From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Oct 19 2002 - 02:42:02 MDT
spike66 wrote:
>>> spike wrote:
>>>
>>> Drugs are not needed. ... Reach out
>>> and grab the life you want. spike
>>>
>> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
>
>> Are you claiming our current economic system and ideas are quite
>> sufficient for a world of actual abundance rather than the world of
>> scarcity they were designed for?
>
>
> That is exactly what I am claiming. Not just sufficient,
> but necessary.
>
>> If so then please show your argument.
>
>
> Our current economic system was not so much designed
> as it evolved. As abundance increases, as a direct
> result of humans creating wealth as a byproduct of
> our labor and brains, our economic system evolves to
> be ever better adapted to the world in which it
> exists. Attempts at designing economic systems
> have led to such horrific abominations as communism
> and totalitarianism. May economic systems be left
> to evolve, hands off.
The 10 million dollar question is whether an economic system
evolved for scarcity will evolve fast enough to something that
matches the very different conditions of abundance. It is not
simply a matter of what the governments or economists do, it is
a matter of how fast or slowly embedded human economic memes
shift. I would present that there is no reason whatsoever to
suppose that human memes shift as fast as our technology is
currently moving us to a vastly different environment than our
economics evolved in and a vastly faster changing situation that
the means of evolution themselves can deal with. In these
circumstances saying strictly "hands off" is not altogether
justifiable. We are not back in some relatively prehistoric
condition as referred to with communism and such. If Kurzweil
and others are correct we will see tens of thousands of years
worth of change in this century. If some of us are correct we
will see an orders of magnitude more in one generation. How in
the heck in the face of that are we to draw meaningful and
certain conclusions from stuff at the beginning and middle of
the 20th century?
>
>> Will you stop the tongue-in-cheek cuteness and give your best thinking
>> please? - samantha
>
>
> This is my best thinking please.
>
> Part of having it made is knowing when you have it made.
> We have it made. We will have even more in the future
> as wealth is created in ever more efficient ways. No
> drugs needed.
>
What of those who don't in the least have it made? What of the
nearly half of humanity that is living in more extreme poverty
and even starvation than most of us could imagine? Will we also
lift them up? Will we expect them to magically catch up if only
they act just like us when there is no infrastructure or
background for them to do so?
> Unfettered competition has winners and losers, but in
> the long run everyone wins. Attempts at deterring
> economic competition in a misguided attempt to make
> everyone a winner ends up making everyone a loser.
>
This is theory and rhetoric without proof.
> A perfect example of what I am talking about is just
> down the street from where you live. Intel in
> Sunnyvale and Advanced Micro Devices next to it
> in Santa Clara. Those two guys have been hoping to
> strangle each other for years. The winner: us!
> We win, all of us. We get processors that are
> better, faster, cheaper (to borrow a phrase.)
>
Actually, we lost big time for a lot of years of having bacwards
compatible Intel stuff be almost the only game in town. We
arguably did not get the best architecture and still want
because those competitive circumstances are such that nothing
too innovative can easily be started and catch up. Only a few
player can play in that space. And they have a vested interest
in playing a lot of the same old game as long as it is
profitable regardless of what is best for us.
In software the situation is much worse.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:40 MST