For at least 100,000 years, we've lived in a desperately poor world in which (to rip off Our Lady Peace) "every calorie's a war". We still live in one, if you t

For at least 100,000 years, we've lived in a desperately poor world in which (to rip off Our Lady Peace) "every calorie's a war". We still live in one, if you take a global perspective, but we're moving out of such a state. What do I mean by "desperately poor"? (I'm making a tall assertion since there's no economic comparison, at least none that we know of, to human history.) I mean that we're biologically programmed to rapidly exceed any carrying capacity. Economic growth throughout most of human history has been so slow as to be absorbed entirely in population growth, which has been great for priests and kings but terrible for subjects. Per-capita well-being almost hadn't changed (on a global scale; there were local ups and downs) between 10,000 BC and about 1840 AD. Technological advances were absorbed entirely into the task of supporting larger populations. In a desperately poor world, you need to force everyone to work. People who aren't working are "lazy" and need to be punished. What most dictators actually want is to mechanize work: to replace these complex, difficult organisms (that sometimes break down and stop working) with mechanical ones without family ties, without belief in gods except the ones favorable to "the state", and without creativity or self-awareness or any desire for autonomy. That applies to ancient, semi-fictional dictators like Gilgamesh and it applies to modern, faceless dictatorships like 20th-century authoritarian communism. We're finally finding our way to the compromise, which is to use technology to create those mechanical workers (robots)-- because humans despise being treated as machines, and we're also really bad at the work they do well. Early computers were actually slower than human "computers", but had a lot more in the way of endurance. Now we're moving toward a rich world and we're totally unprepared for it. We have millennia-old assumptions about peoples' relationships with work (that there will always be useful work for people to do, making it fair and reasonable to structure a society where everyone who can work must) that are about to become invalid, and none of our social structures are prepared for this change even on a national scale, much less a world one. I'm starting to think we should just give stuff away. Instead of the IMF and World Bank putting these African countries into debt, let's just tax rich people a little more and pay people to build safe water systems. For free. There's plenty of infrastructural and environmental that the world needs, and if there aren't market incentives for people to do the right thing, then that's a perfect place for government to get involved: tax the rich, and pay underemployed Americans to do things that are good for the country and for the world. For the record, world poverty is a complex problem and most of what we call "aid" isn't what we need to heal the world. Giving money to poor countries just makes their elites richer. We should be giving away water, medicine, technological access, and (most importantly) education.