Ive often marveled at how political and economic experts try so hard to continue minor course corrections that just serve to ignore the major problems. There are two factors that are unarguably the most important factors in the future (and present) of global economics, which have widespread effects on our entire system to produce and acquire goods and services. Those two factors are automation and population.
These are simply facts that are not open for debate. Automation has made the number of people necessary to produce a certain product fewer and fewer. The continued growth of the population has made human labor a more abundant resource, which according to the law of supply and demand means that the value of human labor is going to continue to decrease. What this leaves us with is a bit of a conundrum: more is produced more efficiently with fewer people having the ability to gain access to it.
This means that the old adage of the harder you work, the more successful youll be cannot be true. There will always be someone who can do your work cheaper than you, and even if not there will eventually be an automated solution that you cannnot compete with. Sure, there are still plenty of fields that require imagination and creativity that cannot be automated or mass-produced, but in the realm of manufacturing and basic services there is no sustainability of our current system.
The falsehoods that the population has been plied with are almost disgraceful in this respect. We are consistently told that we are a service-based economy, or an economy of ideas. Thats fine and dandy for a population of a few thousand. But when you have a population of a few hundred million, or a globalized economy of ten billion, then it is sadly laughable to even suggest that even a noticeable fraction of those people will be able to make a living for themselves through their ideas. Simply put, in the meritocratic system there must be labor jobs that are able to provide the income necessary to meet the basic needs of the workforce, and be able to afford the products that they are working to produce. Thats where the system is broken down.
As I see no future in which the population dramatically decreases (aside from nuclear Armageddon or terrible natural disaster) and our technology is not going to become less capable or less efficient, there seems to be a collision course between our ideals of hard work = life success and the reality of we dont really need everyone to work hard. This is horrifying to most of us, because our innate sense of fairness is threatened. I have heard on more than one occasion that if someone isnt willing to work then they deserve to starve. But should that be the case if there is abundant food, no work to be done, and if working would even perhaps be counter-productive? I think not.
What is needed is a rational discussion regarding the possibilities to plan our future access to resources. We cannot afford to let our passions guide us in this, and we cannot continue to ignore these facts. Unfortunately, what I expect instead is a torrent of hyperbole, from calling any attempt to address these issues as communism or fascism (which Ive always been fascinated by the contradiction thereof).
These are simply facts that are not open for debate. Automation has made the number of people necessary to produce a certain product fewer and fewer. The continued growth of the population has made human labor a more abundant resource, which according to the law of supply and demand means that the value of human labor is going to continue to decrease. What this leaves us with is a bit of a conundrum: more is produced more efficiently with fewer people having the ability to gain access to it.
This means that the old adage of the harder you work, the more successful youll be cannot be true. There will always be someone who can do your work cheaper than you, and even if not there will eventually be an automated solution that you cannnot compete with. Sure, there are still plenty of fields that require imagination and creativity that cannot be automated or mass-produced, but in the realm of manufacturing and basic services there is no sustainability of our current system.
The falsehoods that the population has been plied with are almost disgraceful in this respect. We are consistently told that we are a service-based economy, or an economy of ideas. Thats fine and dandy for a population of a few thousand. But when you have a population of a few hundred million, or a globalized economy of ten billion, then it is sadly laughable to even suggest that even a noticeable fraction of those people will be able to make a living for themselves through their ideas. Simply put, in the meritocratic system there must be labor jobs that are able to provide the income necessary to meet the basic needs of the workforce, and be able to afford the products that they are working to produce. Thats where the system is broken down.
As I see no future in which the population dramatically decreases (aside from nuclear Armageddon or terrible natural disaster) and our technology is not going to become less capable or less efficient, there seems to be a collision course between our ideals of hard work = life success and the reality of we dont really need everyone to work hard. This is horrifying to most of us, because our innate sense of fairness is threatened. I have heard on more than one occasion that if someone isnt willing to work then they deserve to starve. But should that be the case if there is abundant food, no work to be done, and if working would even perhaps be counter-productive? I think not.
What is needed is a rational discussion regarding the possibilities to plan our future access to resources. We cannot afford to let our passions guide us in this, and we cannot continue to ignore these facts. Unfortunately, what I expect instead is a torrent of hyperbole, from calling any attempt to address these issues as communism or fascism (which Ive always been fascinated by the contradiction thereof).