[The following is an expanded version of an e-mail I sent to Stephen in response to some reflections he had on our most recent FastForward Radio -- that show with guest Joseph Jackson discussing the possibility of a post-scarcity world. I think Stephen was going to post some additional thoughts, too -- to which I would have added comments -- but time's up!]
My primary issue with Joseph’s arguments isn’t ideological. In some cases, at least, technology trumps (or drives) political ideology and economic models. We’ve talked before on the blog and the podcast about how societies suddenly grew a conscience concerning slavery as soon as they had machines that could do the work anyway, or developed a deep reverence for the earth after they had satisfied enough material needs to put it on the priority list. A universal safety net of subsistence living for everyone could arguably work the same way. A generation from now, we might not even see that as “socialism” any more than we view public highways or public education as socialism.
My issue is more practical. By what means could we possibly get to the kind of society he’s describing? The assumption seems to be that it would be the federal government (or the Earth government or — my fav — the Committee of Robot Overlords) doing the distributing. But we don’t have a working model of how a government can guarantee the material welfare of its population without ripping its economy to shreds and putting individual rights on the back burner. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but Joseph doesn’t have a model of how we would get there, or at least he didn’t articulate one Wednesday night.
Photo by ninjapoodles
Which is maybe why he’s starting a journal.
In the US today, we ensure subsistence via a combination of government programs and a lot of ad-hoc, open-source private efforts. It’s not a perfect system, but very few people starve to death, anyone who wants it can get shelter for the night, and hospitals don’t refuse patients who come in to the emergency room. I support a local church-sponsored food bank. They do very good work, and the only government involvement I know of is its tax-free status. It’s an open-source welfare program. One of the models I’ve noodled with for a future government would be one that has some oversight of the overall production environment, which would be widely distributed automation not necessarily “owned” by the government — like the committee that sets standards for open-source software.
Of relevance here is a quote from a different e-mail, this one from Michael Darling — I guess today is officially Blog Stuff from Michael’s Emails Day — which lays out the problem in this way:
The vocabulary we use to talk about economics and scarcity has to change. Economists and those who take their classes and read their books are not equipped to discuss abundance. It just makes no sense.
Even less equipped to do so would be politicians. Our whole political discourse has the zero-sum game as itsraison d’etre. The Left will tell you that the market is not sufficient, and that money should be taken from the “rich” and redistributed fairly amongst those who need it (either directly or via services). The Right will tell you that confiscatory taxation and government handouts can only destroy the economy. Scarcity is the underlying assumption behind both arguments.
I don’t see any straightforward way to convert our current very powerful, entrenched, and bureaucratic government into something open and abundance-friendly. Certainly, they will be slow to adopt those kinds of models on their own. But if some of what goes on in Joseph’s new journal is about how to move to that kind of model — and we start to see some steps in that direction — then it’s a good thing.
However, we had to wait until laptops were not only invented but commoditized before we could have One Child One Laptop. So I think we need some additional technological growth and increase in productivity before we can get to a true robo-Marxist Worker’s Paradise.