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Thanks -- yes, let's hope for the best!

On poor quality clothing:
"Used clothes: Why is worldwide demand declining?"
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
"Manufacturers know that customers are more interested in low prices than durability, because they increasingly expect to wear their clothes just a few times and throw them away. "So the quality's not as good, so when our customers get [an item] they're not getting two or three hundred wears out of it - they know it's only going to be a couple of uses," he says. That means, according to Fee Gilfeather, head of marketing for Oxfam's trading division, "more [clothing] is getting incinerated than there used to be.""

Also on that:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
"For decades, the donation bin has offered consumers in rich countries a guilt-free way to unload their old clothing. In a virtuous and profitable cycle, a global network of traders would collect these garments, grade them, and transport them around the world to be recycled, worn again, or turned into rags and stuffing.
Now that cycle is breaking down. Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones, and poor countries are turning their backs on the secondhand trade. Without significant changes in the way that clothes are made and marketed, this could add up to an environmental disaster in the making."

I agree that we could be a lot happier with less stuff. It's an abundance mindset though -- to stop feeling the need to hoard.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose needs and desires were few relative to their skills and the abundance of nature relative to their populations lived more in that mindset of abundance:
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ...
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

For example:
http://marcinequenzer.com/crea... FIELD OF PLENTY
"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 physi

Gilder sure got this prediction right in 1996: "If bandwidth is free, you get a completely different computer architecture and information economy. Transcending all previous concepts of centralization and decentralization, one global machine will distribute processing to the optimal point and access everything. Feeding on low power and high bandwidth, the most common computer of the new era will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address."

And thus we have everyone's smartphones connecting to Google and Facebook.

It's interesting to reflect on his point that "Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity."

Some of my own musings in that direction are here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

And I sum them up as: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

That builds on Einstein's comment that "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

It's ironic that computing technology like AI and robotics that could free all of humanity from drudgery may instead -- if Musk's warning were ignored -- lead to the enslavement and then extinction of humans by AIs and robots wielded by an every dwindling population of the elite at war with each other over whatever perception of scarcity they have.

The same is true for nuclear energy used instead in nuclear bombs, nanotech and biotech used as weapons instead of to build and heal, and so on for many other technologies -- including even bureaucracy that can either plan how to most quickly create abundance for all or plan how to most efficiently send people to concentration camps.

Perhaps today's scarcity seems to be one of imagination? At least some people tried -- like Gene Rodenberry. I'm currently reading "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek" by Manu Saadia which explores some of that optimism. As is said in that book, it all boils down to whether we choose to share prosperity in a mostly egalitarian way. I wrote another essay that makes a related point where I suggest post-scarcity is the product of social progress times technical progress passing some threshold.

Bob Black had some interesting ideas too: http://www.primitivism.com/abo...
And Marshall Sahlins: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...

(Been meaning to write a book with the title of this post summarizing my previous writings on this...)

Gilder sure got this prediction right in 1996: "If bandwidth is free, you get a completely different computer architecture and information economy. Transcending all previous concepts of centralization and decentralization, one global machine will distribute processing to the optimal point and access everything. Feeding on low power and high bandwidth, the most common computer of the new era will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address."

And thus we have everyone's smartphones connecting to Google and Facebook.

It's interesting to reflect on his point that "Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity."

Some of my own musings in that direction are here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

And I sum them up as: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

That builds on Einstein's comment that "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

It's ironic that computing technology like AI and robotics that could free all of humanity from drudgery may instead -- if Musk's warning were ignored -- lead to the enslavement and then extinction of humans by AIs and robots wielded by an every dwindling population of the elite at war with each other over whatever perception of scarcity they have.

The same is true for nuclear energy used instead in nuclear bombs, nanotech and biotech used as weapons instead of to build and heal, and so on for many other technologies -- including even bureaucracy that can either plan how to most quickly create abundance for all or plan how to most efficiently send people to concentration camps.

Perhaps today's scarcity seems to be one of imagination? At least some people tried -- like Gene Rodenberry. I'm currently reading "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek" by Manu Saadia which explores some of that optimism. As is said in that book, it all boils down to whether we choose to share prosperity in a mostly egalitarian way. I wrote another essay that makes a related point where I suggest post-scarcity is the product of social progress times technical progress passing some threshold.

Bob Black had some interesting ideas too: http://www.primitivism.com/abo...
And Marshall Sahlins: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...

(Been meaning to write a book with the title of this post summarizing my previous writings on this...)

http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

You bring up an important issue. However, in practice, the most common way large numbers of people tent to become underfed, uneducated, and victims of slave culture ideology (religion being complex topic) is from things like colonialism and militarism actively destroying real abundance and healthy cultures in a quest for some dysfunctional imbalance.

For example, consider what happened when Columbus came to the Americas:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.... ... When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island. ..."

Contrast with what Marshall Sahlins said about most hunter/gathers:
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Also related:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Peace makes plenty.
Plenty makes pride.
Pride breeds dispute.
Poverty's the fruit.
Poverty makes peace."

But that poem from the 14th century (!) is a very different take on things than saying scarcity or want or ignorance is a natural state of being...

Still, even in such cases as you describe with billions of people under subjugation, people (in aggregate) are always thinking of new ideas about their situation and new ways of doing things, and improving their skills and sharing ideas. It takes a lot to shut that growth process down.

For a current example, consider all the effort of groups like by RIAA and similar groups through political lobbying to create more artificial scarcity (e.g. The Sonny Bono / Micky Mouse copyright extension act). These restrictive efforts now ensure people can in theory do more jail time and get bigger fines for sharing (copyrighted) information like a few inspirational songs than if they had committed murder. See for example:
"Seven Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fin

As does being an informed citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, a good sibling, a good storyteller tailored for local needs, and so on. So, always lots of important things to do even when we don't need to "work" for someone else for a wage...

Check out: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
    The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."

See also my essay: "Basic income from a millionaire's perspective? "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Or more general on post-scarcity: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...

"I mean if you had no choice but to gather/hunt for food the entire day or otherwise you wouldn't survive, that would be the economy dictating to you that you cannot really do much of anything beyond just surviving."

But hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than we do:

Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.

"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."

Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...

Related:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

And the amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle...
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."

Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"):
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim

http://robohub.org/tag/agricul...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.ieee-ras.org/agricu...

Indoors agricultural is also rising, given cheaper energy costs for LED lighting and more consistent results in controlled environments...

Yes, hunting/gatherering in a large home range is easier than pre-modern century farming styles, which seem to have only increased because of increasing population densities and tribes pushes to marginal lands or smaller lands.
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...

Anyway, I applaud the trend in the original article. Of course, living next to a farm can pose health challenges (like from contaminated ground water) depending on what pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers are used (even "organic" ones).

If you look at the "Biosphere II" project, or similar intensive agricultural projects (as in the book "Survival Gardening") it looks like a few people per acre can be supported with intensive methods in favorable climates, especially if you grow a lot of beans and return sterilized human manure to the land..
http://www.permies.com/t/12422...
"It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare -- and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc. [FAO, 1993] "

Intensive agriculture is knowledge intensive though, even if robots might mean it would not be so labor intensive. But no doubt eventually we will see plug-in (or cold fusion-powered) containers that have seeds and lights and robots in them and just output food given water and some other inputs. But it won't be as picturesque as a diversified semi-hobby organic farm. But it might not be as unsightly as, say, parts of Iowa where much of year the devastated industrialized farmland looks like a moonscape, and the soil is essentially only used to prop up the plants, only ~10% of calories per acre is created compared to intensive practices, and most of the result is fed to animals where ~90% of the calories are wasted relative to human consumption (so, only ~1% efficient overall compared to intensive cultivation of vegetarian foods, in round numbers).

Info on sustainable farming practices:
"Towards holistic agriculture: a scientific approach" by R. W. Widdowson"
http://books.google.com/books/...

And: http://remineralize.org/

And on economics:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
"Of course an increase in consumption imposes costs in the short
run. But in the long run, population pressure reduces costs as
well as improves the food supply in accord with the general theory,
which I'll repeat again: More people, and increased income, cause
problems of increased scarcity of resources in the short run.
Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices
present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to
search for solutions. Many fail, at cost to themselves. But in a
free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run
the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had
not arisen. That is, prices end up lower than before the increased
scarcity occurred, which is the long-run history of food supply.
Some people wonder whether we can be sure that food production
will increase, and whether it would be "safer" to

Supports your point: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ..."

The idea that hunter/gathers worked hard is a convenient one to promulgate if your objective is to keep long-suffering agricultural serfs from revolting... Some suggest the expulsion from the Garden of Eden story in the Bible is about the transition from hunter/gathering to agriculture (and similar painful stories are in other cultures).

As you point out, the work hunter/gathers had to do to get food depends on things like the specific living situation as well as population density. As population density goes up because of the success of hunter/gathering, sadly, it makes it harder and harder to live that way. Then militaristic bureaucracies can arise to control the most productive lands (including estuaries) adding another dimension to the issue. In the past, those might eventually collapse and a cycle would start over (see Daniel Quinn who in Beyond Civilization points out how often this cycle happened). But nowadays a collapse would probably involve nukes that could render much of the Earth uninhabitable plus our global populations based on agriculture and advanced technology are many many times what hunter/gathering would support. So, our collective best bet is to keep things going and take advantage of new possibilities, like creating and living in self-replicating space habitats that duplicate themselves from lunar or asteroid ore and solar energy as well as making advanced Earthly cities including in the ocean and so on. And with robotics and a basic income, most humans can go back to the better part of a hunter/gather lifestyle, including having time to raise children well and to be part of a socially-connected community.

Raising children well can take about as much time as most adults can put into it. Our US society is currently suffering for too much parental time put into work and then other distractions. and not enough time spent with kids. The same goes for the effort reuired to maintain social relations with freidns and neighbors. That is historically way most human adults spent most of their time -- raising kids and being social. For reference on a hunter/gatherer lifestyle:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

I readily agree that people need a sense of "agency" -- that they are accomplishing things to make their life better. But whether that needs to be withing a structured system of economics we call "work" entailing bosses and customers and "wage slavery" is a different question (even if most of us practically have few other short-term alternatives to work).
http://www.whywork.org/

Related to you point, many people like playing a hunter/gatherer in an abundant Minecraft world a lot. Yet, maybe part of that is indeed because of the abundance and the possibilities? Yet, in US society, many people are arbitrarily shut out from all the abundance. This kind of stuff (or the need for it) is just wrong in such a wealthy society:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2009/08/07/6958/appalachian-fairgrounds-charity-tries-fill-gaps-health-care
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/22/demographic-shift-puts-american-dream-out-reach/

If "welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency", then:
A. Why do rich people tend to give their children lots of expensive things including Ivy League educations, good cars, condos, trust funds, and so on?
B. Would you turn down a million dollar cash gift?
C. Do monthly "Social Security" payments to any citizen in the USA over age 65 cause enormous distress to the elderly?

If you think about these three questions, you may find a missing piece of the puzzle of a picture of the future.

However, your point about the cost of living going down is indeed true and needs to be kept in mind. On the other hand, decreasing costs also generally implies less money going to fewer people. But the marketplace only "hears" the needs of those with cash. If you have zero money, then you can't afford a place to sleep or put your stuff. And further, automation tends to concentrate wealth (at least initially).
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

Productivity has doubled or triples over the last few decades in the USA, but real wages for most workers have remained flat (granted, health insurance benefits have increased, but it is not clear people are that much healthier for that). That is a political issue about fairness as well as power.

I'd agree humans want interaction with other humans (generally), but whether that is best in the context of payments (as opposed to gifts or family and friend interactions) is another question. For example, I prefer to have my wife cut my hair than to go to a barber or hair salon.

Another thing to consider is that perhaps all humans have some claim on some of the fruits of the commons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

BTW, on NYC homeless:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/28/131028fa_fact_frazier?currentPage=all

It sounds there like the "means testing" and uncertainty and constant changes create much

Well, in theory, in a truly free market, that is not supposed to happen, as individual capitalists get lazy or sick and others take their place. And without things like copyright, patents, limited-liability corporations, or other monopolies or subsidies or preferences granted and enforced by a strong State, it is hard to hold onto a top position.

Yet, there are positive externalities like community and negative extenalities like pollution that lead to market failures without some sort of higher level organization than a marketplace. And, it takes money to make money, so wealth builds on wealth. And in practice, great wealth means you can buy favorable laws. That is, until the populace resists in some way, including at the voting booth. Or until the system collapses from some unaccounted for externality like an unmanaged unregulated risk leading to market failure or widespread disaster like biotech plague or nanotech gray goo or failed asteroid mining project crashing to Earth or corporate-lobbied-for militaristic spending spirals out of control and saturates the world with mobile mines etc..

Anyway, what you describe is a bt like the first part of Marshall Brain's "Manna" novel.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

It's true in a sense that most people don't want to work, because at the core of all animal nature is a motivational triad of seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy. Doug Lisle talks about this (including in the book, The Pleasure Trap).
"The pleasure trap: Douglas Lisle"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX2btaDOBK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxf4kj8Rb6Y

In the past, people who were not "lazy" wasted energy and so did not survive as well. The question is, what is the payoff for doing something in gaining pleasure or avoiding pain (or also at higher moral or spiritual or social levels etc.). I think most people are willing to do things when they see a payoff (even just trundling over to the fridge for a beer). More on motivation by Dan Pink:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And people seem tuned for a certain small amount of self-directed work daily (plus child-care):
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours"

http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

Exactly. Anarchism subsumes a pretty wide political spectrum [1]. For those inclined to read more: John Zerzan's assay Future Primitive appears to me as the most widely cited publication. Wikipedia also has a nice introduction in the article anarcho-primitivism.

[1] = Still personally I would not include primitivism, simply because they archive the stateless society by abolishing society as a whole. With that reasoning killing the whole population is anarchist, too, because without population there is no society and therefore no state...

"The great unsolved problem is: people need to work for their keep (in some fashion) to feel spiritually fulfilled. In a post-basic-need-scarcity world, how does that happen? Because we've seen, over and over again, that society basically disintegrates if people don't feel like they've worked for the things they have."

Humans naturally come up with their own things to do. It is actually social institutions like compulsory schooling that beats that out of them. See John Taylor Gatto's writings, for example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates ..."

Just trying to be a good parent to young children can pretty much take as much time as people can put into it.

Look at how people used to live for some other ideas:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

If what you said was true, then why do not all the rich people in the world disintegrate (given most have inherited a good share of their wealth and power)? Why would they give money to their children? Why does Bill Gates still do things when he has so much material wealth? Why did Richard Stallman keep doing stuff after he got a MacArthur Genius award and could have just sat on his backside?

What does it mean to work for something? Is it really a big problem that people generally get their air for free?

I'm not saying there is not truth to your point, because it is true that people need meaning in their lives. I'm just suggesting the issue of gaining meaning solely by overcoming material scarcity does not generalize as broadly as you suggest. See also, for some middle ground:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

Those are reasons why we may choose not to automate stuff even when we can...

"tl;dr"

Your loss. The Skills of Xanadu is an amazing story, especially for having been written in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext, which we are essentially using to communicate right now.

As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them. So, you can have "permaculture" without too much work. See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."

What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005926.html
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

People for decades wanted to make agricultural robotics but were stymied by the economics of our society and its acceptance of cheap (slave wages) illegal labor. Give it a decade to adjust and we'll see robots in the Georgia and Alabama fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2009/04/autonomous-grape-vine-pruner.html

Then you will see how software can be eaten. :-)

What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings? Robots can build new factories too (as if we did not have more than enough already). Don't confuse the fact that for historical reasons some few humans claim entitlement to "rent" on accessing resources they control socially with the issue that robots can increasingly supply substantially all the labor needed to use resources to make stuff. See Marshall Brain's Manna for one idea on how that might work economically:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm

And to see how robotic mining is emerging:
"Rio on edge of new world of robotic mining"
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6cc3482-6756-11df-a932-00144feab49a.html

That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff, especially when we are deciding for ourselves what to do or make. Look at how much people like Minecraft. So, it's not clear we need the robots in a big way. The alternative is to rethink the work so it is fun. How many trillions of one meter cubes have been mined over the last two years in Minecraft? People even pay for the privilege of doing so.

...corporations will inevitably pursue automation.

More likely they will promote cannibalism.

But anyway, for your reading pleasure

"Which would be cool if I had any clue what the 90% of world's population, the unemployed, will be doing with all that time."

"Employment" is a fairly recent idea. What was everyone doing thousands of years ago before "employment"?
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

By the way, I like J.D. Bernal, who you can add to your list, for this from the 1920s:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."

Thanks for your comments. Glad you liked the post and I hope you look at some of the links.

On the theme you raise, I've also been wondering if many people in the past might have lived longer than we give them credit for, as well (in other words, maybe the infant mortality rates may be off?).

I've seen different estimates of how many people were in North America, so you are right, it might have been higher, although I would think 2 million to 20 million for North American (above Mexico) would be more likely, but I don't know for sure. One source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
"Estimating the number of Native Americans living in what is today the United States of America before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers has been the subject of much debate. A low estimate of around 1 million was first posited by the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s, by calculating population density of each culture area based on its carrying capacity. In 1965, the American anthropologist Henry Dobyns published studies estimating the original population to have been 10 to 12 million. By 1983, he increased his estimates to 18 million.[42] He took into account the mortality rates caused by infectious diseases of European explorers and settlers, against which Native Americans had no immunity. Dobyns combined the known mortality rates of these diseases among native people with reliable population records of the 19th century, to calculate the probable size of the original populations.[4][5]"

The general issue is that the further you go from the equator, the more land per person you need for subsistence for various climate and sunlight reasons. So, one acre might support a person by the equator, but you might need 1000 or more up around Northern Canada.

So, yes, I was going with the low end. Of course, our wilderness is more degraded now, as well. Also, if you add in Mexico and below, I think the total for both continents could have been 100 million or so.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions:
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-New-Spain-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140441239

Although another aspect of that is that the natural diversity seen in North America of animals during the 1700s and 1800s was also partially a recovery from previously heavy exploitation by natives, who, as you say, often died from introduced disease.

Another angle on that general theme of affluence in the stone age:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Another related book on the pandemic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

And more on what really happened during the invasion of North America, in the own words of the profit-driven invaders (as well as some accompanying missionaries) who saw the value of the land but not of the alternative society:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

A related theme from Native Americans:
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 en

Your comment is tremendously insightful, and I can't disagree with it as a comment on social dynamics, although I might ask, "Better for whom?" and how should we interpret that in a supposed "democracy"? Also, human psychology is complex; the need for relative social status is only one of many potential motivators (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs).

Freeman Dyson says something related in one of his books about a daughter who went to Africa and was frustrated by how the local community would rather send women miles each day for water than hire a local well digger, in part because it was more prestigious to ask the central government for help by a petition that they knew would never be granted. But the people making that decision were men, and they were not the ones carrying jugs of water on their heads every day. So, that's another angle on the status issue you raise. Why did those men not have low status by not doing what they could to ensure their community was more prosperous? There are cultural aspects to that (including the legacy of a disruptive colonialism that may have harmed those areas and created "learned helplessness" in some regions in a way similar to your story with the doctor).

See also James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear sci-fi novel though for an alternative -- a society where social status comes from displaying competence in something.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Anyway, yes, I think you are right that since the plow (or before) we can have a lot of abundance. Also related:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

But we squander a lot of abundance fighting each other.

But the problem is, when something really big comes along like a tsunami, or supervolcano, or asteroid strike, then like the dinosaurs, we may not have the resources to deal with it...

Still, I think culture can make a difference, as can technology. It is getting more and more obvious that so much of the scarcity we see these days is "artificial".

See also my essay here, in response to someone making a similar point to the one you did:
    "Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points. :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
    So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100.
    Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
      "Global Mindshift: The Wombat"
      http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
    Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to
make things efficiently and effectively.
    Let us consider three scenarios for these points, with the numbers as above. ..."

Some things have improved, some things have gotten worse. It's hard to say, overall, that most people in the USA are much happier than the Haudenosaunee (Iroqois) were 500 years ago, even living a bit longer perhaps on average. Are those alive now in the USA much happier or more physically fit than the Arawak in Haiti who Columbus and his successors wiped out?

See, for example:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus."

So, sure, we have fancy laptops and the internet, and that is great. But do most of us have real families, real communities, and meaningful work anymore?

See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

We can't go back to those days and keep our big populations. But we can at least honor the memory of what was good about those times, and try to bring that goodness into the 21st century. Some people are trying:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/

Overall, I think Eric Schmidt was trying, too. I'm sort of sorry now I made fun of him and Knol here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/5bd385feed4127d7
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against Virgle?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense.
-----
Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
"""

Still, if he had listened to the points I was trying to make about Google and Post-Scarcity, maybe he would have had more success?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"This is an email I posted to the Project Virgle email list. Project Virgle was an April Fool's joke by Google and Virgin, which many did not see as that funny. ... Essentially, by focusing on "profit" (and so Empire to defend that profit and related "ownership" and "equity") this is the kind of deadly farce of the bubble of Empire that Google and Virgin are (in jest) proposing bringing to Mars. It's just the "uns

I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
    http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

The robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick the fruits from.

It is a form of natural capitalism in the sense that the planet and its infrastructure is essentially owned by all the people, who then get dividends as citizen capitalists. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_now

You can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Or, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202

Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership".
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo

See: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

For the future, see Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Or me: :-)
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

As I point out in other replies, if you look at how hunter/gatherers lived, you will see that people can function quite well among relative affluence.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

It's true that material affluence by itself can produce problems, as this study shows the general poor mental health of many wealthy families in the USA:
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/

But, I think that leaves out that our society in the USA has gone too far towards an extreme, and that trend has been amplified by competitive compulsory schooling:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""

And that is reflected in the dominant mythology of the USA:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47

And US foreign policy around the world has actively tried to destroy anything that might have emerged as a possible alternative good example. For example, the first September 11, in 1973, in Chile:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-December/006458.html

So, people can live well together in abundance, and we have historical proof of that. Some people, one might even call this mental illness, can not. How to deal with that is an interesting question, but maybe, as a start, we should make sure the lunatics are not running the asylum? :-( And all it takes, in a democratic society, to do that, is to have good candidates and to vote for them, as well as to build positive alternative non-governmental organizations and better businesses.

So, respectfully, if you keep looking for better answers, you may sometimes find them.

As for robots, they

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.

They also provided for their own needs via informal "jobs" like hunting, gathering, farming, etc. It seems likely to me that "jobs" were a big deal then as they are now.

Costs will continue to drop on them, and quality will continue to improve. So, the value of human labor will continue to decline, as Marshall Brain talks about:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That trend is ongoing now and has been part of why inflation-adjusted wages have been mostly stagnant in the USA for about three decades, and even decreasing over the last decade. Offshoring is part of it too, but automation is the bigger picture, since in theory offshoring would go away as a problem as everyone's standard of living rises and the dollar adjusts vs. other currencies. Automation and better design does away with jobs as long as demand is constant. And because of the law of diminishing returns, people are seeing that while some stuff produced by others is great, too much stuff is just a headache to worry about and ultimately a distraction from other fun activities like being with friends and family and engaging in creative hobbies.

A simpler explanation is that the work can now be done by people who are willing to work for considerably less. There's no evidence of a genuine decline in the value of labor since globally the value of labor has been steadily increasing since 1950.

So, our economy based around scarcity is making less and less sense.

Then why do things cost so much? An economy is a mechanism for distributing scarce resources like food, like peoples' labor, basically almost everything. Why do you tell me that these resources are no longer scarce despite obvious evidence to the contrary? For example, these things still sell for a considerable price in a competitive market.

When there are more communities that are like Albert Lea, and when we take "freedom from want" seriously globally, then I'd say we'd have taken a big step towards 21st century thinking.

I happen to want the freedom to want and the freedom to fulfill those wants as I am able.

As long as we have tens of thousands of nuclear missiles around, that is scarcity thinking. As long as we have those teenagers teleoperating deadly drones instead of mining machines, that is scarcity thinking.

As long as we have scarcity (which we do) and people or entities eager and willing to take resources from others via uninitiated force, we will still have so-called "scarcity thinking". Frankly, I don't see scarcity thinking ever going away for two reasons: 1) there will always be valuable, scarce resources of some kind, and 2) there will always be someone willing to take those resources by force.

Anyway, so, you think people need a challenge influencing the universe? Help solve that irony, and so help free up the resources to build a solar system with quadrillions of humans in space habitats. :-)

You're still operating on the premise that there is a problem here, the so-called "irony". But as we see, your authorities and you are operating under false premises. Pre-industrial jobs existed. Labor is increasing in value now. Food and many other things continue to be scarce despite your assertions. And so-called "freedom fro

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

Using a phrase like "our standard of living" covers up the fact that some people get the benefits of automation, but others pay the costs (directly or indirectly). Marshall Brain wrote about that here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

On labor saving:
"The Original Affluent Society"
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

With robotics on the way, what are people going to do when there are no jobs in construction?
"USC's 'print-a-house' construction technology"
http://www.physorg.com/news139161727.html
"Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the "Contour Crafting" automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours."

Or no jobs in burger flipping even running the machines?
"Robot Chef"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSKMGurrPI

Or even, next-to-no jobs in medicine? Or software? Or music? Because even if human do those things, automation lets less people do so much more?
"Robot doctor gets thumbs-up from patients"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4946229/

It's a big like something in Isaac Asimov's story "The Last Question", when it was asked, if you are in a rainstorm, and you take shelter under a tree, what are you going to do when the tree gets wet through and starts dripping on you? Do you say, I'll go under another tree? When robots can automate much of construction, are we going to get jobs again in agriculture or miming or driving trucks or delivering packages?
"[p2p-research] 60 jobs that will rock the future... (not)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html
"[p2p-research] Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

The US is in the midst of vast and increasing unemployment. Many jobs probably are not coming back. Most services are frivolous and related to guarding or make-work.
http://www

And your riposte also cites nothing. However, I offer this which provides many citations about nudity in the pre-modern world.

"And yes, surviving in the wilderness, period, is a full time job"
This statement is incorrect.

I've read this many times... here is one particular citation

http://www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm
As Hole and Flannery (1963) summarized: "No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing." They have much more free time, adds Binford (1968), "than do modern industrial or farm workers, or even professors of archaeology."

I've read but don't care to search for another citation that hunter gatherer tribes worked little, socialized a lot.

It isn't until you over-breed an area and exhaust it that life turns hard. When your population is small and territory is large (as with the Navi in the movie), food is a non-issue.

With the 20x increase in productivity since 1950, at least *some* people should be able to live as well as people from the 1950's on 20 hours a week work. I know some of us have gotten bigger houses (tho I didn't and I'm almost paid off 11 years after buying it.)

Yet we still have to work 40 hours a week while the wealthy 1% take 70% of the income and hold 95% of the wealth.

The current 40 hour week + health care system is one of the most elegantly designed systems of slavery invented yet.

By the way, there is one pill these days that can help a lot with life-extension for most US Americans. Vitamin D3 gelcaps 5000 IU, with this treatment protocol including blood testing:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

Human lifespan in hunter-gather times past infant mortality might have been into the 60s or older.

The following is from something I wrote elsewhere:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.

As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."

Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to

Related to your point:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"Learn how to escape the dietary pleasure trap!"
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
"""
From the perspective of our natural history, a daily life with such dietary choices is extraordinary. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancient ancestors scratched and scraped, struggling against the harsh forces of nature in order to get enough food to survive. Even today, in undeveloped countries, significant food shortages are still a great concern, with millions dying each year from starvation. Yet, in a mere blink of history's eye--in just a few decades--industrialized societies have arisen from environments of scarcity and have transformed themselves into societies of unprecedented abundance. The most striking feature of that abundance is a virtually unlimited supply of food.
An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before--as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated--and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game--typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure--an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. These artificial products, and others like them, form the core of the American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable--even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food--and their lives--much less. Indeed, most people believe that they literally would suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness.
"""

Personally, I feel many hunter/gatherers twenty thousand years ago may have lived longer and better than some people say they did (even as things got worse with rising population, competition, and agriculture). It really depends on where exactly they lived in what time period and what the local climate was like. There are places and times where six foot and taller skeletons were common, like on the shores of inland places that had big lakes.

From:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily sat

For a society where different rules apply, see:
    "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"""
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
    The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.
"""

Economics does not say everything is scarce. It says it is a discipline about decision making about scarcity. And it is woefully incomplete because it does not really concern itself with creating abundance. Most economics textbooks probably don't even mention abundance. Or fun. Or community. It's a woefully inadequate way to look at the world if what you want to do is build abundant fun communities.

How do you get from "if there is a cost" to "the resource is scarce". Things can be really cheap.

Also, consider what Marshall Brain says here:
    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."
"""

Again, if you look at how people lived for tens of thousands of years in pre-scarcity times (before agriculture was needed), then you will see people can live without elites of the nature we have now. Daniel Quinn talks about this too.

Anybody raising kids is almost never bored. :-)

Power is relative and is always to some extent distributed:
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Also, even with a lot of free software, I spend a lot of time reading about it and learning how to use it, just like hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time learning about medicinal plants and the habits of animals. There is a lot we can learn by looking at how hunter-gatherers lived. From:
    "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

In hunter-gatherer times people spent a lot of time raising kids, traveling, singing, dancing, and so on (beyond collecting food, which took fairly little time compared to an eight hour work day today). A lot of time was just spent admiring the natural world and the stars in the sky in a spiritual way. So, I have little doubt people will find meaningful things to do, even in a world of material abundance.

Please cite your evidence for human lifespans several thousand years ago. I'll agree that during the past few centuries they were lower, but in a sense, generalizing past that is a form a propaganda to justify the current political regime.

Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

You can see this in that human skeletons 10000 years ago were taller than all but for most people in the last 100 years. Medieval suits of armor show this too -- they are too short for most people of this generation.

The creation and spread of various diseases is also tied to humans living in densely packed cities and with livestock they are raising (see the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel").

So, there has been recent progress, but only after a great setback that took 10000 years to recover from.

Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.

As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."

Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But,

"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

Ah, but humans have spent the last 100,000+ years of their lives living in "affluence" in terms of lots of free time and an abundance of food. It is only the last few thousands years of agricultural empires and industrialism that have been the anomaly. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_soc iety
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
So, I see no reason humans can not adapt to a post-scarcity society brought on by stuff like:
http://reprap.org/
or:
http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=2

Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"

The Plasma Cosmology guy's view is that things like Singularities, Red Shift, the early Accelleration periods of the universe... all those are just fudged data with outright lies propping them up too. the argument is that for the last 30 years, astronomers have been ignoring 1/4th of the known fundamental forces in all of their data captures, and have written all of their formulas based on an incomplete data set. This is a view just as contrarian to modern physics as the guy who doesn't believe in the arrow of time...

This isn't something found in one particular media outlet, all media outlets have to be on guard and keep this from occuring. Just seems that some media outlets have had particular trouble with the problem in the recent past.


There is also another issue especially in the USA.
Many times even if a news organization publishes a true report, corporations have ways & means of silencing them i.e. by expensive lawsuits, by pulling out Advertising etc. Hence sometimes press has to apologize. Because of this I think the press in the USA atleast has decided that investigative journalism is just not worth pursuing.

Check this link for the Food Lion & Monsanto
incidents.

No, that's how textbook economics works. Reality is often very different.
Check out what happened on Easter Island, with their "we'll cut back on consumption next year" attitude...

Purely for the sake of academic interest of course. CourtTV describes this man as evolving from a "brilliant academic" to "one of society's most obnoxious" and "America's most wanted terrorist." Certainly at least, he is not alone in his disallusionment of modern society.

http://www.primitivism.com/kaczynski.htm