Wow, this is really skewed towards the 1%, even if you meant it the other way.
You do know that the global middle class yearly income is 1-3k a year, right? That's probably less than a typical American food budget.
It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world would desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's population.
It's also naive to think it's easier to redistribute wealth globally than it is to create technology. Redistribution only comes through bloodshed. At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.
> It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world would desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's population.
I see the old "[technological] man's burden" is as magnanimous as ever. ;)
Why is the rest of the world desperately poor? It's absurd to imagine that it's because the free enterprise West wants to help that 90%, but is held back by... anti-growth activists. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality colonialism (aka stealing from that 90%) never ended, it just got better PR and privatization.
> Redistribution only comes through bloodshed.
Agreed, and most of the wealth redistribution in the world today is upward (as 'the rich getting richer' implies). Since we're having the consequent bloodshed anyway, why not redistribute wealth in the other direction to maximize hedonic good?
Warren Buffett put it best: "There's class warfare all right, but it's my class — the rich class — that's making war, and we're winning."
> At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.
...implying[1] technology doesn't cause bloodshed. Talk about a skewed perspective!
Why was that gold suddenly economical to prospect/mine? Technology.
How were these people massacred so efficiently? Technology.
Why was there such an enormous power imbalance between these two populations? Technology.
"Technology" may look fine-and-dandy to the person behind the keyboard (especially for those who personify it by unconsciously imagining that 'technology' pays their salary), but never forget that all our technological artifacts were ripped out of the ground at some point, typically after using third-world government corruption to steal the land from its former inhabitants. We're merely rich enough that we can push that devastation "far, far away."
[1] or perhaps I'm misinterpreting, and you're just saying that technology brings hard work in addition to bloodshed?
My core argument is that using technology to help curb CO2 emissions is a way to solve the problem that is something we can do, and that ideological solutions - let's rework our society or kill half the population - aren't as easy. To say that we should turn from a growth-based economy to a sustainable economy is much more difficult to create a plan of action for than to create a technological solution.
Ideological solutions have their own stains on history as well, compared to technical solutions - Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all have something to say about that.
There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society. If you argued that society is an epidemic on society, that's a different story, but I would counter and say that there exist bad and good rich people, as well as bad and good technological outcomes, and bad and good ideological outcomes. To cherry pick the bad aspects is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
My core argument is that "endless growth = good" is an ideological problem, and it requires an ideological solution. Without changing the goal of the system, any tech solution will inevitable be used simply to enable more growth (see: Jevon's Paradox).
>There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society.
We do need to be realistic about technology, including its downsides. I'm countering the one-sided perspective of technology as bloodless hard work & ingenuity. Perhaps true for the colonizer, but not the colonized.
We need technological solutions to undo the damage we've done to the climate. Trees won't sequeseter CO₂ fast enough by themselves. We need ideological solutions, so that people don't cancel the gains of technological solutions with increased growth and waste. And then we need political/economic solutions like carbon tax to redirect money towards technological solutions, and minds towards ideological and lifestyle ones.
Really, we shouldn't be fighting over which kind of solution we need, because neither is sufficient in isolation. We need them all. Let's focus instead on fighting opposition to any and all effective solutions for saving people.
You do know that the global middle class yearly income is 1-3k a year, right? That's probably less than a typical American food budget.
It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world would desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's population.
It's also naive to think it's easier to redistribute wealth globally than it is to create technology. Redistribution only comes through bloodshed. At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.