From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 09:25:31 MDT
At 09:35 AM 9/1/02 EDT, Ron h. wrote:
>The people of the island
>live entirely on fish caught by the 20 men.
> Now, pretend that somebody comes up with a new way of fishing and now
>it only takes 10 men to catch the fish required.
> we now have a 10 man labor surplus that can be turned to farming
>veggies, building better huts, etc.
What I find interesting about this kind of analogy is how rarely anyone
notices that if these people can survive happily on fish, without farming
or particle physics, the outcome is not 10 guys doing all the work and 10
slacking. It could just as easily be 10 jobs rotated so that all 20 work
half as hard as previously.
What they do with their spare time is up to them. Some will build
cyclotrons, some paint dazzling portraits of fish to sell to the US Navy
when they visit on leave, some will sleep in the sun, some will invent an
even better way to reduce the number of hours anyone needs to go fishing,
some will work up a plan to invade the next island and force *its* men to
do all the fishing, some will spend hours each day posting to the extropian
list instead of getting a life.
Damien Broderick
[you can give a starving man a fish, and next thing you know he's shooting
all the fish in your barrel]
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