I've slept on a junky bed in the cold in my life too (during winter in Pittsburgh with a 40 minute slog through the snow each way to CMU where I was hanging out at the robotics institute, not able to afford to pay for much heat). I think you missed my point, or I obviously was not clear enough about it. Remember, this is in the context of a Nobel prize-winning scientist saying no one would hire him if he were starting today. The original poster says he or she needs a degree (at great personal cost) to make a difference in the world (including to make a meaningful life from that by contributing to science). I point out how I got a fancy degree and it really does not help that much in doing meaningful work. It certainly could have helped me make a lot of money most likely hurting other people in some monopolistic/cronyistic way (like via the FIRE sector of the economy where lots of Princeton grads go), but I was not into that way of life.
As for science, ignoring most colleges flunk out half their freshman class ultimately, consider this: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "Why does anyone think science is a good job? The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following: age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
If you want to make a difference in the world or even just in your own life, you have to just go out and do something of healthy value to the world (or at least yourself). But that is not what much of academia claims and the original poster seems to feel that he or she is being scammed by academia but can do nothing about it Thus the cake (diploma) is a lie (in many cases). I know -- I got a good piece of that "cake", but it still wasn't very filling or very healthy. Did it have some benefits? Sure. But it is also quite possible I would have done better in life without college (and especially pursuing grad school) at all, because they were great opportunity costs, great financial costs, and such experiences were also in many ways disempowering.
Or for a different perspective, words from someone who chose to become a carpet cleaner to have a good interesting life: https://web.archive.org/web/20030206110440/http://www.unconventionalideas.com/bstcarer.html "...
The point is that as a professional carpet cleaner, I don't need to look very far for challenge and stimulation. No, the work isn't easy, and can be physically demanding, but as you will gather from my descriptions, it isn't all repetitive drudgery either.
Many people get misled when seeking a career. They turn their backs on work which is supposedly beneath the ability o
http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/ http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib ----- Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides....
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion. ----
In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.
I've been tempted to get one as an investment ($22K) to learn to write apps for it, but I don't have the time right now doing other work. But stuff like Baxter is clearly the future...
And, while we "rethink robotics", we need to "rethink economics" (including a basic income, an expanded gift economy, improved local subsistence, and better democratic planning), like I talk about on my site.
What or who should you revere? That is a good question you may spend a lifetime answering... From Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
There are many spheres of life. Or as another analogy, life is like a city with lots of different districts and back alleys and night clubs and homes. Even if conventional academia is not your forte, you might find others where you can build a meaningful life that is a healthy success (parenting, being a good friend or neighbor, etc.). Many inventors did not "fit in", so you might fund some other creative niche outside of the formal academic related career path.
For many people, the promise of academics has become a scam. However, diplomas are still used as gatekeepers to many jobs. For a deeper view of the scam in progress, see thsibook (free online) by John Taylor Gatto: "Underground History of American Education" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science [due in part to continuing exponential growth that was soon to end]. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically.... Since we began with a cosmological analogy, let us return to one now. An unfortunate space traveler, falling into a black hole, is utterly and irretrievably doomed, but that is only obvious to the space traveler. In the perception of an observer hovering above the event horizon, the space traveler's time slows down, so that it seems as if catastrophe can forever be put off into the future. Something like that has happened in our research universities. The good times ended forever around 1970, but by importing students, and employing Ph.D's as temporary postdocs, we have stretched time out, pretending that nothing has changed, waiting for the good times to return. We have about as much chance as the space traveler...."
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/
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.
I think people overestimate the "human touch" need in service (like mentioned as a reason everything won't be automated in other posts). While it is true humans need other humans to be human, and physical human touch is important, interactions with "strangers" can be stressful for many, and they also expose people to a risk of disease. And example if banking, where many people now prefer using an ATM machine to talking to a bank teller. Same with many automated phone systems for routine transactions. It may depend in part on a person's personality of course. At some point thought, "more sanitary" and "more personalized and interactive" may become arguments for more automation. For example, who likes to wait around for the wait staff to bring you a bill when you are ready to go at the end of a dinner out?
One can hope though that as we see more abundance from more automation, people may have more time to cook at home and entertain at home. That may be the bigger long term change here. Why go to a restaurant at all, where you have little control over the ingredients, the people around you, and so on? Or, alternatively, when a robot can fetch your meal for you, as in this video of a PR2 robot going to Subway to fetch a sandwich: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp
Regarding "socialism", here is a great graph on US perceptions, preferences, and reality regarding wealth distribution:http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/ "As you can see from the figure, participants rather badly estimated the current state of wealth disparity! Furthermore, they offered an ideal wealth distribution (under a "veil of ignorance") that was even more different (and more equal) relative to the current state of affairs.
What this tells me is that Americans don't understand the extent of disparity in the US, and that they (we) desire a more equitable society. It is also interesting to note that the differences between people who make more money and less money, republicans and democrats, men and women -- were relatively small in magnitude, and that in general people who fall into these different categories seem to agree about the ideal wealth distribution under the veil of ignorance.
Maybe this suggests that when there are no labels, and we think about the core of our morality in abstract terms (and under the veil of ignorance), we are actually very similar?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in North America: community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsive to citizen's needs, and self-policing by the learned professions.[1]:p24 She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost.[1]:p4"
You're right that climate change makes everything harder. Yet, we have so much abundance, and so much land, and the oceans can support artificial islands and habitats, and we can build in Antarctica and space. So, as a global society we have plenty of wealth to help everyone adjust well to change climates. The question is a political one of how much of that wealth will be made available for that purpose. Since much of that wealth was made using fossil fuels, the question is also, do countries that burned the most in the past have a moral obligation to help? Even ignoring the deeper moral obligation to help other humans and all living creatures (while respecting the past). For example, we could build self-replicating space habitats that wold support trillions of people in style. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race tothe very end...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Of course, "protest" may not be very effective against robots programmed to ignore it, where the 1% live in gated "Elysium" communities shut off from all the noise etc... The window may be closing for fixing our society before these trends otherwise overwhelm most of us.
As I say on my site: "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."
Glad to see so many insightful posts on this topic!
You make some good points, but you also make some key questionable assumptions. Bill Gates was himself born a millionaire (trust fund from banker granddad) and also he did not write most of the software he resold, and what he wrote,he wrote based on knowledge gained in part from dumpster diving to find program listings from a computer center. Without his mother's knowing someone at IBM, he probably would not have gotten the deal for an OS for the IBM PC. IBM probably would have been better off using an in-house Forth that had been written bu David Frank, or Unix like the CS-9000, but suffered from internal politics.
The deep question is what part of the the fruits of our infrastructure (air, water, farmland, roads, machines, seeds, internet, books, software, ICs, etc.) should be shared equally (not "means-tested") and what part should somehow be used to "reward" hard work or risk taking or whatever. So you make an assumption with being "OK" with a huge wealth disparity whatever its cause (in this case, Bill Gates indeed being bright and hard working, but also rich from birth and part of a socially well-connected family). But another point of view might be that, say, half the economic output of the USA should be shared equally (US$25K per person per year) as social security payments from birth as a "basic income", and the other half should then be "earned"or divided based on effort or merit somehow.
Dan Pink questions the whole notion of financial reward as a motivator for intellectual work (even as we all need some money to survive and thrive in this culture we have built): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
See also: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
Bill Gates made a lot of money by damaging the community of people freely sharing knowledge and software with each other, while hypocritically pleading poverty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Often people can make a lot of money by disempowering other people and disrupting communities.
That said, is Windows a useful standard given its backward compatibility? Yes it is (as much as I don't like to have to admit that).
The JK Rowling story is more complex too. Many people write amazing stories, but few get widely published by the nature of our publishing industry. Still, her story is a good example of the value of a "basic income" to promote creativity. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/27/1030053057866.html "Too good, it turns out. Yes, Rowling was a single mother with a bad marriage behind her, and yes, she was briefly on the dole. But the coffee shop was owned by her brother-in-law and Rowling was never far from her middle-class origins.... "In fact," harrumphs the Yorkshire Post, "this middle-class English girl with an Exeter University degree and a career as a teacher didn't try to dispel the myth that she'd been a penniless, single mother."..."
If the dole effectively promotes the arts effectively in a compassionate way, then why do we have copyright instead?
As a software developer, in some ways I think we hit a peak with languages like Smalltalk, Common Lisp / Symbolics, Erlang, and C in the 1980s and an OS / VM architecture like IBM's System 360 and VM (which was in a sense "open source" till the mid 1980s) and things have been sliding backwards ever since. I learned C around 1983 on Unix (VMUTS) running on VM hardware (on an IBM mainframe with two CPUs where typically when I did a compile VMUTS got one CPU and 100 I/O bound users shared the other, giving me ten a second turn around for "hello world"). VisualWorks+ENVY in the late 1980s was just amazing for its times, solving issues in practice that Java and Eclipse in practice still struggles with on 1000X faster hardware. That all could have just gotten less expensive, faster, and grown gradually, and become more (not less) open. See also: "VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future" http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/
The reality is, in the US marketplace, people usually create incompatible "standards" on purpose to gain vendor lock-in, or to make some marketing claim, or to work around some copyright or patent. As with Microsoft in the past, companies may intentionally try to sabotage standards (embrace, extend, destroy) as an example of market failure relating to monopoly and externalities. Still, another reason this happens is that creating new things from (seemingly) scratch can be a lot of fun (even as almost everything is built on layers of past work, including notions of physics).
I'm all for experiment and diversity, and I'm all for plug-in modularity, and I'm all for learning-by-doing including through building systems from the ground-up (e.g. http://www.nand2tetris.org/ ). But, practically speaking, our bigger problem these days is mostly too much software, too many standards, too many programming languages, too many libraries, too many IDEs, too many OSes, too many drivers, too many plugins, and too many applications (all with too much accidental complexity). Instead of having a few comprehensive reliable (and free and open source) systems implemented in the above languages and using a common VM standard, we have many half-made buggy ones. This is not to say those languages above could not be improved or that another addition to them would be bad. It is just that at some point a plethora of half-finished choices is its own kind of oppression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less
See also: 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 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. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we mana
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
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. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially... irony.:-)
So, how can we transcend militarism?
Simple persuasive rhetoric was tried, and failed, when Albert Einstein said, with the creation of atomic weapons everything had changed except our way of thinking.
The economic argument against war was tried, and failed; see "War is a Racket" by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler: http://www.lexrex.com/enli
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..
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"
"Being jobless, and consequently moneyless, in todays world basically makes person isolated from society - one becomes like Robinson on deserted island, only surrounded by hostile creatures threatening his life, health, freedom and personal possessions. One has to work directly on own life support, instead of working for exchange - which doesn't take place, because none would hire him. However, when joblessness becomes common, there is possibility of division of society and economy - those who work for satisfying their own needs can among themselves reinvent specialization, exchange, market and even money, and form separate society, akin to remote native communities. If they can do without non-free products of society (using only trash and rejects from it) they are completely removed from great economy, shrinking both labor and goods' markets. "Invisible hand" with technological advances is systematically pushing more and more people out of economy and it can continue until production of goods is no longer profitable for the lack of demand. However, invisible hand can never reintroduce those rejected people back in, because it doesn't work that way, it only runs one way - to the bottom. So, in the end, high technology will just grind to a halt leaving behind its demise a new primitive society of slum dwellers."
Thanks for the great reply, AC. I like the Robinson Crusoe analogy amidsts modern society (like for squatters) and hostile beasts analogy (like for those who claim to be property "owners"). Yes indeed, the market only hears the needs of those with money. That is why people can starve next to grain elevators bursting full of grain, and people can go shoeless near stores full to the bursting of unsold shoes, and people can go homeless next to vacant houses foreclosed by banks. If your pessimistic conclusion at the end is true (just for the sake of argument), I wonder how many times it has happened before os Earth or in the Universe? Perhaps mainstream economics if what really killed the dinosaurs?:-) Could US-style capitalism explain the Fermi paradox?:-)
See also my writings on five interwoven economies: subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft -- and how all real societies have some balance between all five types of transactions.. On my site or here as a not-very-flashy video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
What you describe is a reversion to a subsistence livelihood (hunter/gatherer, but amidst the trash piles), and then it growing into alternative types of exchange (some people do that now with LETS systems and alternative currencies like the Ithaca HOUR), But other possibilities include growth of a gift economy and also better democratic planning. To put a positive spin on your words, in an age of nanotech replicators and cheap robotics and free software, what you describe may be a simple withering away of money-based transactions until mainstream economics really doesn't matter in practice much anymore for almost anyone.
If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/ "Mylyn's task-focused interface reduces information overload and makes multitasking easy. Mylyn makes tasks a first class part of the IDE, integrates rich and offline editing for ALM tools, and monitors your programming activity to create a "task context" that focuses your workspace and automatically links all relevant artifacts to the task-at-hand. This puts the information you need at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing information overload, facilitating multitasking and easing the sharing of expertise."
Frankly, still have not got the hang of it myself, so I turned it off..
Maybe they were on to something in their overall approach? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine "TCM's view of the body places little emphasis on anatomical structures, but is mainly concerned with the identification of functional entities (which regulate digestion, breathing, aging etc.). While health is perceived as harmonious interaction of these entities and the outside world, disease is interpreted as a disharmony in interaction. TCM diagnosis includes in tracing symptoms to patterns of an underlying disharmony, by measuring the pulse, inspecting the tongue, skin, eyes and by looking at the eating and sleeping habits of the patient as well as many other things."
I got to know Stella when she was working on an improved way to distill salt water into fresh using solar energy (or other forms of heat). Engineer Charlie Parker has built the prototype for her. In essence, her approach involved having a rotating cylinder with a carpet-like surface which rotated into salt water at the bottom and had heat applied near the top. Her idea was that the wicking action of the material would make it easier for the fresh water to evaporate. Back then, there were not any detailed enough measurements of energy use and water produced to know how effective that particular process was. While different overall, some aspects of the current article seem to validate her intuition on that idea of using an intermediate material to help with the distillation process...
She was about 85 then, which goes to show people can make contributions to science, technology, and culture at any age. She lived through a lot, and through all the ups and downs seemed genuinely concerned about helping people everywhere. The motto she had on her small refrigerator door at the time was "Life must be made worth living". That from someone who had lived the life of a Countess at one time (marrying a Count at 17, when she was not from royalty), and who lost most of that from WWII. A complex life.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... 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.... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all...."
Great post on recognizing public goods (due in part to both positive and negative externalities). Further, in order to live well on the Moon or Mars or Asteroids, we will need all sorts of post-scarcity technologies like robotics, AI, 100% material recycling, self-replicating machines, 3D printers, telemedicine, maybe DNA-reprogramming or advanced medicines for microgravity survival, distributed information systems, advanced design tools, better power systems be they solar or muclear fission or fusion, improved forms of governance and conflict resolution, and lots more things. The same sorts of ideas when applied on Earth could (if wealth is distributed, like with a basic income) make the Earth a pleasant place for almost all humans, like Bucky Fuller talked about decades ago. We may well see that in the coming decades on Earth (if we do not destroy ourselves with the same tools fighting over 19th century economic dogmas). So, it would be ironic if we were to spread the very ecnomic dogma we are struggling to move past on Earth into space using the very technologies that coudl liberate humanity everywhere.
A "basic income" is one way to deal with this, and is also described in Marshall Brain's "Manna" novel. So, you get a set number of ration units every month as a human right or right of citizenship (or in Manna, from stock holdership).
Excellent example related to rationing with the conflict over who gets the starship. Currency can be useful for rationing. See C.H. Douglas on Social Credit in Wikipedia on why money is better to signal demand than as a store of value. However, there are multiple ways to signal demand. See also the "Kanban" idea used in factory control, where a Kanban token to signal demand can be anything from a ball to a card to an empty box.
Still, as I explain on my website, there are at least five types of transactions in an economy (subsistence, gift, exchange, panned, and theft), typically interwoven, and any real society has some balance of all five of them according to its history and resources and technology and mythology. As an alternative, we could perhaps allocate starships on part through persuasive IRC chat messages and emails the same way a free software project like Debian allocates it resources, as a bit more of a "gift economy" mixed with some level of planning (but still with some subsistence and exchange in the mix).
One thing to consider is there are different levels of needs and wants, and society will change as they can be fulfilled. Everyone getting enough food and water and shelter is one level of abundance. Everyone living like a typical US America is another. Everyone living like Bill Gates is another. Everyone living like Jean-Luc Picard is another. Everyone living like "Q" is another. Enough abundance to live like a current typical US American without having to "work", managed through a basic income of say US$2000 per person per month, would be an enormous change in our society, even if nobody was getting a starship. There is a law of diminishing returns perhaps, too.It is likely a bigger leap from today's rat race to a basic income of US$2000 a month for all where nobody *has* to work, than from everyone gets US$2000 a month to everyone gets US$200,000 a month (in today's equivalents).
Imagine a world where anyone can 3D print a sandwich and a laptop computer at a local municipal town hall building as easily and without notice as you can get a drink of water from a public water fountain in such places. Yes, somewhere some system accounts for such things, but maybe they would be like how public water fountain use today is just taken for granted and not charged for specially. Yet, 1000 years ago, access to clean chilled water on-demand indoors would have been a great luxury for most.
Slashdot Mirror
The Big Crunch by David Goodstein: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
I've slept on a junky bed in the cold in my life too (during winter in Pittsburgh with a 40 minute slog through the snow each way to CMU where I was hanging out at the robotics institute, not able to afford to pay for much heat). I think you missed my point, or I obviously was not clear enough about it. Remember, this is in the context of a Nobel prize-winning scientist saying no one would hire him if he were starting today. The original poster says he or she needs a degree (at great personal cost) to make a difference in the world (including to make a meaningful life from that by contributing to science). I point out how I got a fancy degree and it really does not help that much in doing meaningful work. It certainly could have helped me make a lot of money most likely hurting other people in some monopolistic/cronyistic way (like via the FIRE sector of the economy where lots of Princeton grads go), but I was not into that way of life.
As for science, ignoring most colleges flunk out half their freshman class ultimately, consider this:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
If you want to make a difference in the world or even just in your own life, you have to just go out and do something of healthy value to the world (or at least yourself). But that is not what much of academia claims and the original poster seems to feel that he or she is being scammed by academia but can do nothing about it Thus the cake (diploma) is a lie (in many cases). I know -- I got a good piece of that "cake", but it still wasn't very filling or very healthy. Did it have some benefits? Sure. But it is also quite possible I would have done better in life without college (and especially pursuing grad school) at all, because they were great opportunity costs, great financial costs, and such experiences were also in many ways disempowering.
Or for a different perspective, words from someone who chose to become a carpet cleaner to have a good interesting life:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030206110440/http://www.unconventionalideas.com/bstcarer.html
"...
The point is that as a professional carpet cleaner, I don't need to look very far for challenge and stimulation. No, the work isn't easy, and can be physically demanding, but as you will gather from my descriptions, it isn't all repetitive drudgery either.
Many people get misled when seeking a career. They turn their backs on work which is supposedly beneath the ability o
http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/ ...
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib
-----
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
----
This has been so obvious for many many years to the organic faring community... It is just another negative externality of conventional farming practice, and another example of market failure to account for systemic risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162375-whos-killing-the-bees-new-study-implicates-virtually-every-facet-of-modern-farming
In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.
The future of agriculture is probably indoors powered by cheap electricity (from fusion and solar) and managed by robots (including probably pollination).
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/issues/farm-indoors.htm
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHA
http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/products/baxter/
I've been tempted to get one as an investment ($22K) to learn to write apps for it, but I don't have the time right now doing other work. But stuff like Baxter is clearly the future...
And, while we "rethink robotics", we need to "rethink economics" (including a basic income, an expanded gift economy, improved local subsistence, and better democratic planning), like I talk about on my site.
What or who should you revere? That is a good question you may spend a lifetime answering... From Albert Einstein:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
On broader change to make economics work for more people, see stuff like:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
On the pitfalls of academia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
There are many spheres of life. Or as another analogy, life is like a city with lots of different districts and back alleys and night clubs and homes. Even if conventional academia is not your forte, you might find others where you can build a meaningful life that is a healthy success (parenting, being a good friend or neighbor, etc.). Many inventors did not "fit in", so you might fund some other creative niche outside of the formal academic related career path.
For many people, the promise of academics has become a scam. However, diplomas are still used as gatekeepers to many jobs. For a deeper view of the scam in progress, see thsibook (free online) by John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
And this:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Anyway, I sympathize with your feeling and frustrations. Even with a dipl
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ... Since we began with a cosmological analogy, let us return to one now. An unfortunate space traveler, falling into a black hole, is utterly and irretrievably doomed, but that is only obvious to the space traveler. In the perception of an observer hovering above the event horizon, the space traveler's time slows down, so that it seems as if catastrophe can forever be put off into the future. Something like that has happened in our research universities. The good times ended forever around 1970, but by importing students, and employing Ph.D's as temporary postdocs, we have stretched time out, pretending that nothing has changed, waiting for the good times to return. We have about as much chance as the space traveler. ..."
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science [due in part to continuing exponential growth that was soon to end]. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.
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
Wow, looking that up, on Applebees and Chili's: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-waiters-and-waitresses/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/02/applebees-tablets-table-top-devices-restaurant-technology/3698561/
I think people overestimate the "human touch" need in service (like mentioned as a reason everything won't be automated in other posts). While it is true humans need other humans to be human, and physical human touch is important, interactions with "strangers" can be stressful for many, and they also expose people to a risk of disease. And example if banking, where many people now prefer using an ATM machine to talking to a bank teller. Same with many automated phone systems for routine transactions. It may depend in part on a person's personality of course. At some point thought, "more sanitary" and "more personalized and interactive" may become arguments for more automation. For example, who likes to wait around for the wait staff to bring you a bill when you are ready to go at the end of a dinner out?
One can hope though that as we see more abundance from more automation, people may have more time to cook at home and entertain at home. That may be the bigger long term change here. Why go to a restaurant at all, where you have little control over the ingredients, the people around you, and so on? Or, alternatively, when a robot can fetch your meal for you, as in this video of a PR2 robot going to Subway to fetch a sandwich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp
Marshall Brain's "Manna" explores two possible answers to your last question.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Regarding "socialism", here is a great graph on US perceptions, preferences, and reality regarding wealth distribution:http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/
"As you can see from the figure, participants rather badly estimated the current state of wealth disparity! Furthermore, they offered an ideal wealth distribution (under a "veil of ignorance") that was even more different (and more equal) relative to the current state of affairs.
What this tells me is that Americans don't understand the extent of disparity in the US, and that they (we) desire a more equitable society. It is also interesting to note that the differences between people who make more money and less money, republicans and democrats, men and women -- were relatively small in magnitude, and that in general people who fall into these different categories seem to agree about the ideal wealth distribution under the veil of ignorance.
Maybe this suggests that when there are no labels, and we think about the core of our morality in abstract terms (and under the veil of ignorance), we are actually very similar?"
Graph picture there seems broken; see it here:
http://ecologicalsociology.blogspot.com/2012/06/us-income-inequality-real-perceived.html
Still, you are right about the "allergy", and that is why planning through the market in the USA along with a basic income may be the easiest way forward:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_market.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-basic-income-guarantee-all-americans-similar-what-being-proposed-switzerland/jF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
"Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in North America: community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsive to citizen's needs, and self-policing by the learned professions.[1]:p24
She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost.[1]:p4"
You're right that climate change makes everything harder. Yet, we have so much abundance, and so much land, and the oceans can support artificial islands and habitats, and we can build in Antarctica and space. So, as a global society we have plenty of wealth to help everyone adjust well to change climates. The question is a political one of how much of that wealth will be made available for that purpose. Since much of that wealth was made using fossil fuels, the question is also, do countries that burned the most in the past have a moral obligation to help? Even ignoring the deeper moral obligation to help other humans and all living creatures (while respecting the past). For example, we could build self-replicating space habitats that wold support trillions of people in style. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race tothe very end...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
Of course, "protest" may not be very effective against robots programmed to ignore it, where the 1% live in gated "Elysium" communities shut off from all the noise etc... The window may be closing for fixing our society before these trends otherwise overwhelm most of us.
As I say on my site: "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."
Glad to see so many insightful posts on this topic!
You make some good points, but you also make some key questionable assumptions. Bill Gates was himself born a millionaire (trust fund from banker granddad) and also he did not write most of the software he resold, and what he wrote,he wrote based on knowledge gained in part from dumpster diving to find program listings from a computer center. Without his mother's knowing someone at IBM, he probably would not have gotten the deal for an OS for the IBM PC. IBM probably would have been better off using an in-house Forth that had been written bu David Frank, or Unix like the CS-9000, but suffered from internal politics.
The deep question is what part of the the fruits of our infrastructure (air, water, farmland, roads, machines, seeds, internet, books, software, ICs, etc.) should be shared equally (not "means-tested") and what part should somehow be used to "reward" hard work or risk taking or whatever. So you make an assumption with being "OK" with a huge wealth disparity whatever its cause (in this case, Bill Gates indeed being bright and hard working, but also rich from birth and part of a socially well-connected family). But another point of view might be that, say, half the economic output of the USA should be shared equally (US$25K per person per year) as social security payments from birth as a "basic income", and the other half should then be "earned"or divided based on effort or merit somehow.
Dan Pink questions the whole notion of financial reward as a motivator for intellectual work (even as we all need some money to survive and thrive in this culture we have built):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
See also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
On Bill Gates and dumpster diving:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
Bill Gates made a lot of money by damaging the community of people freely sharing knowledge and software with each other, while hypocritically pleading poverty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Often people can make a lot of money by disempowering other people and disrupting communities.
That said, is Windows a useful standard given its backward compatibility? Yes it is (as much as I don't like to have to admit that).
The JK Rowling story is more complex too. Many people write amazing stories, but few get widely published by the nature of our publishing industry. Still, her story is a good example of the value of a "basic income" to promote creativity. ... "In fact," harrumphs the Yorkshire Post, "this middle-class English girl with an Exeter University degree and a career as a teacher didn't try to dispel the myth that she'd been a penniless, single mother." ..."
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/27/1030053057866.html
"Too good, it turns out. Yes, Rowling was a single mother with a bad marriage behind her, and yes, she was briefly on the dole. But the coffee shop was owned by her brother-in-law and Rowling was never far from her middle-class origins.
If the dole effectively promotes the arts effectively in a compassionate way, then why do we have copyright instead?
In a world of
It led me to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
As a software developer, in some ways I think we hit a peak with languages like Smalltalk, Common Lisp / Symbolics, Erlang, and C in the 1980s and an OS / VM architecture like IBM's System 360 and VM (which was in a sense "open source" till the mid 1980s) and things have been sliding backwards ever since. I learned C around 1983 on Unix (VMUTS) running on VM hardware (on an IBM mainframe with two CPUs where typically when I did a compile VMUTS got one CPU and 100 I/O bound users shared the other, giving me ten a second turn around for "hello world"). VisualWorks+ENVY in the late 1980s was just amazing for its times, solving issues in practice that Java and Eclipse in practice still struggles with on 1000X faster hardware. That all could have just gotten less expensive, faster, and grown gradually, and become more (not less) open. See also: "VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future"
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/
The reality is, in the US marketplace, people usually create incompatible "standards" on purpose to gain vendor lock-in, or to make some marketing claim, or to work around some copyright or patent. As with Microsoft in the past, companies may intentionally try to sabotage standards (embrace, extend, destroy) as an example of market failure relating to monopoly and externalities. Still, another reason this happens is that creating new things from (seemingly) scratch can be a lot of fun (even as almost everything is built on layers of past work, including notions of physics).
I'm all for experiment and diversity, and I'm all for plug-in modularity, and I'm all for learning-by-doing including through building systems from the ground-up (e.g. http://www.nand2tetris.org/ ). But, practically speaking, our bigger problem these days is mostly too much software, too many standards, too many programming languages, too many libraries, too many IDEs, too many OSes, too many drivers, too many plugins, and too many applications (all with too much accidental complexity). Instead of having a few comprehensive reliable (and free and open source) systems implemented in the above languages and using a common VM standard, we have many half-made buggy ones. This is not to say those languages above could not be improved or that another addition to them would be bad. It is just that at some point a plethora of half-finished choices is its own kind of oppression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less
See also:
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 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. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we mana
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-basic-income-guarantee-all-americans-similar-what-being-proposed-switzerland/jFbgDZ4h
http://www.johntreed.com/sittingducks.html
"Are U.S. Navy surface ships sitting ducks to enemies with modern weapons?"
And I might as well add my usual "it's all ironic", which is my comment on the main article:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
-----
Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
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. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-)
So, how can we transcend militarism?
Simple persuasive rhetoric was tried, and failed, when Albert Einstein said, with the creation of atomic weapons everything had changed except our way of thinking.
The economic argument against war was tried, and failed; see "War is a Racket" by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler:
http://www.lexrex.com/enli
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"
"Being jobless, and consequently moneyless, in todays world basically makes person isolated from society - one becomes like Robinson on deserted island, only surrounded by hostile creatures threatening his life, health, freedom and personal possessions. One has to work directly on own life support, instead of working for exchange - which doesn't take place, because none would hire him. However, when joblessness becomes common, there is possibility of division of society and economy - those who work for satisfying their own needs can among themselves reinvent specialization, exchange, market and even money, and form separate society, akin to remote native communities. If they can do without non-free products of society (using only trash and rejects from it) they are completely removed from great economy, shrinking both labor and goods' markets. "Invisible hand" with technological advances is systematically pushing more and more people out of economy and it can continue until production of goods is no longer profitable for the lack of demand. However, invisible hand can never reintroduce those rejected people back in, because it doesn't work that way, it only runs one way - to the bottom. So, in the end, high technology will just grind to a halt leaving behind its demise a new primitive society of slum dwellers."
Thanks for the great reply, AC. I like the Robinson Crusoe analogy amidsts modern society (like for squatters) and hostile beasts analogy (like for those who claim to be property "owners"). Yes indeed, the market only hears the needs of those with money. That is why people can starve next to grain elevators bursting full of grain, and people can go shoeless near stores full to the bursting of unsold shoes, and people can go homeless next to vacant houses foreclosed by banks. If your pessimistic conclusion at the end is true (just for the sake of argument), I wonder how many times it has happened before os Earth or in the Universe? Perhaps mainstream economics if what really killed the dinosaurs? :-) Could US-style capitalism explain the Fermi paradox? :-)
See also my writings on five interwoven economies: subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft -- and how all real societies have some balance between all five types of transactions.. On my site or here as a not-very-flashy video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
What you describe is a reversion to a subsistence livelihood (hunter/gatherer, but amidst the trash piles), and then it growing into alternative types of exchange (some people do that now with LETS systems and alternative currencies like the Ithaca HOUR), But other possibilities include growth of a gift economy and also better democratic planning. To put a positive spin on your words, in an age of nanotech replicators and cheap robotics and free software, what you describe may be a simple withering away of money-based transactions until mainstream economics really doesn't matter in practice much anymore for almost anyone.
You wrote: "Not a single person was laid off..."
But the unstated part is "...in your company".
If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid
Here is a list I put together of about 50 things one can do about that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
A "basic income" (monthly social security payments for all from birth) is the simplest and probably most effective one of those for a democratic capitalistic society:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/17/american_basic_income_an_end_to_poverty.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html
The opposite position though:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1222228/the-luddites-are-almost-always-wrong-why-tech-doesnt-kill-jobs
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/
"Mylyn's task-focused interface reduces information overload and makes multitasking easy. Mylyn makes tasks a first class part of the IDE, integrates rich and offline editing for ALM tools, and monitors your programming activity to create a "task context" that focuses your workspace and automatically links all relevant artifacts to the task-at-hand. This puts the information you need at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing information overload, facilitating multitasking and easing the sharing of expertise."
Frankly, still have not got the hang of it myself, so I turned it off..
Yeah, as an example, in ancient China, you only paid the doctor when you were well...
http://www.dailypaul.com/256879/tcm-traditional-chinese-medicine-paying-your-doctor-to-keep-you-well
Even now, Chinese doctors get good but not outrageous pay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_China#Physician_compensation
Maybe they were on to something in their overall approach?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine
"TCM's view of the body places little emphasis on anatomical structures, but is mainly concerned with the identification of functional entities (which regulate digestion, breathing, aging etc.). While health is perceived as harmonious interaction of these entities and the outside world, disease is interpreted as a disharmony in interaction. TCM diagnosis includes in tracing symptoms to patterns of an underlying disharmony, by measuring the pulse, inspecting the tongue, skin, eyes and by looking at the eating and sleeping habits of the patient as well as many other things."
People like Andrew Weil seem to focus on integrating the best of all the medical approaches.
http://integrativemedicine.arizona.edu/
For a more extreme criticism of Western Medicine, see Ivan Illich's book "Medical Nemesis":
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030313illich/Frame.Illich.Ch1.html
I got to know Stella when she was working on an improved way to distill salt water into fresh using solar energy (or other forms of heat). Engineer Charlie Parker has built the prototype for her. In essence, her approach involved having a rotating cylinder with a carpet-like surface which rotated into salt water at the bottom and had heat applied near the top. Her idea was that the wicking action of the material would make it easier for the fresh water to evaporate. Back then, there were not any detailed enough measurements of energy use and water produced to know how effective that particular process was. While different overall, some aspects of the current article seem to validate her intuition on that idea of using an intermediate material to help with the distillation process...
She was about 85 then, which goes to show people can make contributions to science, technology, and culture at any age. She lived through a lot, and through all the ups and downs seemed genuinely concerned about helping people everywhere. The motto she had on her small refrigerator door at the time was "Life must be made worth living". That from someone who had lived the life of a Countess at one time (marrying a Count at 17, when she was not from royalty), and who lost most of that from WWII. A complex life.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... 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. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Great post on recognizing public goods (due in part to both positive and negative externalities). Further, in order to live well on the Moon or Mars or Asteroids, we will need all sorts of post-scarcity technologies like robotics, AI, 100% material recycling, self-replicating machines, 3D printers, telemedicine, maybe DNA-reprogramming or advanced medicines for microgravity survival, distributed information systems, advanced design tools, better power systems be they solar or muclear fission or fusion, improved forms of governance and conflict resolution, and lots more things. The same sorts of ideas when applied on Earth could (if wealth is distributed, like with a basic income) make the Earth a pleasant place for almost all humans, like Bucky Fuller talked about decades ago. We may well see that in the coming decades on Earth (if we do not destroy ourselves with the same tools fighting over 19th century economic dogmas). So, it would be ironic if we were to spread the very ecnomic dogma we are struggling to move past on Earth into space using the very technologies that coudl liberate humanity everywhere.
I've worked towards on on-and-off. Sort of like a better email but for any sort of data...
A "basic income" is one way to deal with this, and is also described in Marshall Brain's "Manna" novel. So, you get a set number of ration units every month as a human right or right of citizenship (or in Manna, from stock holdership).
Excellent example related to rationing with the conflict over who gets the starship. Currency can be useful for rationing. See C.H. Douglas on Social Credit in Wikipedia on why money is better to signal demand than as a store of value. However, there are multiple ways to signal demand. See also the "Kanban" idea used in factory control, where a Kanban token to signal demand can be anything from a ball to a card to an empty box.
Still, as I explain on my website, there are at least five types of transactions in an economy (subsistence, gift, exchange, panned, and theft), typically interwoven, and any real society has some balance of all five of them according to its history and resources and technology and mythology. As an alternative, we could perhaps allocate starships on part through persuasive IRC chat messages and emails the same way a free software project like Debian allocates it resources, as a bit more of a "gift economy" mixed with some level of planning (but still with some subsistence and exchange in the mix).
One thing to consider is there are different levels of needs and wants, and society will change as they can be fulfilled. Everyone getting enough food and water and shelter is one level of abundance. Everyone living like a typical US America is another. Everyone living like Bill Gates is another. Everyone living like Jean-Luc Picard is another. Everyone living like "Q" is another. Enough abundance to live like a current typical US American without having to "work", managed through a basic income of say US$2000 per person per month, would be an enormous change in our society, even if nobody was getting a starship. There is a law of diminishing returns perhaps, too.It is likely a bigger leap from today's rat race to a basic income of US$2000 a month for all where nobody *has* to work, than from everyone gets US$2000 a month to everyone gets US$200,000 a month (in today's equivalents).
Imagine a world where anyone can 3D print a sandwich and a laptop computer at a local municipal town hall building as easily and without notice as you can get a drink of water from a public water fountain in such places. Yes, somewhere some system accounts for such things, but maybe they would be like how public water fountain use today is just taken for granted and not charged for specially. Yet, 1000 years ago, access to clean chilled water on-demand indoors would have been a great luxury for most.