-growing consolidation of power and every institution
falling to the influence of ever fewer power centers.

Fortunately, a mere 10 years of steady state economy won't get us to that
point. Today we're already at the point that something like 60-70% of the
world's population is useless (if you killed all of them tonight, tomorrow
there would be no visible difference at all). That number is increasing fast.

The cure ? Remove the scarcity of electricity might do it. Find something to
do (the way some medieval economies solved it was to employ 70% or so of the
population for building cathedrals - manually. Every last thing manually cut
from stone. That could work). War is another option, used in the middle east
did (well, one particular group, really). As long as they keep winning, their
borders expand, their economy grows, and it can last quite a while in that
state.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Ultimately you have to choose between a scarcity economy and systematic birth
control. No possible technological advance can keep up with an exponential
growth curve. And the birth control system has to have active eugenic
measures, otherwise a genetic collapse can sweep through the population. (The
AI servants do not care whether they look after 10 billion genius athletes or
10 billion brainstems in automated nursing homes.)

~~~
gizzlon
The growth rate is declining:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate)

~~~
andygates
Came to say this. There's every indication that as humans get healthier, more
educated, wealthier and live longer (more post-scarcity, in other words) they
switch from "breed more backups" to "nurture one or two offspring", and
steady-state popultion comes out of that.

The sectors of wealthy economies which _are_ still breeding fast are generally
the poor (scarcity again) or people from social groups that were used to
breeding lots, who are slowly getting the memo.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Prosperity does cause humans to move towards relatively fewer offspring, but
only relatively. If the birth rate exceeds the replacement rate by even a tiny
fraction _in any demographic_ , the result is exponential growth. And there
are prosperous, well-educated demographics with ultra-high birth rates, such
as Mormons.

~~~
notahacker
That assumes the birth rates of other demographics don't fall sufficiently
behind the replacement rate to compensate in the short term, and that
demographics' birth rates are immutable in the long term. Will the _offspring_
of Mormons maintain their parents' birth rates? Well they're already
falling...

------
cmccabe
Some of this is questionable. For example, he claims that "by the 1980s...
saving became passe" but that doesn't make sense. If anything, saving was
useless in the 1970s and earlier, when inflation was out of control at more
than 15%. It's kind of weird to be in favor of soft money and deficit
spending, as he clearly is, and then get upset about mounting debt.

There are a lot of reasons why a London home that was 300,00k in the 1970s is
now worth three times that. More people are living in London now than then,
and due to London's "green belt" policies and height and zoning restrictions,
there just hasn't been a great supply of new houses.

Tom doesn't even mention things like the oil shock, the impact of technology
and automation, or demographics. It's kind of hard to get a reasonable picture
of the economy without considering these things!

I agree with the basic point that we should have more Keynesian spending, but
the history felt like a distraction. Calling the 70s a "golden age" is just...
what is this, I don't even. Yeah, with the Vietnam war, OPEC, Silent Spring,
and the threat of nuclear war, it was a real picnic...

~~~
ido

        Houses on my block in the United Kingdom that cost £3000
        in 1970 are now going for over £1.5 million.
    

was this a typo? Because that's a 500-fold increase, and I can't imagine
inflation in the UK was _that_ bad since the 70s?

