The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people, because things like biotech, robotech, infotech, nanotech, nucleartech, and so on make terrible, if ironic, weapons. It is ironic to use military robots to fight over economic issues the robots make obsolete. It is ironic to use nuclear missiles built with advanced materials to fight over oil supplies that nuclear power or solar energy make unimportant. It even takes more electricity to produce a gallon of gasoline than an electric car takes to go the same distance, if you really want some deep irony -- we'd use less electricity if we switched to electric cars. So, as an example of post-scarcity thinking, considering that and safety issues, our society would save money and have lower taxes if everyone got a free-to-the user safe luxury electric car. http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en [google.com]
From Post-scarcity Princeton: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html [pdfernhout.net] """ * Some comments on the PU Economics department and related research directions from a post-scarcity perspective
The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition.:-)
OK, that will never happen, so it should be at least "strongly admonished" for past misbehavior.:-(
What misbehavior? Essentially, the PU Economics department has taken part in a global effort to build an economic "psychofrakulator". How does a psychofrakulator work? Consider a paraphrase of something Doc Heller says in the movie Mystery Men: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes [imdb.com]
Dr. Heller: It's a psychofrakulator. They used to say it couldn't be built. The equations were so complex that most of the scientists that worked on it wound up in the insane asylum [in Chicago].... It creates a cloud of [dollar denomiated] radically-fluctuating free-deviant chaotrons which penetrate the synaptic relays [via television]. It's concatenated with a synchronous transport switch [of values from long term seven generation life-affirming love of caring to short-term immediate profit and immediate gratification suicidal death-affirming love of money] that creates a virtual tributary [back to large corporations]. It's focused onto a biobolic reflector [of the elite controlled mass media] and what happens is that [economic] hallucinations become reality and the [global] brain [and global ecosystem] is literally fried from within.
Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide. Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dynamic, bubble-prone economy....
Good evening. My name is Jim. And I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks, untamed, within me....
Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, they've done enough damage with their arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right.
Step 1: Admit you have a problem. Like they say at the AA meetings, this is half the solution. Where economists are concerned, however, it's easier said than done. Getting a substance abuser to face the facts of their addiction is nothing compared to convincing an economist that they're hooked on elegant but useless mathematical models, and authoritative but destructive policy advice. Where economists are concerned, we're talking denial with a capital 'D.'
Step 2: Accept that all your efforts to explain the world have failed. The 'market' is the holiest symbol in all of economics. It's magically automatic and efficient. And supply always equals demand. The whole profession of mainstream, 'neoclassical' economics is dedicated to the study of markets and how they can be perfected. The problem, however, is that in real life these idealized 'markets' don't explain much at all. Powerful non-market forces determine most of what happens in the economy - things like tradition, demographics, class, gender and race, geography, and institutions. Indeed, what we call the 'market' is itself a complex, historically constructed social institution - not some autonomous, inanimate forum. Power and position are at least as important to economics, as supply and demand....
But I'm mainly using the PU economics department as a stand-in for the problems our world faces and past misdeeds of all economists, which is not really fair, I know; I'm not in any way expert on their current research. A few of the faculty, even twenty years ago, may well have been concerned about some of these issues. The closest I came to the PU economics department was rooming with a PU Economics graduate student for a time during the summer after I left the graduate college and he was one of the most fun people I ever met and he was interested in global issues. We became friends. But, beyond the troubles I saw him have finding an advisor, I saw this clever and witty fellow beaten down over the years as we stayed in touch, even to the point of divorce as he was forced to sacrifice his marriage to a wonderful person for his PhD (though granted, he could have abandoned his degree). To me, that sums up what the PU Economics department has really been about -- numbers and credentials instead of joy and family. The department may well have improved some over the last two decades. Still, at the very least, the PU Economics department faculty should be admonished for not writing the post-scarcity part of this essay instead of me (with my baggage.:-) Obviously, as with Paul Krugman, there are some partial exceptions who maybe should perhaps be admonished double for raising our hopes?:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman [wikipedia.org] To my knowledge, none of them look at the actual issue of the nature of work: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.econ.princeton.edu+work+nature [google.com]
"Results 1 - 10 of about 19 from www.econ.princeton.edu for work nature. (0.12 seconds) [None relevant]" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+%22why+work%22 [google.com]
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu "why work" - did not match any documents." like Bob Black raises: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+%22bob+black%22 [google.com]
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu "bob black" - did not match any documents." Again, from Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
Should the PU economics department wish to stay intact rather than move en masse to another university, the calculus of infinites mentioned at the start of this essay is one new direction for their research and teaching.
But, if PU economists still want to make charts and theories about finite things (they're good at that, obviously, and it is labor that they seem to love to do, see Schumacher:-), then what they need to start looking at and charting are physical concepts like Ray Kurzweil considers here:
"The Law of Accelerating Returns" http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html [kurzweilai.net] PU economists could graph historical trends over time like: * increasing computation delivered per unit mass of silicon, * the increasing amount of freely licensed software and other content, * the increasing percentage of human attention devoted to free content, * the increasing electrical energy captured per unit mass for windmills, * the increasing incarceration rate per capita in the USA, * the decreasing amount of time it takes a solar collector to repay the energy used in its manufacture, * the decreasing ground crew size per space rocket launch, * the decreasing topsoil depth per capita, * the decreasing global biodiversity, and so on. Obviously, they'd also want to look at other things at websites like this for more ideas:
"Redefining Progress: Shifting public policy to achieve a sustainable economy, a healthy environment and a just society" http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm [rprogress.org]
Like Kurzweil, PU economists could start applying their skills to charting trends in the real basis of prosperity. They need to move beyond charting derived trends that are social constructions like fluctuations in fiat currency. They need to start admitting that as a fiat currency system breaks down with a transition to the emerging post-scarcity economy, dollars are no longer a very good way to measure things (if they ever were). They need to remember that currency is as arbitrary system related to a current economic control system which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiat dollars are essentially ration units, and rationing is becoming obsolete as part of the emerging post-scarcity society. For example, personal internet bandwidth use and server disk space are now so cheap as to be effectively "too cheap to matter" except in the most extreme cases for some small number of individuals. So, PU economists need to get back to basics and start charting real physically measurable (or estimateable) things. And then they need to think about the interrelations of those real things. Essentially, they can still use a lot of their old skills at analysis, but rather than apply them to one thing, money, they need to apply them to thousands of individual measurements of aspects of life-support and production. And the challenge will be in seeing how to make predictions about systems where these thousands of factors are difficult to interchange for each other (for example, topsoil depth versus sewing machine production).
The historic focus of PU economists on charting changes in social constructions (fiat dollars) instead of changes in technological capacity that is one cause of PU economists failing to predict a post-scarcity society. It is no surprise it took someone like Ray Kurzweil to be able to handle both the mathematical content and the technological content to provide his analysis of the timing of a post-scarcity transition (or even broader singularity). However, just because Kurzweil is good at seeing the trends leading up to a singularity in our society, does not mean that he can see beyond it (and he admits this). So it is important to understand that the policy proposals Kurzweil suggests come out of his own longstanding conservative/libertarian financial perspective as a self-made technology millionaire. The exact shape of a future society in terms of what core priorities and values it reflects is still up in the air, and may well be very different then the propertarian approach Kurzweil assumes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarianism [wikipedia.org] as opposed to, say, libertarian socialism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialists [wikipedia.org] or something else much broader as a gift economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy [wikipedia.org] or something much narrower as an internet mediated central planning like Chile's Cybersyn pioneered in the 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersyn [wikipedia.org] There could be a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between PU economists with their charting skills for historical trends and PU engineers with their technical knowledge of what physical characteristics of systems are important to production.
In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics [wikipedia.org] So, I'd suggest, should the PU Economics Department faculty be kept on, the department should be renamed the "Princeton University Cybernetics Department" with there being an "historical economics" subsection all the current economics faculty are assigned to, and one faculty member each from the PU Department of Religion, the PU Department of History, and the PU department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering be put in as an acting team triumvirate leadership of the larger department.:-) As economics faculty broaden their research, then they could move into other new Cybernetics department sections. See also:
"The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society" by Norbert Wiener http://www.amazon.com/Human-Use-Beings-Cybernetics-Paperback/dp/0306803208 [amazon.com]
What is more pressing in understanding a post-scarcity economy is seeing what real physical limits exist currently and how they could change over time. This requires examining physical production from first principles, since only when one understands the physical limits of a system does a discussion of various control systems and their strengths and weaknesses make sense.
The essentials to producing anything in general are: * Human time (or other decision making time) * Energy * Raw Materials * Tooling * Transportation Plus there is maybe the effort involved in cleaning up environmental or social damage. In classical economics there is also "rent" for access to money or land or copyrights or patents and so on, but for the sake of a physical analysis we can ignore that because rent is an arbitrary social construction related to rationing, and so is a higher level concept.
What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?
It's amazing to me how quickly sci-fi supposedly set in the 24th century is becoming reality:
"Star Trek TNG: The Game (episode)" http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/The_Game [memory-alpha.org]
Wesley and Robin investigate the [video game] device in sickbay, [using a computer simulation of the human visual system and other brain systems] and determine that it has a psychotropically addictive side-effect, and that it stimulates increased serotonin production. Most worryingly, it also stimulates the brain's higher reasoning area.
And it doesn't take human level AI or vision to do the kind of things ants can do -- gather materials and process them chemically. So we will see big changes before human AI, even if human level AI for some reason was impossible or undesirable.
Looking at things from this perspective, how can everything become free as computer costs decrease? Well, if you use robotics and automation, the human time goes away as a necessity. If human-equivalent time is free, then there is no human time cost to the other items as well. So, say for energy, with free labor, you only need the other categories to make more energy producing equipment, at which point you have all the free energy you want. So, with free labor and free energy, to get free raw materials all you need is tooling and transportation. And with free labor, energy, and raw materials, you get tooling if you you have transportation, But with free labor, energy, raw materials, and tooling, then you have the ingredients for free transportation. And with free everything else, the robots and computers are free too. Ultimately, there are only two costs to anything -- labor and rent (ignoring the destruction of environmental capital). Since rent is societally determined, if labor is free (via computer driven robots) then everything can be free eventually. Granted, there are *physical* limits involving how fast you can do something with the robots or 3D printers on hand. Those physical time limits and their interdependencies are well worth studying by a new breed of post-scarcity economists. But in practice, if you look at nature, the long term limits are more like incident sunlight and our planet has tens of thousands times more incident sunlight then our current society would need if it was all electric. Most materials can be recycled and so do no pose limits. So as computing replaces labor, everything can eventually be "free", as long as physical capital is produced faster than it wears out or is consumed. No doubt many of the mathematical techniques economists have developed for thinking about imaginary things like fiat dollar return on investment may have some applicability to more complex models considering energy return on an investment of energy, or computational return on an investment of mass, or the sustainable yield of consumer product mass from a productive physical system with a certain target growth rate of mass and energy converted into robots given tooling wear, and so on. Here is a paper prototype of such an analysis system which considers tool wear in relation to expanding industrial capacity: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm [kurtz-fernhout.com] """
Also related
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)" http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/ [beyondajob...covery.org] "Summary: Mainstream economics assumes demand for almost anything is infinite. Thus, the theory goes, when human workers get replaced by robots, or better design means less human labor is needed, then there will soon be new jobs making new things; the only issue might be retraining. But, if demand is limited (because the best things in life are free or cheap, and everything you own also owns you), then when people get laid off, the jobs are gone for good, because there is nothing more that anybody wants then is already produced. And people having more time outside of compulsory work would be a good thing, if we more evenly shared the wealth from automation and better design, but we don't -- yet."
The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people
I disagree. I think a bigger problem are abundance obsessed people who choose to remain ignorant of the obstacles to actually implementing theoretically possible technologies: cost, time, and social/political inertia. Just because we know how to replace unskilled labor with machines and oil with nukes doesn't mean we can retool the infrastructure overnight nor convince investors to fund a rapid cutover.
Even though futurists like you dislike thinking about nitty-gritty details, especially economics and polit
There is no doubt some truth to what you say, but why make this personal? Can you talk about ideas without attacking a person and making lots of assumptions about them (which may well be wrong)? We might see a lot more progress if people could talk about ideas more.
Please plot the current exponential growth of renewable energy for wind and solar and you will see that, just following current exponential trends, in twenty to thirty years, almost all our energy will come from renewables like wind and solar. Pe
You're right, my tone was too strident. Just heard this post-scarcity sillyness too often. I actually agree with you about solar and wind except I insert "I really really hope" before "almost all our energy will come from renewables".
To prove to yourself that technological adaptations don't always come fast enough to bail us out, imagine that for some reason oil jumps to $500/barrel tomorrow (terrorist attacks on refineries, all-out nuclear war in the Middle East, etc). Will there be enough time for everyon
The USA has centuries worth of coal. Nazi Germany almost took over the world using coal to make liquid synthetic fuels using 1940s technology. The US population is 300 million about. There are tens of millions of people unemployed and underemployed. We could switch entirely to coal in a year or two if we really wanted too. That would be terrible for the environment, and public health (mercury pollution etc.) but we surely could do this.
As for the long term, we could probably even evacuate the entire planet
Fine. Given that I cannot change public opinion or government policy, what can I do as an ordinary individual to avoid civilizational risks and get us out into space.
As one possibility, you can contribute to the growing open manufacturing and maker communities that are creating a free commons of knowledge of how to make things. For example, you could help with RepRap somehow. Or you could improve Blender or other 3D modeling software. Or you could build better communications tools about manufacturing knowledge (maybe based on Google Wave?) Eventually, all that will lead to a new paradigm for manufacturing, allowing us to build better systems, including better spacecraft
Those are worthy projects. I'm probably going to continue in my own line of academic research, but I'll keep that in mind.
But it's also important to be as prepared as possible for the future getting derailed. I've actually heard people say they would rather die than live through a dark age. Their optimism is a fragile and brittle thing, apparently.
As for me, at the same time as I work to bring on the future, I will continue thinking up and implementing ways to come out on top even if the shit does hit the f
Sometimes you just have to make a choice between helping the larger society prosper versus turning inward and perhaps, by inaction, helping bring about the very catastrophe you are worried about.
Well, sometimes some discretion is necessary. Better the seeds of high-tech society survive in a few tightly-organized pockets than spend themselves bailing out the masses who never bothered to make their own preparations. Still, general information should be shared, that's definitely a positive sum game. Specific preparedness measures taken by individuals not so much.
While I think your post was quite interesting (great references, they were interesting to read), I think you are missing a key concept of economics... All resources are scarce, therefore there is no such thing as "post scarcity." I also think you have missed the point that economics is not as much about predicting a market as it is about predicting human behavior in a market. While people are very unpredicible, often making poor decisions, most economists would blame this on an imbalance of information in t
I'm sure a lot of economists would agree with you. And, like you try to do, one may paint some extreme picture (like running out of hydrogen in the universe). But, compared to that happening to a universe-spanning species in some far distant future, the human race has no real resource limits of any significance. Hovewer, there are many *artificial* scarcities that have been created, from a shortage of doctors (carefully controlled med school cartels), to a shortage of copyrights (law), to a shortage of rene
There are two underlying principles to economic theory (in their simplest forms): 1) All resources are scarce. 2) People are greedy.
One could argue about the merits of these three underlying principles but I have yet to ever see an example of a human society where these principles break down.
I would agree that with almost any given resource technological advances have led to a decline in real costs for such resources. There are examples to the contrary such as our recent facination with protecting the envir
For a society where different rules apply, see: "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm [primitivism.com] """ Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formul
I do not belive that more "goods and services" are always better for us, but societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and
societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.
It's called hoarding. And it always was either a reaction to a real life-threatening scarcity (that modern society does not have to deal with) or a part of sadistic desire for power (that society can easily suppress by keeping psychopaths away from power). Things will get much less complicated when economists will abandon the idea that extraordinary greedy people "deserve" extraordinary income by the virtue of their extraordinary feeling of self-importance.
As another reply, by "Alex Belits" points out, aspects of what you outline, like hoarding, would be considered dysfunctional in other paradigms. A study of other cultures, like some Native American tribes, shows that a "Tribal Chief" was selected and replaced at will by the people. They were picked from their lifelong behavior in the tribe, often to serve as more a spiritual leader than a dictator. Example from recent Iroquois history: http://www.peace4turtleisland.org/pages/tributetoshenandoa [peace4turtleisland.org]
I was with you till you started to ramble about the "death of conservative economics". What you fail to realize is that we don't live in a post-scarcity world. We live in a dual economy. We have parts of the economy that are post-scarcity and parts that are very scarce. Energy, technology, bits, are all post-scarcity. Water, food, land, Megan Fox are all scarce resources. The problem is that people are so used to the scarce economy that they don't know how to deal with the new post-scarce resources.
You're right, it is a good idea to separate those things, digital from physical right now.
I'd go a step further and suggest a big problem these days is that people lump under "capital" both imaginary fiat dollars (ration units) and physical things like cement plants. As suggested by another poster, if we want a new cement plant, it takes time to build one. But an endless supply of fiat dollars can be created by the stroke of a pen in Congress. Digitally, there is so much capacity now relative to basic needs
We're here to give you a computer, not a religion.
- attributed to Bob Pariseau, at the introduction of the Amiga
Misses the post-scarcity point; digital abundance (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people, because things like biotech, robotech, infotech, nanotech, nucleartech, and so on make terrible, if ironic, weapons. It is ironic to use military robots to fight over economic issues the robots make obsolete. It is ironic to use nuclear missiles built with advanced materials to fight over oil supplies that nuclear power or solar energy make unimportant. It even takes more electricity to produce a gallon of gasoline than an electric car takes to go the same distance, if you really want some deep irony -- we'd use less electricity if we switched to electric cars. So, as an example of post-scarcity thinking, considering that and safety issues, our society would save money and have lower taxes if everyone got a free-to-the user safe luxury electric car.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en [google.com]
From Post-scarcity Princeton:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html [pdfernhout.net]
"""
* Some comments on the PU Economics department and related research directions from a post-scarcity perspective
The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition. :-)
OK, that will never happen, so it should be at least "strongly admonished" for past misbehavior. :-(
What misbehavior? Essentially, the PU Economics department has taken part in a global effort to build an economic "psychofrakulator". How does a psychofrakulator work? Consider a paraphrase of something Doc Heller says in the movie Mystery Men:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes [imdb.com]
Dr. Heller: It's a psychofrakulator. They used to say it couldn't be built. The equations were so complex that most of the scientists that worked on it wound up in the insane asylum [in Chicago]. ... It creates a cloud of [dollar denomiated] radically-fluctuating free-deviant chaotrons which penetrate the synaptic relays [via television]. It's concatenated with a synchronous transport switch [of values from long term seven generation life-affirming love of caring to short-term immediate profit and immediate gratification suicidal death-affirming love of money] that creates a virtual tributary [back to large corporations]. It's focused onto a biobolic reflector [of the elite controlled mass media] and what happens is that [economic] hallucinations become reality and the [global] brain [and global ecosystem] is literally fried from within.
Or in other words:
"Screwed: What 30 Years of Conservative Economics Feels Like"
http://granby01033.blogspot.com/2008/04/screwed-what-30-years-of-conservative.html [blogspot.com]
Or:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics [wikipedia.org]
And:
"Obituary: Conservative Economic Policy"
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/10/19/obituary_conservative_economic/ [talkingpointsmemo.com]
Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide. Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dynamic, bubble-prone economy. ...
And any economists who don't want to move to, say, Chicago should be asked to follow this twelve step program: :-)
"Confessions of a Recovering Economist" by Jim Stanford
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=37&ItemID=3996 [zmag.org]
Good evening. My name is Jim. And I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks, untamed, within me. ...
Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, they've done enough damage with their arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right.
Step 1: Admit you have a problem. Like they say at the AA meetings, this is half the solution. Where economists are concerned, however, it's easier said than done. Getting a substance abuser to face the facts of their addiction is nothing compared to convincing an economist that they're hooked on elegant but useless mathematical models, and authoritative but destructive policy advice. Where economists are concerned, we're talking denial with a capital 'D.'
Step 2: Accept that all your efforts to explain the world have failed. The 'market' is the holiest symbol in all of economics. It's magically automatic and efficient. And supply always equals demand. The whole profession of mainstream, 'neoclassical' economics is dedicated to the study of markets and how they can be perfected. The problem, however, is that in real life these idealized 'markets' don't explain much at all. Powerful non-market forces determine most of what happens in the economy - things like tradition, demographics, class, gender and race, geography, and institutions. Indeed, what we call the 'market' is itself a complex, historically constructed social institution - not some autonomous, inanimate forum. Power and position are at least as important to economics, as supply and demand. ...
But I'm mainly using the PU economics department as a stand-in for the problems our world faces and past misdeeds of all economists, which is not really fair, I know; I'm not in any way expert on their current research. A few of the faculty, even twenty years ago, may well have been concerned about some of these issues. The closest I came to the PU economics department was rooming with a PU Economics graduate student for a time during the summer after I left the graduate college and he was one of the most fun people I ever met and he was interested in global issues. We became friends. But, beyond the troubles I saw him have finding an advisor, I saw this clever and witty fellow beaten down over the years as we stayed in touch, even to the point of divorce as he was forced to sacrifice his marriage to a wonderful person for his PhD (though granted, he could have abandoned his degree). To me, that sums up what the PU Economics department has really been about -- numbers and credentials instead of joy and family. The department may well have improved some over the last two decades. Still, at the very least, the PU Economics department faculty should be admonished for not writing the post-scarcity part of this essay instead of me (with my baggage. :-) Obviously, as with Paul Krugman, there are some partial exceptions who maybe should perhaps be admonished double for raising our hopes? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman [wikipedia.org]
To my knowledge, none of them look at the actual issue of the nature of work:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.econ.princeton.edu+work+nature [google.com]
"Results 1 - 10 of about 19 from www.econ.princeton.edu for work nature. (0.12 seconds) [None relevant]"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+%22why+work%22 [google.com]
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu "why work" - did not match any documents."
like Bob Black raises:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+%22bob+black%22 [google.com]
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu "bob black" - did not match any documents."
Again, from Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
OK, maybe Bob Black is less known, but what about E.F. Schumacher and Buddhist Economics?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+schumacher [google.com]
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu schumacher - did not match any documents."
From Schumacher:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html [smallisbeautiful.org]
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
Should the PU economics department wish to stay intact rather than move en masse to another university, the calculus of infinites mentioned at the start of this essay is one new direction for their research and teaching.
But, if PU economists still want to make charts and theories about finite things (they're good at that, obviously, and it is labor that they seem to love to do, see Schumacher :-), then what they need to start looking at and charting are physical concepts like Ray Kurzweil considers here:
"The Law of Accelerating Returns"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html [kurzweilai.net]
PU economists could graph historical trends over time like:
* increasing computation delivered per unit mass of silicon,
* the increasing amount of freely licensed software and other content,
* the increasing percentage of human attention devoted to free content,
* the increasing electrical energy captured per unit mass for windmills,
* the increasing incarceration rate per capita in the USA,
* the decreasing amount of time it takes a solar collector to repay the energy used in its manufacture,
* the decreasing ground crew size per space rocket launch,
* the decreasing topsoil depth per capita,
* the decreasing global biodiversity, and so on.
Obviously, they'd also want to look at other things at websites like this for more ideas:
"Redefining Progress: Shifting public policy to achieve a sustainable economy, a healthy environment and a just society"
http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm [rprogress.org]
Like Kurzweil, PU economists could start applying their skills to charting trends in the real basis of prosperity. They need to move beyond charting derived trends that are social constructions like fluctuations in fiat currency. They need to start admitting that as a fiat currency system breaks down with a transition to the emerging post-scarcity economy, dollars are no longer a very good way to measure things (if they ever were). They need to remember that currency is as arbitrary system related to a current economic control system which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiat dollars are essentially ration units, and rationing is becoming obsolete as part of the emerging post-scarcity society. For example, personal internet bandwidth use and server disk space are now so cheap as to be effectively "too cheap to matter" except in the most extreme cases for some small number of individuals. So, PU economists need to get back to basics and start charting real physically measurable (or estimateable) things. And then they need to think about the interrelations of those real things. Essentially, they can still use a lot of their old skills at analysis, but rather than apply them to one thing, money, they need to apply them to thousands of individual measurements of aspects of life-support and production. And the challenge will be in seeing how to make predictions about systems where these thousands of factors are difficult to interchange for each other (for example, topsoil depth versus sewing machine production).
The historic focus of PU economists on charting changes in social constructions (fiat dollars) instead of changes in technological capacity that is one cause of PU economists failing to predict a post-scarcity society. It is no surprise it took someone like Ray Kurzweil to be able to handle both the mathematical content and the technological content to provide his analysis of the timing of a post-scarcity transition (or even broader singularity). However, just because Kurzweil is good at seeing the trends leading up to a singularity in our society, does not mean that he can see beyond it (and he admits this). So it is important to understand that the policy proposals Kurzweil suggests come out of his own longstanding conservative/libertarian financial perspective as a self-made technology millionaire. The exact shape of a future society in terms of what core priorities and values it reflects is still up in the air, and may well be very different then the propertarian approach Kurzweil assumes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarianism [wikipedia.org]
as opposed to, say, libertarian socialism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialists [wikipedia.org]
or something else much broader as a gift economy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy [wikipedia.org]
or something much narrower as an internet mediated central planning like Chile's Cybersyn pioneered in the 1970s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersyn [wikipedia.org]
There could be a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between PU economists with their charting skills for historical trends and PU engineers with their technical knowledge of what physical characteristics of systems are important to production.
In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics". :-) As economics faculty broaden their research, then they could move into other new Cybernetics department sections. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics [wikipedia.org]
So, I'd suggest, should the PU Economics Department faculty be kept on, the department should be renamed the "Princeton University Cybernetics Department" with there being an "historical economics" subsection all the current economics faculty are assigned to, and one faculty member each from the PU Department of Religion, the PU Department of History, and the PU department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering be put in as an acting team triumvirate leadership of the larger department.
"The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society" by Norbert Wiener
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Use-Beings-Cybernetics-Paperback/dp/0306803208 [amazon.com]
What is more pressing in understanding a post-scarcity economy is seeing what real physical limits exist currently and how they could change over time. This requires examining physical production from first principles, since only when one understands the physical limits of a system does a discussion of various control systems and their strengths and weaknesses make sense.
The essentials to producing anything in general are:
* Human time (or other decision making time)
* Energy
* Raw Materials
* Tooling
* Transportation
Plus there is maybe the effort involved in cleaning up environmental or social damage. In classical economics there is also "rent" for access to money or land or copyrights or patents and so on, but for the sake of a physical analysis we can ignore that because rent is an arbitrary social construction related to rationing, and so is a higher level concept.
On replacing human time with computers and automation in a couple decades, see, for background: ... building machines as smart as ourselves."
"Kurzweil says, by the 2020s we'll be
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/04/1213237 [slashdot.org]
And to see what is happening right now:
"Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/2014225 [slashdot.org]
What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?
It's amazing to me how quickly sci-fi supposedly set in the 24th century is becoming reality:
"Star Trek TNG: The Game (episode)"
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/The_Game [memory-alpha.org]
Wesley and Robin investigate the [video game] device in sickbay, [using a computer simulation of the human visual system and other brain systems] and determine that it has a psychotropically addictive side-effect, and that it stimulates increased serotonin production. Most worryingly, it also stimulates the brain's higher reasoning area.
And it doesn't take human level AI or vision to do the kind of things ants can do -- gather materials and process them chemically. So we will see big changes before human AI, even if human level AI for some reason was impossible or undesirable.
Looking at things from this perspective, how can everything become free as computer costs decrease? Well, if you use robotics and automation, the human time goes away as a necessity. If human-equivalent time is free, then there is no human time cost to the other items as well. So, say for energy, with free labor, you only need the other categories to make more energy producing equipment, at which point you have all the free energy you want. So, with free labor and free energy, to get free raw materials all you need is tooling and transportation. And with free labor, energy, and raw materials, you get tooling if you you have transportation, But with free labor, energy, raw materials, and tooling, then you have the ingredients for free transportation. And with free everything else, the robots and computers are free too. Ultimately, there are only two costs to anything -- labor and rent (ignoring the destruction of environmental capital). Since rent is societally determined, if labor is free (via computer driven robots) then everything can be free eventually. Granted, there are *physical* limits involving how fast you can do something with the robots or 3D printers on hand. Those physical time limits and their interdependencies are well worth studying by a new breed of post-scarcity economists. But in practice, if you look at nature, the long term limits are more like incident sunlight and our planet has tens of thousands times more incident sunlight then our current society would need if it was all electric. Most materials can be recycled and so do no pose limits. So as computing replaces labor, everything can eventually be "free", as long as physical capital is produced faster than it wears out or is consumed. No doubt many of the mathematical techniques economists have developed for thinking about imaginary things like fiat dollar return on investment may have some applicability to more complex models considering energy return on an investment of energy, or computational return on an investment of mass, or the sustainable yield of consumer product mass from a productive physical system with a certain target growth rate of mass and energy converted into robots given tooling wear, and so on. Here is a paper prototype of such an analysis system which considers tool wear in relation to expanding industrial capacity:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm [kurtz-fernhout.com]
"""
Also related
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/ [beyondajob...covery.org]
"Summary: Mainstream economics assumes demand for almost anything is infinite. Thus, the theory goes, when human workers get replaced by robots, or better design means less human labor is needed, then there will soon be new jobs making new things; the only issue might be retraining. But, if demand is limited (because the best things in life are free or cheap, and everything you own also owns you), then when people get laid off, the jobs are gone for good, because there is nothing more that anybody wants then is already produced. And people having more time outside of compulsory work would be a good thing, if we more evenly shared the wealth from automation and better design, but we don't -- yet."
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The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people
I disagree. I think a bigger problem are abundance obsessed people who choose to remain ignorant of the obstacles to actually implementing theoretically possible technologies: cost, time, and social/political inertia. Just because we know how to replace unskilled labor with machines and oil with nukes doesn't mean we can retool the infrastructure overnight nor convince investors to fund a rapid cutover.
Even though futurists like you dislike thinking about nitty-gritty details, especially economics and polit
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There is no doubt some truth to what you say, but why make this personal? Can you talk about ideas without attacking a person and making lots of assumptions about them (which may well be wrong)? We might see a lot more progress if people could talk about ideas more.
Please plot the current exponential growth of renewable energy for wind and solar and you will see that, just following current exponential trends, in twenty to thirty years, almost all our energy will come from renewables like wind and solar. Pe
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You're right, my tone was too strident. Just heard this post-scarcity sillyness too often. I actually agree with you about solar and wind except I insert "I really really hope" before "almost all our energy will come from renewables".
To prove to yourself that technological adaptations don't always come fast enough to bail us out, imagine that for some reason oil jumps to $500/barrel tomorrow (terrorist attacks on refineries, all-out nuclear war in the Middle East, etc). Will there be enough time for everyon
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Oh, and incidentally, it's the free market economists (except Robin Hanson apparently) that believe infinite growth is sustainable.
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The USA has centuries worth of coal. Nazi Germany almost took over the world using coal to make liquid synthetic fuels using 1940s technology. The US population is 300 million about. There are tens of millions of people unemployed and underemployed. We could switch entirely to coal in a year or two if we really wanted too. That would be terrible for the environment, and public health (mercury pollution etc.) but we surely could do this.
As for the long term, we could probably even evacuate the entire planet
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Fine. Given that I cannot change public opinion or government policy, what can I do as an ordinary individual to avoid civilizational risks and get us out into space.
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As one possibility, you can contribute to the growing open manufacturing and maker communities that are creating a free commons of knowledge of how to make things. For example, you could help with RepRap somehow. Or you could improve Blender or other 3D modeling software. Or you could build better communications tools about manufacturing knowledge (maybe based on Google Wave?) Eventually, all that will lead to a new paradigm for manufacturing, allowing us to build better systems, including better spacecraft
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Those are worthy projects. I'm probably going to continue in my own line of academic research, but I'll keep that in mind.
But it's also important to be as prepared as possible for the future getting derailed. I've actually heard people say they would rather die than live through a dark age. Their optimism is a fragile and brittle thing, apparently.
As for me, at the same time as I work to bring on the future, I will continue thinking up and implementing ways to come out on top even if the shit does hit the f
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Sometimes you just have to make a choice between helping the larger society prosper versus turning inward and perhaps, by inaction, helping bring about the very catastrophe you are worried about.
But, from a "preparedness" perspective, working from pessimism, interesting reading:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml [fromthewilderness.com]
http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/themainmessage.htm [alpharubicon.com]
Ideally, one can do both -- build strong local communities that are more self-re
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Well, sometimes some discretion is necessary. Better the seeds of high-tech society survive in a few tightly-organized pockets than spend themselves bailing out the masses who never bothered to make their own preparations. Still, general information should be shared, that's definitely a positive sum game. Specific preparedness measures taken by individuals not so much.
Interesting links, thanks for them.
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I'm sure a lot of economists would agree with you. And, like you try to do, one may paint some extreme picture (like running out of hydrogen in the universe). But, compared to that happening to a universe-spanning species in some far distant future, the human race has no real resource limits of any significance. Hovewer, there are many *artificial* scarcities that have been created, from a shortage of doctors (carefully controlled med school cartels), to a shortage of copyrights (law), to a shortage of rene
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There are two underlying principles to economic theory (in their simplest forms): 1) All resources are scarce. 2) People are greedy.
One could argue about the merits of these three underlying principles but I have yet to ever see an example of a human society where these principles break down.
I would agree that with almost any given resource technological advances have led to a decline in real costs for such resources. There are examples to the contrary such as our recent facination with protecting the envir
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For a society where different rules apply, see:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm [primitivism.com]
"""
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formul
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I do not belive that more "goods and services" are always better for us, but societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and
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societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.
It's called hoarding. And it always was either a reaction to a real life-threatening scarcity (that modern society does not have to deal with) or a part of sadistic desire for power (that society can easily suppress by keeping psychopaths away from power). Things will get much less complicated when economists will abandon the idea that extraordinary greedy people "deserve" extraordinary income by the virtue of their extraordinary feeling of self-importance.
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As another reply, by "Alex Belits" points out, aspects of what you outline, like hoarding, would be considered dysfunctional in other paradigms. A study of other cultures, like some Native American tribes, shows that a "Tribal Chief" was selected and replaced at will by the people. They were picked from their lifelong behavior in the tribe, often to serve as more a spiritual leader than a dictator. Example from recent Iroquois history:
http://www.peace4turtleisland.org/pages/tributetoshenandoa [peace4turtleisland.org]
Re:Misses the post-scarcity point; digital abundan (Score:2)
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You're right, it is a good idea to separate those things, digital from physical right now.
I'd go a step further and suggest a big problem these days is that people lump under "capital" both imaginary fiat dollars (ration units) and physical things like cement plants. As suggested by another poster, if we want a new cement plant, it takes time to build one. But an endless supply of fiat dollars can be created by the stroke of a pen in Congress. Digitally, there is so much capacity now relative to basic needs