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Welcome to 2030
This article was penned by a member of the Danish Parliament to promote discussion about just where we are headed.
To some, it’s a utopian goal … the desired endpoint of our current big tech, big government, Marxist cooperative. To others, it’s a totalitarian hell to be avoided at all costs. But it was published by the World Economic Forum, proponents of the “Great Reset.”
Is this where they really think we could end up? It seems amazingly economically naive for something put out by an economics organization. Free clean energy? Free telecommunications? Free … everything? Without some analog to the Philosopher’s Stone, scarcity will be with us always. And with it, nothing is free. Some method must exist to ration scarce goods. Prices, determined by the free choices of free people, seem to be the best way we know to do this. But it’s not the only way. All the others depend on varying degrees of authoritarian fiat. Surely the WEF knows this. So why pretend that there is a “free stuff” possible future? They certainly seem to know there is a downside to the “free stuff” future…
Once in a while, I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
The downside is very real. But the “free stuff” future is a physical impossibility. Yet they dangle it out there as if it were a real choice. It would seem to be an attempt to get the gullible to trade their liberty for a chimera that can’t be delivered. Fortunately for them, the ranks of the gullible are large and growing. Unfortunate for us.
Published in General
So, if I was going to imagine a low scarcity society, what would you need? (complete post-scarcity is insane. It means anyone who wants can build a working Saturn V rocket, a Great Pyramid out of Platinum, or something else crazy. Outside of virtual worlds, it’s not possible for centuries if at all. See Iain Banks and his Culture book series for a real post-scarcity civilization)
The environmentalists would never go for this.
Wood is renewable, but it does take time.
There’s enough food grown in the world to feed everyone, but its allocation and transportation are still erratic, so your 4th point needs to be bolded, italicized, and double-underlined. Putting it in red flashing characters would help too (see also: toilet paper during a respiratory pandemic for an example of logistical nightmares).
And the amount of food we use for livestock is just massive, and I would expect meat prices would have to climb quite a bit to shift that allocation. And with the growth times for livestock, like wood I don’t ever expect meat to be “post scarcity”.
For everything else, we would need a vigorous recycling system and a way to force unwanted plastics to decompose, since the microplastic pollution problem would likely be worse the cheaper “post scarcity” plastics would get.
That’s why I mentioned the Star Trek replicators creating everything out of just atoms as the utopians’ ideal something-for (from)-nothing situation. Even with the enviros’ current fanaticism with renewables and electric cars, it would be the same as when natural gas fell out of favor. It was the green movement’s only preferred fossil fuel until fracking and horizontal drilling made it cheap and easily available 15 years ago. Then it was demonized.
If battery technology makes electric vehicles viable against internal combustion engines for more than just short-range driving, mining and disposal of the heavy metals needed to make the EV batteries will be demonized. Nuclear already has been demonized for decades, and if solar and wind became 24/7/365 viable they suddenly raise the enviros’ objections over bird kills, land animals being fried, plus the heavy metal problems with the storage batteries, and even last year you started seeing the activists start to push attacks on people daring to fly in airplanes.
If high speed trains were suddenly viable as at least short flight alternatives, you’d then see protests all over the place about the negative environmental consequences of dedicated high-speed rail lines, since in the end, those people hate anything they think makes western-style capitalism function.
In other words: NIMBYism.
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In Fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right, then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
–Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
…but not in anyone’s back yard
Exactly correct. They’re not pro-environment. They’re anti-people. It’s the strangest thing…
[“4th point” is “a highly developed transportation system]
An example the author of the cited article gives is that we won’t own kitchen appliances (she mentions pasta maker and crepe cooker, which itself gives us a glimpse into her lifestyle) but will borrow them (for free) whenever we want it and it will be delivered (for free). I begin to picture a street (or airspace) filled with robots and drones delivering on a daily basis the tools of daily life, a picture that puts today’s traffic jams to shame. And the logistics? Again on my price hobby-horse, how many pasta makers and crepe cookers are in the central warehouse? How confident can I be that the delivery system will get the exact model I expect to my door at the exact time I want it? And what prevents users from over-ordering “just in case” (“I’m not sure if I want pasta or crepes for dinner, so I’ll have them deliver both.”)?
Not to be overly cynical, but I’ll bet she was sober when she wrote this. Which is terrifying.
Is there some article you can point us to that informs this statement, please?
Think of control more than legal ownership. Or of how the two interact.
The Land of “Happy”
Have you been to the land of happy,
Where everyone’s happy all day,
Where they joke and they sing
Of the happiest things,
And everything’s jolly and gay?
There’s no one unhappy in Happy
There’s laughter and smiles galore.
I have been to The Land of Happy-
What a bore
-Shel Silverstein
Not as terrifying as what she dreams up when drunk [with power].
Welcome to 2060
I don’t own anything, have no privacy.
I have no food, I am drunk all the time
And so is everyone else
Please help!
Sounds like the Soviet Union in 1960.
deleted. Duplicate
Dr Ezekiel Emanuel might have some ideas.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to flag😳
Or Wednesday 2 weeks ago for some.
I don’t know if he still does it, but Rush used to read “The real story of Thanksgiving” each year, which describes a lot of it in great detail.
Even bicycles break down. Get flat tires, etc. Are we supposed to believe that the robots will take care of all of that too? How quickly are we supposed to have bicycle-repairing robots? (And the robots that repair the bicycle-repairing robots?)
Once again, Monty Python to the rescue:
Actually I prefer the audio-only version from the albums:
You own nothing = you rent everything.
You have no privacy = you are not able to think for yourself.
Somebody has to make the “free” stuff, be they replicators or whatever.
How would he have gone about brainwashing any target audience? First of all, he mistakenly believed that it would be workers in industrialized nations who would read his book, rise up and overthrow their societies. Except for a few small attempts like the Paris commune in the late 1880’s, the major revolution was in 1917 in Russia, a society which was agrarian not industrial.
He should be admired for presenting an analysis of the structure of capitalism and its various in-built downsides. I don’t think he can be blamed for what happened to his theories, any more than an algebra teacher should be blamed for a Mafia loan shark who uses the equations to stick it to a borrower.
But was Marx just describing, not advocating?
Oh, I think we can blame him alright. His analysis of capitalism is dead wrong right from the square one. The entire analysis is predicated on The Labor Theory of Value. Without LTV the whole thing collapses into a smouldering ruin. And LTV is just plain wrong. So we can and should blame him in the same way we’d blame the engineer of a bridge that collapsed and killed everybody on it.
Can’t like this comment enough.
Absolutely correct.
I thought he did both. I don’t think he liked capitalism.
I don’t think we can draw this conclusion after 100 years and finding ourselves exactly where he predicted we would be. There are blind spots in capitalism and there are cultural safeguards that are critical to cultivate alongside it.
I think we should be taking some of those criticisms seriously. Not to get rid of capitalism, but to make it better.
I’d disagree. He predicted wages of the entire laboring class dropping to subsistence levels driven by the surplus army of the unemployed. That has certainly not happened. Not even close. Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other force in history.
I might add “so far.”