Did you see that thing the other day where some people decided to make an entire music video in stop motion using Jelly Beans[1]? It took 30 persons 22 months. That is possible because "globalization combined with rapidly advancing technology" can drastically lower the amount of economic output each person needs to produce to sustain him or herself.
This also means that a person who is capable of filling an entire day with production of economic output has a drastically higher amount of wealth to spend on things not specifically "necessary" - such as feeding people making stop motion Jelly Beans films.
We all know that money is only an abstraction for real wealth (goods and services). I hardly think a jelly-bean video (though impressive) is an example of high economic output. The best case scenario you're describing is a world in which a small fraction of the populace creates actual wealth (food, plumbing, servers, etc), and everyone else rides their coat-tails by creating frivolities like fashion accessories and entertainment. (Come to think of it, we've been trending this way for decades.)
While I acknowledge how far capitalism has taken us in wealth creation, it has a blind spot: some forms of wealth are invisible, and either hard to measure, or hard to capture. Every person making a living with YouTube videos is a person who is not teaching in an inner-city school, or rehabilitating the homeless, or building a power grid in Somalia, or a thousand other useful things which don't dangle a direct profit motive (or enough of one to meet a threshold for action).
I'm as loathe as anyone to see a top-down "government" approach to these problems; setting aside the issues of corruption and perverse incentives, even the most well-meaning social programs tend to suffer from insane bloat with no metrics or feedback loops, and therefore mixed efficacy at best.
The only way I see to create this invisible wealth is to supplement markets with new bottom-up community-oriented economies, whether based on money, gift economy, reputation, or something entirely new. We have some precedent for these kinds of distributed institutions (Wikipedia, Linux, Anonymous), but when you compare these to the scale of Microsoft or the U.S. Army, you can see how far we have to go in giving people useful work that also lets them pay their bills.
(Side note: there is a case to be made that pure libertarianism would result in more wealth for everyone, meaning more people could afford voluntary charity and community spending. Bluntly, I don't have that much faith in human nature. At minimum, I could only see that working when coupled with the right sociocultural value system, which emphasized a balance between selfishness and community, rather than an adulation of greed.)
> actual wealth [vs.] frivolities like fashion accessories and entertainment.
I'd argue that's a fallacy. Show a pre-industrial revolution subsistence farmer a car factory, and he'd throw his arms up in horror over the frivolity. Imagine his reaction to seeing a airplane factory producing billion dollar vehicles that are meant to freight hundreds of so-called "workers" to spend a week out of their FOUR annual vacation weeks drinking and dancing in southern Spain (where? the furthest this farmer has ever travelled is the next county over where his sister lives).
> (Side note: there is a case to be made that pure libertarianism would result in more wealth for everyone, meaning more people could afford voluntary charity and community spending. Bluntly, I don't have that much faith in human nature. At minimum, I could only see that working when coupled with the right sociocultural value system, which emphasized a balance between selfishness and community, rather than an adulation of greed.)
Governments enforcing sociocultural values only works when those values exist. In the old east-block, governments were hard at work enforcing a set of values it's citizens didn't share. It didn't work. The UK doesn't have a constitution, but it was much better at protecting it's citizens than these east-block countries whose constitutions, on paper, were vastly superior.
If the people broadly didn't care about inner city schools or the homeless, nothing would be done for them, government or not.
Yes, I took some rhetorical liberty in that last point. But even so, the fact that they are volunteers matter less that you seem to suggest: their rent and groceries were still paid for. Wether that came from parents, other benefactors or part time work or savings (being their own benefactors), the fact that they were at liberty to do what they did is a product of the changes we're seeing.
"Spare time" is time that is left over when you've done the things you need to do. The existence of spare time is evidence that your productivity is higher than your consumption.
Did you see that thing the other day where some people decided to make an entire music video in stop motion using Jelly Beans[1]? It took 30 persons 22 months. That is possible because "globalization combined with rapidly advancing technology" can drastically lower the amount of economic output each person needs to produce to sustain him or herself.
This also means that a person who is capable of filling an entire day with production of economic output has a drastically higher amount of wealth to spend on things not specifically "necessary" - such as feeding people making stop motion Jelly Beans films.
1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193914