From: O'Regan, Emlyn (Emlyn.ORegan@actew.com.au)
Date: Tue Apr 20 1999 - 19:14:39 MDT
Has anybody done a thorough analysis of the likely behavior of post
immortality capitalism? How will this affect economies, governments,
citizens? I'm thinking economists, econometrists, someone who's scraped
all the beans into a set of complicated piles, and can justify the
result.
Can everyone get rich? Or will we have the same divide that we
experience today? Will the first world countries still require a
massive, impoverished third word to support the illusion of utopia?
Emlyn
>----------
>From: Billy Brown[SMTP:bbrown@conemsco.com]
>Reply To: extropians@extropy.com
>Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 12:08 AM
>To: extropians@extropy.com
>Subject: RE: ethical problem? Some kind of problem, anyway...
>
>O'Regan, Emlyn wrote:
>> Similarly with jobs. I think that a lot of people work their 40+ years
>> in a career happy to know that it will come to an end in some imaginable
>> period of time: I'd say a lot of (or most) people don't like their
>> career, or to put it another way, if they were idependently wealthy,
>> they'd stop working. Try telling them that they're ageless now, and the
>> retirement age has moved to 400, or 800, or 100,000, or never.
>
>Well, it can't get quite that bad. Any reasonably frugal person can save up
>enough to fund their own retirement in less than 100 years - often much
>less, especially in high-paying fields. You could also do a partially
>retirement - work hard for 20 years, then switch to a part-time job and use
>the interest on your savings to make up the difference.
>
>Immortality would give everyone a chance to let compound interest turn their
>pennies into dollars, and their dollars into riches. Of course, if it
>becomes common for people to retire and live off their interest the economy
>is going to start looking pretty strange.
>
>Billy Brown, MCSE+I
>bbrown@conemsco.com
>
>
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