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Citations needed. I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity of resources in the last few years. Additionally... to say that nearly every industry can abs

Citations needed. I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity of resources in the last few years. Additionally... to say that nearly every industry can absorb almost infinite demand for their products is absurd. Near infinite claims need near infinite evidence. Can we produce near infinite food? Can we produce near infinite precious metals? There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
You, as a human being, can only consume so much water. So much energy. So much food. Its already within our means to feed everyone (green revolution), shelter [1] everyone, and energy? Please! Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year (you will never see the price of power go up again [2] [3], renewables are simply too cheap now, and will continue to be deployed at a rate somewhere between linear and exponential, pushing out generation sources that have a consumable fuel with marginal cost). Surely we'll need to drive down the cost of healthcare and housing [4]; that'll be tough and expensive to solve. But everything else? Its all clean energy, automated manufacturing, and bits across a wire. We must choose to provide for everyone not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The economy does not need to grow further; growth is not the problem, distribution is ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation [3] http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/bernstein-solar-coal-lng.png http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/... (TL;DR Cost of energy from solar is dropping faster than Battlestar Galactica through a planet's atmosphere [3a]) [3a] https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s [4] https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg
- intended 10y ago
  > The economy does not need to grow further This is pretty much false, because on the one end we have people in poverty who will hopefully move out of it, which will cause growth. On the other end, most people on this forum are involved in finding new ways to unlock "value" and thus create new wealth. The economy is not a pure zero sum game.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >This is pretty much false, because on the one end we have people in poverty who will hopefully move out of it, which will cause growth. They can move out of poverty by society distributing wealth more equally, which is not dependent on growth. Especially when people have 100000 the net worth of other people.
  - crimsonalucard 10y ago
    >The economy is not a pure zero sum game. Why do people keep saying this? This is a huge misconception. The economy IS zero sum. Energy and physical resources are limited. When one person uses a limited resource, than another person will be unable to use that same resource. This is a Zero Sum. I've heard people say that seemingly "unlimited" products like an idea, a painting or an abstract idea can be created out of thin air and because of this the economy is not zero sum. Well guess what? Have you ever heard of an economy that can exist while thriving only on abstract ideas and pieces of art? No. All economies thrive on energy and physical resources while abstraction only sits on top of these things as a luxury. AKA: A farmer can feed himself with his own crops, but an artist cannot survive without trading his painting with a farmer for food. Another cop out people use is that although the sun is technically a limited resource (it will burn out one day), it is seemingly unlimited because it outputs more energy then humanity will ever need or comprehend. This argument is flawed too. We are limited by the amount of energy we can extract from the sun. There will always be a limit to the amount of energy we extract from the sun due to fundamental limits in technology and physics. It gets worse than this, because technically speaking you are correct.. the economy is not zero sum, it's actually a negative sum. When you add up the numbers there will always be a net loss for all economic actors. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that even if an economic agent doesn't extract or use a resource, the resource on it's own will eventually, slowly degrade into an unusable state.
- jganetsk 10y ago
  So, in other words... you agree with me. We cannot absorb "near infinite" demand. Rather, it's the opposite: demand might even have a finite upper bound! But this is neither true, nor does it need to be. Economics is all about marginal curves. And I think what we are finding is that demand does increase, but that we can adapt to increased demand for most goods and services without increased demand on labor. So, inflation is not a threat, because wages don't go up. But it means ever-increasing return on capital... which is precisely what we've been seeing for decades.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Maybe we agree? I think for all intents and purposes, "infinite" does not mean "need additional pylons for remaining segments of Dyson sphere in order to power interplanetary colonial fleet Mark I via laser tether". Maybe we call it "per capita demand maximum"? But labor isn't alone in not being necessary to satiate additional demand; note the trillions of dollars in capital struggling to find "acceptable" returns. Investors are even willing to invest in negative return bonds in parts of the first world to protect cash holdings of portfolios. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/14/news/tax-us-companies-offshore-cash/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/14/news/tax-us-companies-offsho... "Top 50 U.S. companies hold $1.4 trillion in cash offshore" Assume these companies brought that cash back to the US. What would they do with it? Where is there to grow?
    - jganetsk 10y ago
      Yes, there's a massive savings glut. But a big part of that is due to central banks. If they tightened up monetary policy, interest rates go up, and investors would start getting better returns. But central banks are afraid to raise interest rates because they worry about the possibility of deflation. If companies repatriated their cash, the main thing they would do with it is pay a hefty tax bill to Uncle Sam. This would be a good thing to do when the central banks do increase interest rates.
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Interesting comment. I had not considered central bank monetary policy was holding back corporate profit repatriation, which would realize significant revenues for the federal government, which could be spent on infrastructure.
- barrkel 10y ago
  There's some evidence that democracy is unsustainable without economic growth. Most measures of economic activity like GDP are measures of the total movement of resources, where such movements are monetized. That is, increasing growth means increasing distribution. (There's no guarantee that the distribution is better, of course.)
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >There's some evidence that democracy is unsustainable without economic growth. Democracy is how a society chooses to govern itself. Above a certain point (e.g. when food is so scarce people kill each over for it) it's not about how much money or resources it has. There have been in ethnography tribes with democratic self-governance that had 1/1000 the resources we have, and no "growth" year over year.
- davidjnelson 10y ago
  Love that Gibson quote. Have you come across research or pilots that have made progress on the distribution problem? Without being an expert, it appears to be caused by greed.
pastProlog 10y ago
> I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity in the last few years. I do. There have always been economies of scale, but the first shipment of Call of Duty costs tens of millions of dollars. Shipments #2 to #1000000 over the wire cost next to nothing. A movie like The Avengers exhibits the same behavior. Sixty years ago, a new car rolling off an assembly line of a Detroit factory was the epitome of the world economy, technology and engineering. Which was not all that different from the process of a weave rolling off a flying shuttle in 1740. This is a new thing, where piece #1 of a piece of IP is very costly, but the next few million pieces are cheap to produce. To have a focus on the old thing of a scarcity of materials as this goes on seems to be missing the boat on what is happening. Not that I put much creedence in the scarcity focus before, but it has just become completely ridiculous.
- internaut 10y ago
  This is something I've been interested in, the idea of having a marginal cost lifestyle. The main problem with it for physical items is that there is always a large upfront lump sum cost. A small hydroelectric system produces energy for practically free but costs a lot to build. It will last until your grandchildren are old though, it is a true investment.
- Retric 10y ago
  The first car for a given model year might cost a billion dollars the second might cost 10k. So, it's more the gap has been growing than it's suddenly a new thing.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
Of course we can't produce infinite anything. We can't even make infinite copies of a piece of software. So instead of "infinite" or "near infinite", let's say "at least two orders of magnitude". Can we produce 100x as much precious metals? Yes.[1] Can we produce 100x as much energy? Yes.[2] Can we produce 100x as much food? Yes.[3] Can we produce 100x as much living space? Yes. 1: Exercise: think of an elemental metal we're short of. Look it up in Wikipedia, look at what % of the Earth's crust consists of that resource, and compare that to current usage. 2: With enough money, we could do this with nuclear power today. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do this with solar, again given enough money. 3: Greenhouses. Precious metals, food, energy and prime living space are very scarce in economic terms. It would cost very real and very significant amounts money to produce more. But given enough money, we could produce a lot more of them. If the world economy grew 100x too, could we increase these scarce resources 100-fold? I assert yes.
- misja111 10y ago
  > 1: Exercise: think of an elemental metal we're short of. Look it up in Wikipedia, look at what % of the Earth's crust consists of that resource, and compare that to current usage. Just because it is somewhere in the Earth's crust, it doesn't mean that we are able to harvest it. > 2: With enough money, we could do this with nuclear power today. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do this with solar, again given enough money. You are talking about producing 100X as much energy as we do today. Nuclear power is already used in many countries. Scaling up our energy production with a factor 100 just by replacing traditional power plants with nuclear will never reach that factor. And solar power is not even able to fulfill our current energy need, there is just not enough free surface on the earth for all those solar panels. > 3: Greenhouses. The claim that the use of greenhouses could scale up our global food production with a factor 100 is absurd.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    > Just because it is somewhere in the Earth's crust, it doesn't mean that we are able to harvest it. That's basically what we already do for copper. A copper "mine" takes something that isn't much different from random rocks, and separates out the copper. Copper ores that have a high percentage of copper have been gone for a while now. Copper used to be so cheap they used it for pennies, now it's so expensive that people break into houses to steal the wire. But we haven't run out. >Scaling up our energy production with a factor 100 just by replacing traditional power plants with nuclear will never reach that factor. Well obviously we'd need to build new plants. What's the limiting factor preventing us from creating 100x as many nuclear plants, provided sufficient money to build them? > The claim that the use of greenhouses could scale up our global food production with a factor 100 is absurd. Why? Greenhouses produce far more than 100x the calories/acre than wheat or corn land. It's far less absurd than urban vertical farming which uses artificial light instead of sunlight, yet there are several startups that think vertical farming is viable and have received tons of investment.
Retric 10y ago
20,000 calories per day is not better than 10,000 calories per day. Thus, food has reached a point where enough no longer the problem, and if we made twice as much we probably would burn it not eat it. As to stuff, it's content which tends to be the real limitation not the TV. And content can be unlimited we simply impose artificial limitations.
- cheshire_cat 10y ago
  We are already throwing massive amounts of food away. "Getting food from the farm to our fork eats up 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80 percent of all freshwater consumed in the United States. Yet, 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. This not only means that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also that the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions." [1] [1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
  - esrauch 10y ago
    There are some advantages to being over provisioned though: it is more resilient to disruption and downturns for one.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
neffy 10y ago
Think about a book with information in it on, oh I don't know, basic first aid principles. 1000 Years ago it wasn't available. 200 years ago, it was available only to those who could afford to go to university, and had reached a very socially expensive and scarce educational level. Now you can download it for nothing. With pictures. Ditto music, film, etc. The financial apparatus that you're referring to can solve more or less for the scarcity case, but it cannot solve (i.e. find prices for) the abundance case. The liquidity issues are a sideshow to what will be the main event.
- internaut 10y ago
  > The financial apparatus that you're referring to can solve more or less for the scarcity case, but it cannot solve (i.e. find prices for) the abundance case. Prices should be declining if supply are increasing. If you're right, which you're not, then prices should be decreasing very quickly. Food and energy bills for the average person in my country and others I've been to are steadily increasing. USA 2011 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-increase-most-in-36-years/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-increase-most-in-36-... USA 2014 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-soar-as-incomes-stand-still/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-soar-as-incomes-stan... World graph http://www.worldwatch.org/global-food-prices-continue-rise-0 http://www.worldwatch.org/global-food-prices-continue-rise-0 EX-computation, tell me something good. We can't eat silicon wafers. The cost of energy alone is exponentially higher than it was in the early 70s. We're not living in an enchanted forest, formerly progressive trends are going into reverse on most counts outside of computers.
  - someguydave 10y ago
    I'm not sure that computation is much of an exception. Yes, we have more transistors on chips, but can we actually make them do more useful things? It's not always clear cut. Also it seems like many employed in software are mostly reinventing older ideas poorly.
    - internaut 10y ago
      Didn't see your post there, sorry. I agree, but I try to lead with my strongest case that can't be denied objectively. The concern about implementing 'actual useful shit' e.g. not flinging birds at pigs, is very much at the forefront of my mind but it's a harder case to argue even if it would be more meaningful, esp. to the uninitiated.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market. Financial metrics can grow without substantially increasing demand for labor. Most of the nonfinancial economy, however, is stuck in recession or stagnation. The tech sector only differs in being fueled by the flood of capital into VCs. After the Second Great Depression was narrowly headed off by TARP, we're still stuck waiting for the Second New Deal and Second Post-War Reconstruction.

toomuchtodo 10y ago

You, as a human being, can only consume so much water. So much energy. So much food. Its already within our means to feed everyone (green revolution), shelter [1] everyone, and energy? Please! Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year (you will never see the price of power go up again [2] [3], renewables are simply too cheap now, and will continue to be deployed at a rate somewhere between linear and exponential, pushing out generation sources that have a consumable fuel with marginal cost). Surely we'll need to drive down the cost of healthcare and housing [4]; that'll be tough and expensive to solve. But everything else? Its all clean energy, automated manufacturing, and bits across a wire. We must choose to provide for everyone not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The economy does not need to grow further; growth is not the problem, distribution is ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation [3] http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/bernstein-solar-coal-lng.png http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/... (TL;DR Cost of energy from solar is dropping faster than Battlestar Galactica through a planet's atmosphere [3a]) [3a] https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s [4] https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg

intended 10y ago
> The economy does not need to grow further This is pretty much false, because on the one end we have people in poverty who will hopefully move out of it, which will cause growth. On the other end, most people on this forum are involved in finding new ways to unlock "value" and thus create new wealth. The economy is not a pure zero sum game.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >This is pretty much false, because on the one end we have people in poverty who will hopefully move out of it, which will cause growth. They can move out of poverty by society distributing wealth more equally, which is not dependent on growth. Especially when people have 100000 the net worth of other people.
- crimsonalucard 10y ago
  >The economy is not a pure zero sum game. Why do people keep saying this? This is a huge misconception. The economy IS zero sum. Energy and physical resources are limited. When one person uses a limited resource, than another person will be unable to use that same resource. This is a Zero Sum. I've heard people say that seemingly "unlimited" products like an idea, a painting or an abstract idea can be created out of thin air and because of this the economy is not zero sum. Well guess what? Have you ever heard of an economy that can exist while thriving only on abstract ideas and pieces of art? No. All economies thrive on energy and physical resources while abstraction only sits on top of these things as a luxury. AKA: A farmer can feed himself with his own crops, but an artist cannot survive without trading his painting with a farmer for food. Another cop out people use is that although the sun is technically a limited resource (it will burn out one day), it is seemingly unlimited because it outputs more energy then humanity will ever need or comprehend. This argument is flawed too. We are limited by the amount of energy we can extract from the sun. There will always be a limit to the amount of energy we extract from the sun due to fundamental limits in technology and physics. It gets worse than this, because technically speaking you are correct.. the economy is not zero sum, it's actually a negative sum. When you add up the numbers there will always be a net loss for all economic actors. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that even if an economic agent doesn't extract or use a resource, the resource on it's own will eventually, slowly degrade into an unusable state.
jganetsk 10y ago
So, in other words... you agree with me. We cannot absorb "near infinite" demand. Rather, it's the opposite: demand might even have a finite upper bound! But this is neither true, nor does it need to be. Economics is all about marginal curves. And I think what we are finding is that demand does increase, but that we can adapt to increased demand for most goods and services without increased demand on labor. So, inflation is not a threat, because wages don't go up. But it means ever-increasing return on capital... which is precisely what we've been seeing for decades.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Maybe we agree? I think for all intents and purposes, "infinite" does not mean "need additional pylons for remaining segments of Dyson sphere in order to power interplanetary colonial fleet Mark I via laser tether". Maybe we call it "per capita demand maximum"? But labor isn't alone in not being necessary to satiate additional demand; note the trillions of dollars in capital struggling to find "acceptable" returns. Investors are even willing to invest in negative return bonds in parts of the first world to protect cash holdings of portfolios. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/14/news/tax-us-companies-offshore-cash/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/14/news/tax-us-companies-offsho... "Top 50 U.S. companies hold $1.4 trillion in cash offshore" Assume these companies brought that cash back to the US. What would they do with it? Where is there to grow?
  - jganetsk 10y ago
    Yes, there's a massive savings glut. But a big part of that is due to central banks. If they tightened up monetary policy, interest rates go up, and investors would start getting better returns. But central banks are afraid to raise interest rates because they worry about the possibility of deflation. If companies repatriated their cash, the main thing they would do with it is pay a hefty tax bill to Uncle Sam. This would be a good thing to do when the central banks do increase interest rates.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Interesting comment. I had not considered central bank monetary policy was holding back corporate profit repatriation, which would realize significant revenues for the federal government, which could be spent on infrastructure.
barrkel 10y ago
There's some evidence that democracy is unsustainable without economic growth. Most measures of economic activity like GDP are measures of the total movement of resources, where such movements are monetized. That is, increasing growth means increasing distribution. (There's no guarantee that the distribution is better, of course.)
- coldtea 10y ago
  >There's some evidence that democracy is unsustainable without economic growth. Democracy is how a society chooses to govern itself. Above a certain point (e.g. when food is so scarce people kill each over for it) it's not about how much money or resources it has. There have been in ethnography tribes with democratic self-governance that had 1/1000 the resources we have, and no "growth" year over year.
davidjnelson 10y ago
Love that Gibson quote. Have you come across research or pilots that have made progress on the distribution problem? Without being an expert, it appears to be caused by greed.

pastProlog 10y ago

> I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity in the last few years. I do. There have always been economies of scale, but the first shipment of Call of Duty costs tens of millions of dollars. Shipments #2 to #1000000 over the wire cost next to nothing. A movie like The Avengers exhibits the same behavior. Sixty years ago, a new car rolling off an assembly line of a Detroit factory was the epitome of the world economy, technology and engineering. Which was not all that different from the process of a weave rolling off a flying shuttle in 1740. This is a new thing, where piece #1 of a piece of IP is very costly, but the next few million pieces are cheap to produce. To have a focus on the old thing of a scarcity of materials as this goes on seems to be missing the boat on what is happening. Not that I put much creedence in the scarcity focus before, but it has just become completely ridiculous.

internaut 10y ago
This is something I've been interested in, the idea of having a marginal cost lifestyle. The main problem with it for physical items is that there is always a large upfront lump sum cost. A small hydroelectric system produces energy for practically free but costs a lot to build. It will last until your grandchildren are old though, it is a true investment.
Retric 10y ago
The first car for a given model year might cost a billion dollars the second might cost 10k. So, it's more the gap has been growing than it's suddenly a new thing.

bryanlarsen 10y ago

Of course we can't produce infinite anything. We can't even make infinite copies of a piece of software. So instead of "infinite" or "near infinite", let's say "at least two orders of magnitude". Can we produce 100x as much precious metals? Yes.[1] Can we produce 100x as much energy? Yes.[2] Can we produce 100x as much food? Yes.[3] Can we produce 100x as much living space? Yes. 1: Exercise: think of an elemental metal we're short of. Look it up in Wikipedia, look at what % of the Earth's crust consists of that resource, and compare that to current usage. 2: With enough money, we could do this with nuclear power today. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do this with solar, again given enough money. 3: Greenhouses. Precious metals, food, energy and prime living space are very scarce in economic terms. It would cost very real and very significant amounts money to produce more. But given enough money, we could produce a lot more of them. If the world economy grew 100x too, could we increase these scarce resources 100-fold? I assert yes.

misja111 10y ago
> 1: Exercise: think of an elemental metal we're short of. Look it up in Wikipedia, look at what % of the Earth's crust consists of that resource, and compare that to current usage. Just because it is somewhere in the Earth's crust, it doesn't mean that we are able to harvest it. > 2: With enough money, we could do this with nuclear power today. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do this with solar, again given enough money. You are talking about producing 100X as much energy as we do today. Nuclear power is already used in many countries. Scaling up our energy production with a factor 100 just by replacing traditional power plants with nuclear will never reach that factor. And solar power is not even able to fulfill our current energy need, there is just not enough free surface on the earth for all those solar panels. > 3: Greenhouses. The claim that the use of greenhouses could scale up our global food production with a factor 100 is absurd.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  > Just because it is somewhere in the Earth's crust, it doesn't mean that we are able to harvest it. That's basically what we already do for copper. A copper "mine" takes something that isn't much different from random rocks, and separates out the copper. Copper ores that have a high percentage of copper have been gone for a while now. Copper used to be so cheap they used it for pennies, now it's so expensive that people break into houses to steal the wire. But we haven't run out. >Scaling up our energy production with a factor 100 just by replacing traditional power plants with nuclear will never reach that factor. Well obviously we'd need to build new plants. What's the limiting factor preventing us from creating 100x as many nuclear plants, provided sufficient money to build them? > The claim that the use of greenhouses could scale up our global food production with a factor 100 is absurd. Why? Greenhouses produce far more than 100x the calories/acre than wheat or corn land. It's far less absurd than urban vertical farming which uses artificial light instead of sunlight, yet there are several startups that think vertical farming is viable and have received tons of investment.

Retric 10y ago

20,000 calories per day is not better than 10,000 calories per day. Thus, food has reached a point where enough no longer the problem, and if we made twice as much we probably would burn it not eat it. As to stuff, it's content which tends to be the real limitation not the TV. And content can be unlimited we simply impose artificial limitations.

cheshire_cat 10y ago
We are already throwing massive amounts of food away. "Getting food from the farm to our fork eats up 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80 percent of all freshwater consumed in the United States. Yet, 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. This not only means that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also that the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions." [1] [1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
- esrauch 10y ago
  There are some advantages to being over provisioned though: it is more resilient to disruption and downturns for one.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

neffy 10y ago

Think about a book with information in it on, oh I don't know, basic first aid principles. 1000 Years ago it wasn't available. 200 years ago, it was available only to those who could afford to go to university, and had reached a very socially expensive and scarce educational level. Now you can download it for nothing. With pictures. Ditto music, film, etc. The financial apparatus that you're referring to can solve more or less for the scarcity case, but it cannot solve (i.e. find prices for) the abundance case. The liquidity issues are a sideshow to what will be the main event.

internaut 10y ago
> The financial apparatus that you're referring to can solve more or less for the scarcity case, but it cannot solve (i.e. find prices for) the abundance case. Prices should be declining if supply are increasing. If you're right, which you're not, then prices should be decreasing very quickly. Food and energy bills for the average person in my country and others I've been to are steadily increasing. USA 2011 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-increase-most-in-36-years/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-increase-most-in-36-... USA 2014 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-soar-as-incomes-stand-still/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-soar-as-incomes-stan... World graph http://www.worldwatch.org/global-food-prices-continue-rise-0 http://www.worldwatch.org/global-food-prices-continue-rise-0 EX-computation, tell me something good. We can't eat silicon wafers. The cost of energy alone is exponentially higher than it was in the early 70s. We're not living in an enchanted forest, formerly progressive trends are going into reverse on most counts outside of computers.
- someguydave 10y ago
  I'm not sure that computation is much of an exception. Yes, we have more transistors on chips, but can we actually make them do more useful things? It's not always clear cut. Also it seems like many employed in software are mostly reinventing older ideas poorly.
  - internaut 10y ago
    Didn't see your post there, sorry. I agree, but I try to lead with my strongest case that can't be denied objectively. The concern about implementing 'actual useful shit' e.g. not flinging birds at pigs, is very much at the forefront of my mind but it's a harder case to argue even if it would be more meaningful, esp. to the uninitiated.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market. Financial metrics can grow without substantially increasing demand for labor. Most of the nonfinancial economy, however, is stuck in recession or stagnation. The tech sector only differs in being fueled by the flood of capital into VCs. After the Second Great Depression was narrowly headed off by TARP, we're still stuck waiting for the Second New Deal and Second Post-War Reconstruction.