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http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

The problem with the current approach to US government transfers is it is mostly "needs based" (inviting fraud and shame) and is also skewed by narrow politics (like farm subsidies to huge farms not to grow stuff or to grow unhealthy stuff). A basic income for all (social security from birth) would democratize our distribution system, leading to all kinds of innovation in services. It would also respond to increasing unemployment as AI and robotics can do more and more jobs and most human labor becomes increasingly devalued in the exchange economy. We need to accept that there are two broad economic spheres -- an open ended one of real goods for living (food, education, personal housing, infrastructure) and a mostly zero-sum casino economy tied mostly to banking, stocks, derivatives, other finance, insurance, and real estate speculation. The reason the USA is still in the midst of a Great Depression (whatever mainstream economists claim) is because vast amounts of cash are in the FIRE sector and there is a drought of cash for the living sector. That is why economic models about money supply and inflation are flawed -- they don't differentiate enough between these two spheres. A basic income funded by tax (income or wealth) as well as possibly inflation and also royalties on use of government assets like fishing rights or spectrum use (like the Alaska Permanent fund) is a way of moving money out of the zero-sum FIRE sector into the hands of people who would spend it on having a healthier human life.

From 1964, a bit ahead of its time but playing out now given essentially zero net new jobs for a decade even as the population grows:
http://educationanddemocracy.o...
"Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."

Most wealth comes from a combination of natural resources and what our ancestors learned by trial an error, and is our common global inheritance, as explained by C. H. Douglas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Social credit is an interdisciplinary distributive philosophy developed by C. H. Douglas (1879-1952), a British engineer, who wrote a book by that name in 1924. It encompasses the fields of economics, political science, history, accounting, and physics. Its policies are designed, according to Douglas, to disperse economic and political power to individuals. Douglas wrote, "Systems were made for men, and not men for systems, and the interest of man which is self-development, is above all systems, whether theological, political or economic."[1] ... According to Douglas, the true purpose of production is consumption, and production must serve the genuine, freely expressed interests of consumers. In order to accomplish this objective, he believed that each citizen should have a beneficial, not direct, inheritance in the communal capital conferred by complete access to consumer goods assured by the National Dividend and Compensated Price.[6] Douglas thought that consumers, fully provided with adequate purchasing power, will establish the

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
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Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
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http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
----
Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ...
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest):
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
"we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software. :-(
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See also, for the future both of them together may create, the upcoming movie "Elysium":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
----
In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on Elysium, a Stanford torus[8][9] high-tech space station governed by President Patel (Faran Tahir), in a utopian setting which includes access to private medical machines that offer instant cures, while everyone else lives below on the overpopulated, ruined, "Third World slum"[7] Ear

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
"The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values: "As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone." In the second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy, which includes economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of "adequate health care". The first two freedoms of speech and religion are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and anticipated what would become known decades later as the "human security" paradigm in social science and economic development. He also included the "freedom from fear" against national aggression before the idea of a United Nations for this protection was envisioned or discussed by world leaders and allied nations."

Anyway, in theory, the point of constitutions and governments is to define and enforce rights in a society. Enforcing rights includes arbitrating between people with conflicting notions of boundaries, as in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". Such rights allow increased trust in a society, which reduces operating costs, as otherwise all your time and energy may need to go into protecting yourself against your neighbor, and that society will sicken and die relative to other societies with greater internal trust. If the USA continues to descend into distrustful paranoia, security costs go up, and the society begins to seize up.

Look up information about "Social Credit" and C. H. Douglas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization."

See also: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people’s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when suffi

I like listening to music. Here is what some people have to say about forcing other people to listen to music:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-02/news/31989906_1_music-groups-torture-prisoners-guantanamo-bay
"A new documentary released by Al Jazeera exposes the use of childrens songs and heavy metal music to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. "

I also like math... By analogy, what is forcing people to do math against their will?

You wrote: "I hated highschool..."

Then you wrote: "I have to ..."

Why do you have to perpetuate the system you hate?

I know there are answers -- the right to consume in our society is linked to participating in our current economic order. See: "The Triple Revolution Memorandum".
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/17/why-the-triple-revolution-memorandum-was-ahead-of-its-time/index.html

So, maybe you have to stay a school teacher for that reason. I certainly face the same economic issue myself regarding other paying work. And maybe you students are indeed better off with your approach in the context you describe, all other things being equal. So, then the issue is, how can one change the context so all other things are not equal and there is a rebalancing?

Still, either a universal basic income or the proposal I outlined would give families plenty of money to hire math tutors like yourself if their kids wanted to learn math. Or a basic income for everyone would mean you could do different things with your own time.

What you say from your experience is truth. But, you can still think more deeply and creatively about the meaning of it, like John Taylor Gatto, Jeff Schmidt, or John Holt did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator)

If all the kids you were teaching had freely chose to be in your class, would you have to think so much about authority? What would your day be like if the only kids you were interacting with explicitly wanted to be learning math or anything else you wanted to teach (like they wanted to be engineers or whatever)? The fact that there are children who are compelled to be in your classroom when they don't want to be there is a big part of the problem. Sadly, Jaime Escalante's efforts were essentially shut down by the school bureaucracy that could not accept them, so I'm not saying creating or sustaining alternatives in public schools is easy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante#National_attention

Khan Academy is one example of part of a different way forward. Free schools are another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
http://www.sudval.org/

Or:
http://www.augusttojune.com/
"Come inside a public school happily and purposefully going against current trends and join 26 8-10 year olds, their teacher, and their parents for a year bursting with opportunities for curiosity, creativity and compassion. "

The last link, is a documentary about an alternative public school, so things are possible.

More alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/

More on this theme

"The world is full."

Carrying capacity is a function of technology and lifestyle (which are in turn functions of imagination and ethics):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

The carrying capacity of the local solar system with known or easily forseeable technology is probably on the order of quadrillions of humans living in many millions of Earth's worth of space habitats.

See, to complement "Know Thyself", see also "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://www.anwot.org/

The big issue is we are trying to apply scarcity-based economic thinking to the technologies of abundance. So we demand that people work for the right to consume, but then we make them compete against firms introducing robots. This was a problem seen as far back as 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

A basic income, improved gift economy, better technologies for local subsistence, and internet-empowered planning at all levels could help increase our collective carrying capacity and quality of life.

See also:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"Why should we get rid of money?"

Mainly because it is increasing obsolete as a vague way to understand demand. Things like emails and twitters are a more nuanced way to express complex demands.

But, it is true, with a "basic income", money is not as bad a thing. For example, see Marshall Brain's Manna:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
""It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free." ...
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
"Let me show you." said Cynthia. She opened her catalog to a page, and pointed to one of the pictures. It was clothing. "This is what I am wearing." she said. "See - it is 6 credits. In a typical week I only spend about 70 or so credits on clothes. That's why I like to wear something new every day."
"The robots did manufacture Cynthia's outfit for free. They took recycled resources, added energy and robotic labor and created what she is wearing. It cost nothing to make it. She paid credits simply to keep track of how many resources she is using." "

More and more the link between a right to consume and a need to get humans to do labor is breaking. People could see that beginning even in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird peopleâ(TM)s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures --unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal i

AC had a good point. Creativity is generally not improved by rewards, and there are other ways to support people than linking the right to consume with an increasingly precarious income-through-jobs link. We could have had $2.5 million of free stuff, and now we are getting yet more proprietary stuff.

See my essay on that theme (though it is directed more at tax-exempt non-profits):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
Longer version: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

See also on why creativity diminished if done for material gain:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

From 1964 on the strained income-through-jobs link.
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

Alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_dictionary_of_alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC

Computers have imporved a lot since the old USSR. How does your computer with billions of transistors know how to move information around inside itself to meet your needs without using money inside it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

How does Debian know what software to make and maintain? Can emails and chat messages act as currency?

Soon we will have print-on-demand with 3D printers. Does that not also change things? We may also have recycle-on-demand with nanotech devices.

An alternative idea for designing sustainable and flourishing economies:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Even if capitalism coudl be made to work sustainably (including if externalities are accounted for through government regulation, taxes, and subsidies), then we still need a basic income to make sure the market hears the needs of everyone. See, from 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

Or more recently, from the "free" encyclopedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Ironically, it is EU regulations that forced a lot of this cleanup (as another poster commented on).

"That makes a lot more sense than "quantitative easing" which prints the same amount of money just to give it to a few banks, who then lend it out at rate 10 times that at which they borrowed it."

You've probably seen this, but if not, you might like it:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/

Parts are on YouTube, and in Money as Debt II there is a great animation of people on a treadmill as debts are created. There is also a section on the "casino economy" where much money ends up just betting on currency fluctuations and such, and is unavailable for transactions in the physical economy.

I liked your points elsewhere about printing extra money, when it is needed, creating more wealth than any inflation. The Social Credit movement argued something like that, and said the printed money should be distributed as a basic income.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value. While Douglas did not deny that all costs are ultimately due to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth. Douglas was careful to distinguish between value, costs and prices. He claimed that one of the factors leading to a misdirection of thought in terms of the nature and function of money was economists' obsession over values and their relation to prices and incomes. While Douglas recognized "value in use" as a legitimate theory of values, he also claimed that values were subjective and not capable of being measured in an objective manner. Thus, he rejected the idea that the role of money is to act as a standard, or measure, of value. Douglas believed that the role of money is distribution of production. ...
Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."

See also for points on the breakign link between work and income, from 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

Anyway, more hopeful/collaborative reading that many people have long been trying to deal with this social disease of greed and fear and ignorance, even while there is plenty to go around, and more and more every day.

I don't ag

I have to admit you have a point as to up-front costs, but if the robots can build and maintain other robots, which they can do to a limited extent already, the operating cost is less of an issue (although the robots can more easily get out of control like in James P. Hogan' s "Two Faces of Tomorrow").

Plus, in general, robots are becoming cheaper than human labor for more and more jobs anyway. See Marshall Brain's presentations, like this one:
    "Marshall Brain - Automation & Unemployment"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs

Ot Martin Ford's writings:
    http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/

Or this from 1964:
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
    The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
    There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

Or related stuff on my site.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
        http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
        http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( "

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization#Fall_of_civilizations
"Joseph Tainter in "The Collapse of Complex Societies" suggested that there were diminishing returns to complexity, due to which, as states achieved a maximum permissible complexity, they would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return. Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this figure in the 2nd Century AD."

The suggestion is that civilizations tend to refuse to accept going down any path to a more sensible solution than collapse because every move towards better social health would be more painful than just business-as-usual. Of course, ideally, that is what political leadership (not political followership?) is for, to get people to make the hard choices and improve overall social health.

More on social pyramids and economics:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

As long as there is a huge and growing rich/poor divide in this world, driven in part by increasing automation decreasing the value of most human labor, and we fail to do anything about that overall situation (like institute a basic income), our country will be at increasing risk for all sorts of different directions, of which cyber threats are only one set of issues. Here is a document prepared for President Kennedy and delivered to President Johnson in 1964, that is only more and more true in some ways:
"The Triple Revolution Memorandum: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights"
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measure -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not

Good points, and thanks for the kid words about the article.

I feel lack of universal health coverage, for example, is one thing holding back more entrepreneurship in the USA. I've known several people who said they can not change jobs or try something different over health insurance worries.

But, that is in some sense by design; from "Conceptual Guerilla":
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
"When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just âoedime-store economicsâ â" intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly donâ(TM)t. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor" Thatâ(TM)s their whole philosophy in a nutshell -- which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives"
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position -- "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labo"â angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor. ,,,"

Of course, the ultimate in "cheap labor" is "no labor" -- replacing labor by a machine, a computer, better design, cheap energy, or volunteers, or something else. Technology is making that all possible, and even easier. For example, cloud computing makes it easier to get rid of system administrators.

So, in general, the bargaining power of most labor is eroding, because productivity is rising but demand is limited (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)..

I'm not saying the bargaining power of all labor is eroding, just most labor. Some people are still in demand, generally those with certain combinations of rarer skills combined with social connections. But all that contributes to an increasing rich/poor divide. More and more people are finding that a highly automated industrial system just does not need them. And that is bad news in the absence of some sort of social safety net, or better, some sort of social security as a human right as a citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms

You used the word "competitive", but the fact is, cooperation is more what we need.
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm

Why should US citizens have to be "competitive" with wage slavery or full automation because of an income-through-jobs link?
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

People saw this was going to happen even in the 1960s, but sadly the Democrats ended up pushing for full employment rather than social equity as a right to access the fruits of the industrial commons:

And the Republicans became the party of technological progress in some ways (but co

From an Amazon review of that book: "The one lesson is simply this: economic planning should take into account the effects of economic policies on all groups, not just some groups, and what those effects will be in the long run, not just the short run. That's it. That's the lesson. Fallacious economic policies almost invariably seek to benefit one group at the expense of all others, or to bring about short-term benefits at the expense of long-term benefits. With this as his thesis, Hazlitt examines the numerous manifestations of such fallacies in different situations."

That sounds sensible to me. I'd agree that a lot of problems in the USA are from the way powerful interests have used the government to get preferences in their direction (like the US meat, dairy, and grain industries, which is destroying US health, or like the US war industry, see "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedly Butler).

However, and not having read the book,does Hazlitt talk about how mainstream economist assume demand is infinite as a way to keep up with exponentially rising productivity and still keep most people employed in the mainstream system so they have purchasing power to buy the necessities of life? See also the essay "The Triple Revolution" from 1964 about a breaking "income-through-jobs" link even then, and the last thirty plus years of stagnant real wages in the USA has proved that out to some degree, and now we see declining real wages and those economic trends are really taking hold.
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

I feel demand for more physical stuff is not infinite among healthy humans (even given status competition) for at least four reasons. One is a spreading ethics like "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" that suggests "voluntary simplicity". A second is because of the idea of Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" which suggests that after basic material aspirations are fulfilled, humans tend to focus on higher, generally non-material, ones. A third reason is the simple accumulation of stuff in our environment, where it becomes easier to find what you need as someone else's discarded or underutilized infrastructure at little incremental cost (thus Freecycle and too-cheap-to-matter internet services). A fourth reason is that for more creative and intellectual tasks, it turns out, reward is not much of a motivator and may even reduce performance by interfering with intrinsic motivation:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

While the original article makes it seem like cell phones are not being replaced due to limited finances, could it be that we are also reaching some point of saturation in some area of basic communications technology?

While it is true, all things being equal, "more" in some sense might be nicer in some ways (like a faster cell phone or a prettier display), it is also true that the law of diminishing returns sets in at some point, where "more" starts to impose huge costs, including non-monetary ones like confusion and hassles and time costs of constant upgrades and learning new stuff. What would Hazlitt say are the implications of a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services across our entire society? That is not the kind of thing free market economists usually want to think about...

Then there is the fact that people without jobs due to rising productivity and limited demand would have no means to pay for more stuff, which then leads to another set of problems. Think about the implication of IBM's Watson winning at Jeopardy, or, for another case, this dexterous robot hand:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-han

I agree with you on the value of diversity. Still, one can also have diversity with a lot less work when code is shared and people are cooperating. I talk about that here:
    http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"Increasing competition in a society will greatly increase the amount of work to be done. As Alfie Kohn and others like Richard Stallman have pointed out, direct competition in a society is overall a reducer of abundance. While there is a lot of value in a diversity of services and products and friendly competition can help increase that, once people agree on the value of a service or product, cooperation by people in producing the good or service is almost always more efficient than directly competing with each other. Competition creates wasted duplicate efforts, incompatible standards, confusion among potential consumers, excessive advertising, and even direct sabotage; all of that dysfunction creates more work for everyone though. While it may make sense to have a variety of, say, cameras, whether the groups producing those cameras cooperate or compete in discussing new innovations is the issue. The free software movement, with groups working on different software products but sharing code and ideas under free licenses shows an alternative to commercial product groups working in secrecy and isolation and defending their finished proprietary products with patents and copyrights from those who would copy them or improve them independently. Law Professor James Boyle talks about aspects of this in his free book "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind"."

Would we really have so many redundant languages and redundant code libraries and redundant products if people were not competeting so much with each other and were sharing code? I think we might have more mass customization (like everyone may tweek their GNU/Linux system), but I think we would also have common systems people were working from. Even with the variety of GNU/Linux distros out there (but really, how many are big? Debian/Ubuntu? RedHat? Suse? etc.) they share a lot of common tools and also they are such a small number of mainlines compared to, say, the number of times cameras have been reinvented over the years...

Still, this is to say nothing against an individual who wants to learn re-inventing something. That can be a great way to learn, and a very enjoyable thing. But when we talk about how a productive community should be working, that is different.

Anyway, my key point is mostly that a focus on creating tech jobs misses the big picture of how our economy is changing due to the proliferation of all this advanced technology. Is not the point of all this fancy technology to reduce hiring in the Tech sector? :-) As well as every other sector? But then we act like unemployment is a bad thing. It would not be such a bad thing if we considered it a human right to have a "basic income" (social security for everyone) for everyone to be entitled to some of the fruits of the industrial commons, whether they "work" at a paying job or not. As was suggested in 1964:
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

That's the big widely unrecognized issue here...

Automation, better design, voluntary social networks and limited demand mean that the value of most human labor is rapidly decreasing. Implicit in your comments is the assumption we need everyone to be working to produce all the goods and services we need (or want). But, that assumption is less and less true. Depending on who you believe and how you define unemployment, unemployment in the USA right now is somewhere between 10% and about 25%. Further, compared to a century or two ago, when children worked in factories and mines, and practically no one "retired", and practically no one went to college or graduate school, and people worked 70 hour work week (in factories or on farms), unemployment now could be thought of as 50% to 75% or higher compared to a century ago. The fact is, compared to then, essentially nobody in the USA is working, and those who work are not doing very much of it. It's true that if you go back to hunter/gatherer times (see Marshall Sahlins), you'll find a similar pattern (only some worked, and then it was not very hard).

For example, look at this video of a robot arm throwing a cell phone into the air and catching it, and tell me that most human labor will be needed in manufacturing in twenty years:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
Even China is starting to have issues with manufacturing unemployment. How long before many services go the same way as agriculture and manufacturing? Yet our entire schooling system is still oriented around turning out mostly factory workers and soldiers.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Anyway, so I think current trends show that work has long been going away (even as demand has increased greatly up to a point). Further, in the USA, most people have long gone past the point of diminishing returns for more stuff and bigger homes to the point of negative returns (due to the destruction of community and family) -- even as some 10% to 20% of the US population has been left out of that and is relatively impoverished and would benefit greatly from more stuff.
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948879/

The happiest places in the world usually have both material abundance and strong social programs:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7585729&page=1
"According to a 2005 editorial, published in the British Medical Journal and authored by Dr. Tony Delamothe, research done in Mexico, Ghana, Sweden, the U.S. and the U.K. shows that individuals typically get richer during their lifetimes, but not happier. It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one's life, according to Delamothe. "

Some related links:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/american.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

If we look at how humans used to live before formal "jobs", like Marshall Sahlins talks about here:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm-
there are lots of things humans always want to do, like raise children, sing, dance, explore, commune with nature and the infinite, learn, create new things, comfort the dying, and just hang out with friends and family. So, there would be no shortage of things to do if we get machines to do more of the repetitive scut-work if no one wants to do it voluntarily. We would just be moving full-circle to an older way of life, but with a new technological twist (and longer life spans and bigger dreams).

A major issue is that our current economic system is set up on the assumption that if people don't work, they should not have access to food, shelter, or medical care. But automation and better design reduces the value of most human labor. And, the very dynamic of capitalism produces ever better designs and increased automation. This trend was pointed out in 1964, and, with some ups and downs, is accelerating as computers and robotics and networks and design are increasing in capacity exponentially:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume

Thanks for your other replies. Sorry to hear about your ex-girlfriend's negative spiral. Certainly her case should show how wealth has diminishing returns for most people, and things like physical health, mental health, and community become better investments by society at some point than just producing more stuff and and isolated indoors lifestyle to go with that? Some ways past that:
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy"
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
"Vitamin D and Depression"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671

You continue to evade some key points I have made. The most important is that, as Einstein said, there is no objective way to decide what we want to do without considering values and priorities and related assumptions, which are things that stem for essentially a religious impulse.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

By the way, a toilet cleaning robot (not that it looks that well worked out):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9vaqsd1iP4

Here is a better idea, that, using better design, makes a toilet into more of a self-cleaning appliance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcpZgp23nzM&NR=1

There are more links in the sidebar. Why do we have to build an entire society and economy around forcing people to clean other people's toilets when we can build robots to do it, or build better toilets that clean themselves? And the same extends to any disagreeable task you can name -- we can either build a robot to do it at this point, redesign the process so it does not need to be done, redesign the process so it is fun, decide it is not as important as we thought, or figure out some equitable way to share the disagreeable parts. But you still seem fixated on this issue that people have to be motivated to do stuff. Healthy humans do stuff because that is what healthy humans do. Granted, between school, TV, authoritarian workplaces, lack of sunlight, broken communities, and so on, most US Americans are not very healthy, as reflected in the skyrocketing depression rates at ever earlier ages, and also as reflected by a growing rich/poor divide that split our society into three classes -- those with no need to work, those who work too much, and those who can't get jobs at all.

As was said in 1964,
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

That is what you are ignoring, as are most of the other believers in essentially mainstream economics. The "Midas Plague" is totally changing the nature of economics, and the choice are essentially to waste all that productivity to keep a scarcity-based economic model working or to broadly

Places with huge problems also tend to have legacies of intervention by foreign governments and foreign corporations. The Earth has no resource limitation problems in the long term:
"Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html

But, with robots on the way, it's easy to see why many think life is cheap because masses of human labor are no longer needed for the earlier exploitation:
"Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

That is the deeper problem we need to address as a society, how to move past the irony of having all these tools of abundance but people using them to make artificial scarcity. We need to stop using military robots to enforce a culture of work on humans and instead make robots to do the work. We need to stop building nuclear missiles to fight over oil wells on Earth and instead use the same basic technologies to produce power or make accessible resources in space (I'm a renewable energy fan more than nuclear though). Here are some other ways to move past that irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C (Surviving America's Depression Epidemic)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

There are lots of solutions rather than kill off people or prevent them from being born when there is so much abundance for everyone these days through modern technology. You want to stop suffering? Break the link between a right-to-consume and being able to sell your labor on a market where automation and better design is removing good jobs every day, like people said would be a problem even back in 1964:
http://educationanddemocra

If goverments were so bad, why is much of Western Europe with more intervention but more democracy overall generally happier than the USA?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html

The biggest point is from here, that the income-through-jobs link is becoming more broken every day as we see sci-fi robots become reality, as forseen in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
"""

Some of this may be that you are seeing the part you want to see and trying to pigeon hole these arguments. Here is a good essay for a broader perspective:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constan

You make a lot of good points, and sure we have seen a lot of change in the last few hundred years (including multiple genocides of people like the Native Americans who were in the way of change to the land they claimed). The older historical evidence is that in a place like Rome with a slave economy, you were pretty much either a wealthy land owner, a merchant, or a slave. There was maybe a little wiggleroom for an underclass who competed with the slaves and of course there was the military. (There was not much of a "middle class"). As James P. Hogan suggests in his sci-fi books like Voyage from Yesteryear, we are undergoing a "phase change" to a new economic order. If robots can do work about as good as most people for less cost, and better design means most work does not need to be done, then where does that leave everyone who is not a wealthy land owner (or some equivalent in today's USA, owning some other monopoly on something like patents and copyrights and mindshare so on)? With robots and computers as the new intelligent slaves (until they revolt? :-), who needs humans to be physical slaves, merchants, or soldiers? How can you have an underclass that can survive if they are competing with robots who can do everything much cheaper? It would be a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, as Marshall Brain outlines, with a very few left owning everything and all other humans in concentration camps. Unless we have a different social order that moves beyond the notion that a right to consume has to be linked to productivity through formal employment.
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

Healthy humans only need so much stuff. Automation may be good for firms that do it, but if demand is limited, jobs disappear in the system. That's why capitalist systems must grow continually, to create new jobs to make up for productivity increases. The problem is, too much stuff actually can get in the way of a good life, since good human relations are generally the most important part of a happy life and too much stuff distracts from that. Also, right now, much stuff has negative external costs involved in its creation (though we may someday move beyond that).

Here is some sci-fi on ironies in a world of abundance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. ..."

But, that would still be a big shift from what we have now, which is based on the idea that people only have a right to consume based on the value of their labor. This was talked about back in the 1960s in a letter sent to President Johnson in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

To deal with increasing automation destroying the value of most labor given limited demand, what we need more is a global sharing of the wealth produced by an automated industrial commons, which means taxes for a basic income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
or transitioning to another economic model like a gift economy or a subsistence economy or something else. The big issue is not so much automation (although there are aspects that are negative of loss of control or loss of joy in hands on work that you may love) but the issue of how the fruits of automation get distributed. Related on three different visions of work we need to bring together for the 21st century:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

Think of this example: someone sets up vending machines powered by solar panels in every community, and these machines print wood shaped to order for very low prices, and the machines take next-to-no labor to keep going. Basically, what you outlined, only even better (maybe the devices just suck carbon and water from the air to make the wood). Your company can't compete with the prices and quality and speedy delivery, so everyone you employ is laid off. The owner of this enterprise, who owns all the patents and who gets all the money, decides to pile it under his or her mattress, or alternatively, gamble it in high stakes poker games (called derivatives :-) that just move to higher and higher stakes. Where are the new jobs there? Sure, that company may make a few new jobs, but overall, lots of labor is saved, so there is a net negative as far as jobs, because healthy people only need so much wood. The only reason to even worry about jobs is this issue of the right to consume, as well as government enforcing monopolies on land or patents or copyrights, since otherwise there is so much abundance we could organize the economy differently, like GNU/Lin

The biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

Money is a collective fantasy about rationing; how can we move beyond it? As Iain Banks wrote, money is a sign of poverty. James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" also envisioned a post-scarcity society that had moved beyond it.

The last time an big company recruiter sent me an inquiry, I sent back this link: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

The problem:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"School Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Some more links about moving beyond the need to work for pay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_economy

From something I helped put together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."

Well, are you lazy because you are leaching off of 5000 years (and more) of innovations made by our ancestors? Do you reinvent the science and technology from scratch when you want a new computer? At what point after all that hard work by so many will we be able to stop working so much?

Over the last 200 years, the US workforce has gone from about 90% farmers to about 1% farmers, using mostly machinery like tractors and harvesters. Over the last 50 years, the US workforce has gone from about 30% manufacturing workers to about 12% (with some imports, but much has been productivity increases). We now have massive and increasing unemployment. Industrial productivity continues to increase exponentially. Where are all these things that people need to be working at? Services? Robots are doing more and more, as is computer software, and most (not all) service jobs doing things like telemarketing or being a restaurant employee are not very good jobs. A relative handful of people maintaining Debian GNU/Linux are supplying software to billions. Technology is an amplifier. The whole nature of economics is changing.

What we have now is actually vast amounts of effort that go into non-productive activities because of the attitude you outline, where in the end a greater and greater percentage of effort goes into "guarding" rather than production. RIAA or SCO are great examples of this, with endless lawsuits trying to get income for some few and wasting everyone's time and energy. But much the same is true even these days about basic material things like cars. Here is something I wrote on why taxes would go *down* if everyone got a free luxury electric car, because of the savings on health care costs, pollution remediation, and war taxes:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

The "conventional wisdom" assumptions about work and income are out of date for the 21st century. Let alone they are *cruel* given people are homeless and hungry amidst so much abundance in the USA, and those numbers continue to grow. As is said at the third link below: "The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

Related:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html

Two by me on why robots are changing the nature of employment:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html

Here is something I wrote on why even *millionaires* would be better off with a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

You are voting against your own self-interest because of obsolete 20th century ideology. The age of one-for-one trade is coming to an end (even if there may always be aspects of trade in our society). We're in a new age of emerging abundance from advanced technology, one that makes possible aga

While most day-to-day engineering is, as you say, a compromise between multiple priorities, I've been told by an IBM Research "Master Inventor" that really excellent engineering figures out a way to meet all the priorities without major compromise through some new insight (but such conceptual breakthroughs are rare).

Of course, a deeper issue is, what are our priorities, values, and assumptions, and how are we choosing them? :-)

I hope we go into future technological singularities with humane values at the front of our priorities, because otherwise, building things like military robots to enforce economic dogmas (usually linked to not letting people eat unless they work) is totally ironic.
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Why not just build robots to do the work instead? The major challenge of the 21st century is overcoming the irony of the tools of abundance being used to create artificial scarcity (because the people directing the engineers are still preoccupied with perceived scarcity). A parody I wrote related to that:
    "A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd?hl=en

I think many engineers spend too much time indoors with too little sunlight. They should be taking vitamin D to help ward of disease and mental illness:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

As I wrote about here, inspired by the Virgle April fools joke, I see Google as being conflicted about its identity in a world that could provide abundance for everyone if we made a post-scarcity ideological shift, but which currently does not because a scarcity ideology is still dominant:
"A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"""
Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ...
The fact is, there are far more than six *million* millionaire families in the USA who would never have to "work" another day in their lives if they were frugal (and so could work full time on space settlement or other worthwhile charitable free ends).
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_billionaire_next_door.htm
There must just be a failure of imagination that keeps them from it. Or an excess of a certain capitalist religion shown on a libertarian-leaning college mailing list I am on (and usually disagreeing :-). Or a failure to be able to define "enough" and move beyond a fear of becoming poor. And the millionaires I've known or heard of who became suddenly wealthy generally are suddenly adrift in a life that has not prepared them for thinking about deep questions like what their values and priorities really are and why -- and working through that takes time which they often don't have as money runs away from them spent on trivialities of "their stillborn adult lives". And the stable millionaires who have slowly earned their wealth are often so enmeshed in the current order of things to make it hard to see beyond it (a current order which they may well have genuinely and sincerely tried to make better, like at Google, and even succeeded at doing so to an extent, within the bounds of Empire.) ...
Maybe the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires (governments) out there should think on Spock's choice as capitalistic and militaristic irrational exuberance starts reentering the stratosphere (wars over food, water, arms, climate, and oil profits, and yes, blowback from terrorism).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=globalization+blowback
And actually do something besides compete and mak

Very insightful: "government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities". In a way, the USA had its greatest general prosperity when marginal tax rates were 91% and the government was interfering heavily in the economy right after WWII, which lead to the Golden Era of the 1950s with many one-income blue collar families, the sort of "family values" many Republicans talk about. What does that tell us?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt

Also related:
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap

Ideally, we need to tax and redistribute as a basic income, given the income-through-jobs link is breaking down through out our society from automation and better design:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

This three to eight year lag is the spread of cyberweapons is supposed to reassure us? :-( What other weapons have three to eight year lags in being available to everyone?

We need to move beyond war, in part because it is too terrible to contemplate at this point:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

We need to transition to "intrinsically secure" infrastructure:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
that we protect by means of "mutual security":
    http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430

We need to move beyond current defense ideology in the USA based on competitive profit-maximizing centralized brittle infrastructure that we try to defend by unilateral dominance (at a cost of about a trillion dollars a year in the USA).

Well, we also have robots on Planet Earth:
    http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

What does that robot mean about the future of most jobs requiring hand-eye coordination?

See also:
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

A basic income almost passed under Nixon. :-)

Every human has some claim on the commons. Do you know how many families have been destroyed by failed businesses? How can you have opportunity when you live in grinding poverty and are easily exploited? While it is true that "hard work" is an aspect of what created wealth in our society, a lot of wealth also comes from the biosphere, natural resources, a cultural commons of ideas, as well as luck and genetics. Why should people not have a claim on at least those aspects of societal wealth even if they work not at all or have not inherited capital from their parents? The issue is ideology which defines how things work at the moment in a certain social system built on certain social assumptions with a certain physical infrastructure that reflects those assumptions and values. Why should jobs be the only justification for a right to consume, especially in an age of increasing automation? From:
"The Triple Revolution"
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
"""

From:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/40

I've become more and more enamored of the idea of a "basic income" which would be essentially extending Social Security in the USA to everyone in the country (and eventually globally) regardless of need or age. The same for Medicare. It seems to me that is an easy first step for a market system to continue to function, and after that we will likely see further transformations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.usbig.net/

It's heartening to think the US Congress almost passed one under Richard Nixon. So it is not like the idea is politically impossible. And several other countries and communities have been experimenting with it recently.

A simple equation:

Jobs = (Demand - (Stockpiled_Supply - War)) / (Automation * Good_Design)

We can assume "Automation" and "Good_Design" are increasing, which tends to reduce the need for "Jobs", all other things being equal. Mainstream economics suggests "Demand" is essentially infinite -- that is, if people have two cars, they want four cars, and if they have four cars, they want one hundred cars parked in their driveway, and then even that won't be enough, they will want a thousand cars, a million cars. Clearly, stated that way, mainstream economics sounds absurd, because people only have so much time and attention they will devote to acquiring cars. So, if "Demand" is ultimately limited once most people meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, information, and some consumer items ("the best things in life are free or cheap"), or at least "Demand" is rising less quickly than improvements in productivity "(Automation * Good_Design)", then the number of paying "Jobs" will go towards zero. And as there are less "Jobs", and so more competition for them, the remaining "Jobs" will get paid less and have worse working conditions.

The absence of good "Jobs" creates a crisis in a society that only allows people with jobs to direct the market and take goods from it (thus, the unemployed will starve, or riot, or be on unrelated small and depressing welfare payments, see Marshall Brain's Manna or described in the Triple Revolution memorandum).
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

"War" can increase jobs by destroying any stockpiled goods or existing infrastructure, requiring more goods and infrastructure, or vast stockpiles of military might intended no never be used, but "War" has become too terrible to contemplate even as stockpiles of war materials beg to be used, and in any case, building a *need* for "War" into an economic system seems inelegant and unethical, especially when "War" can so easily mean Armageddon these days.

The above is the equation I would suggest is more worth exploring these days than the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" one. That simple equation is IMHO key to understanding the next twenty years of our society, especially with the emergence of more capable robots. It would be worthwhile to plot the number of jobs over time for all sorts of assumptions of curves of demand and curves of automation and better design. One could also add in some demographic aspects of changing population sizes which I have left out for simplicity, as well ais issues of how well the market economy is functioning in terms of currency flows and hording and inflation/deflation. Remember, in the next twenty years, none of the resource constraints Peak Oilers worry about are likely to be huge, but nonetheless, the equation above might show jobs trending low enough to create

Your suggestion sounds like a variation of this physicists suggestion:
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

But there are a few deeper issues. Goodstein, for example, talks about general elitist issues in education.

Another I add is another interpretation of what it means as you suggest that the number of physicists exceeded "demand" (in a classical economics sense), since is that not just another way of saying the number of physicists exceeded what those with money were willing to pay for? And most of the problems the world faces (like starvation or river blindness or pollution or human rights issues) are not of urgent interest to many of those with serious money, who are often busy amusing themselves to death?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Or alternatively fighting to stay financially obese. Or alternatively, want do do good, but are so locked into a narrow competitive mindset they think the world will be saved by spreading competitive capitalism everywhere, like Iraq? This a broad failure of morality and ethics in our society, cultivated in part by a cult of consumerism linked to a malfunctioning industrial control system.

Here is the reason that everyone who wants to study physics in this potentially abundant world can not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. ... The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

We need to transition in general to a post-scarcity society moving beyond rationing the basics (perhaps a guaranteed basic income like social security for everyone would be a start). Right now, the post-scarcity technologies physicists and engineers (and even poets and novelists) have provided us with (like biotech, nuclear tech, nanotech, robotics, AI, advertising, the internet, and so on) are being wielded by people preoccupied with a scarcity worldview. That is a terribly dangerous situation, that people have the power to create and destroy so rapidly and so extensively, but many with that power do not see there are other options to

Just for fun, theoretically, you can put payloads into orbit and on routes to the moon/planets/asteroids if you give them a solar sail. (People could not survive that trip, unless encoded in data bits and silicon.)

Maggots and leeches are proving effective in medicine in various ways.
    "Maggots and Leeches: Old Medicine is New"
    http://www.livescience.com/health/050419_maggots.html

In round figures, people are about 90% bacteria by numbers, and about 10% bacteria by weight. Bathing too often may disrupt your bacterial ecology and lead to infections or skin problems, and growing up in too clean environments may lead to immune problems. Although exactly what is too much is problematical. See:
    "The filthy, stinking truth: The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick."
    http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/

Until we actually landed on the moon, the best scientists still thought landers might sink into dust. Someday, we may turn the Moon into a green paradise using greenhouses and artificial lighting or mirrors.

Psychologically, the individual's perception is still the center of everything (though people try to move beyond that in their thinking). Quantum mechanics reflects this. Still, we may be living in a simulation in which case, like those living in Plato's "Cave", most of what we assume may be just a shadow of the truth:
    http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Anyway, just having fun with your points. I like your insightful comment that knowing enough to be dangerous (as opposed to nothing or lots) is a source of difficulties.

Here is the big issue with Moore's law and it was forseen in the 1960s:
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis."

So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.

"If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that."

If everything else is free (or incredibly cheap), why does an author need a return on their time (most of the time)?
See: http:///www.reprap.org (GPL'd 3D fabricator) "Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain M. Banks, 1987.

Do parents need a return for the time they spend with their children? Or, in this case their "mind children"?

In 1997, my wife and I gave away a garden simulator under the GPL (more than six person-years of work)
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
and got the whole free internet in return (including Slashdot). Seems like a good deal to me. :-)

The problem for Douglas Adams was that, as Ian Banks' quote might suggest, he was was *poor* (or felt he was poor, or felt at risk of being poor in the future), where poor essentially means you can't expect reasonable needs to be met without major effort. So Douglas Adams must have felt (perhaps quite correctly) that he needed the ration units to survive (or thrive) in a system oriented around rationing. When scarcity (for most things) comes to an end worldwide, as is happening, then there is not much need for rationing and ration units for most of the basics (energy, food, water, shelter, computing, health care, transportation, etc.) See also, from 1964(!):
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."

To see what such a world might look like in fiction (contrasted to our the recent ways), read James P. Hogan's novel, _Voyage from Yesteryear_.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Of course, as in James P. Hogan's novel, getting there (post-scarcity ideology dominant) from here (scarcity ideology dominant) is going to be "interesting times". For a more dystopian take on this (if the wealth from cybernation is not shared roughly evenly), see:
    "Manna"
      http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://breakingranks.net/
"The purpose of this web site is to discuss the social cost of rankism and to develop a grassroots capacity to defend and protect dignity in everyday life. We hope you will join us in planning and building a world without rankism!"

http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"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."

http://www.reprap.org/
"[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."

http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

I used to hang out at the robot labs at CMU in the 1980s. What frightened me most about the whole thing of military robotics (as well as mind children) was a combination of arrogance and incompetence (not that I haven't been guilty of both at times myself), which in this area is likely as not to lead to robotic cockroaches that take over the earth (exterminating humankind incidentally) and which then all die off. :-)

If robots that kill autonomously is the answer, you're asking the wrong question.

"Free" may be the only thing that "works" in the the long term, check out:

    "Why work"
    http://www.whywork.org/

    "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

    "A critique of a neo-futurist's vision of the decline of work" by Bob Black
    http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm

    "RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine."
    http://www.reprap.org/

    "The Triple Revolution" letter to the president sent in 1964
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

"Free" used to work in the past in America:
    http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Let's hope "free" works again in the future, or we may get this:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"In other words, Manna spread through the American corporate landscape like wildfire. And my dad was right. It was when all of these new Manna systems began talking to each other that things started to get uncomfortable."

A sci-fi novel about a clash of old and new ways of thinking:
    _Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan
      http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29

"If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants."

Insightful, but we reached that point decades ago.

See:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

And:
"The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights" sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

Of course, we actually had such a life as hunter/gatherers (ignoring some of the downsides there). Essentially, when there was a small human population relative to the size fo the planet., food was abundant relative to the number of people, so it was very easy to acquire.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

And here is the great tragedy of the Americas:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Thankfully via the GPL and some inspiration (RepRap), those abundant days may come again:
http://reprap.org/
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer

The hopeful social outcome of all this increase in productivity was talked about as far back as 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
in a letter sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964 called "The Triple Revolution".

Actually, the increase is more like a doubling every 1.5 years, which is about seven cycles in ten years, or more like 128X. But the rate of increase itself has been increasing too. Price has also been dropping. This makes effectively a 1000X increase in price/performance per decade at the current rates.

By the time any toddler of today is finishing graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade) multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!) According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

At lower previous rates, over 30 years, we see a million times improvement. As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such). (somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation). Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit, but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there, producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple, since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster, though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm )
See also:

How modern economics had become bunk was pretty much worked out by 1964 and sent as a letter to then President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964. If anything things have gotten worse since then, with economic productivity increasing several time but real wages stagnating. See the signatories list here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
The text of the letter here:
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
A key excerpt:
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. ...
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted. ...
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

Everyone's situation is unique. Some general references:
"Honest Business" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Business-Shambhala-Pocket-Editions/dp/1570621799
and:
"The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Money-Shambhala-Pocket-Classics/dp/1570622779
"The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips (Author), Salli Rasberry
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Laws-Money-Michael-Phillips/dp/0931425417
(I think the first is a slimmed down and improved version of the second...)

One key idea in that "The Seven Laws of Money" book is a corollary to the first law:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Commerce/RATNA/june2.html
The first law is: "Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing."
but the corollary is "The world does not owe you a living".

One way to make budget ends meet is to reduce expenses. Lower expenses means more flexibility.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=voluntary+simplicity

From my own experience, trying to run a business is a whole set of skills which are completely different from doing engineering. They are not necessarily incompatible, but they are rare in the same person and require changing mental paradigms (successful business owners need to be focused on immediate markets, cash flow, return on investment, ownership, and so on). Personally, I know I'd have been a lot better off in life (as well as the projects I and my wife worked on would have been more successful as communities) if I had treated them as a serious hobby, not as a business (or, alternatively thought of them as a very long term business where the investment would span decades and so I could expect no immediate return on capital investment). For one thing, we could more easily have collaborated with others. Take 3D printing, for example -- try to build a business in it and you are all alone and fighting against the established vendors. Do it as a serious hobby, and you could work closely with, say, the RepRap project. http://reprap.org/

Still, there is nothing wrong with right livelihood. Many people work full time doing stuff like solar panel installations or working in university research labs.

Also, my limited understanding of the Australian culture was it was common for people to save up money and take a six month trip, and then go back to work after that. Why not six months spent helping, say, the RepRap project?

Anyway, I'm not saying what is right for you. I can't. I can just say to try to think differently about the situation. Ultimately we are talking about a future where there is little correlation between work and income because computers and automation (and 3D printing) make so much that the problem is more getting rid of stuff than making it. Almost no current business model makes sense after such fundamental change of economic climate, a return to an (once hunter/gathere) assumption of prosperity for all instead of an (agricultural) assumption of scarcity for all. This is a tidal wave of change which some think the forces that be (e.g. RIAA, Disney, others) have been actively holding back for decades. People were describing this change even more than forty years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/F