Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

Getting rid of capitalism also wouldn't require getting rid of the concept of private property. Capitalism is simply the concept that wealth can generate revenue through investment. It's a way of allocating money by way of a ruling class of the most wealthy. This isn't the only way, or in my opinion the best way, to decide what resources are allocated where.

I think coops, nonprofits, and even open source software all show the limits to capitalism. They are examples of people rejecting capitalism in order to persue higher goals than the ever increasing profit margins capitalism demands. I think our economic system should reward them.

Today, in my state, we extract and move more raw iron ore for steel production per year by a considerable factor more than the US ever achieved, and with far fewer people per tonne - largely due to better techniques and automation.

If you look about the world as it is you will realise that we are capable of having greater production and better lifestyles across the globe with a lower population and less by product from consumption than we do today.

The means and levels of consumption today are problematic to say the least.

In the U.S. (and broadly, the western world) we seem to have a really hard time using economic incentives to encourage certain behaviors. I think it's partially because we don't want to implicitly judge a given lifestyle choice as better than another.

However, I think there is much we can learn from a place like Singapore. Singapore simply does not stick to any single political dogma - they choose a mishmash of policies based on the outcome they want to achieve.

Everyone deserves equal investment, yet investment is not distributed equitably at all.

Education, internships, mentorship, etc are all investments, but more importantly, they snowball.

An executive branch cabinet official likely had a high profile job, and a high profile job before that, and a job with mentorship before that, and several internships before that, and admission to a great college before that, and potentially private school before that, and potentially community clubs or community help before that, maybe they had a parent in a position of power.

Every opportunity helps you get more opportunities in the future, and those who have capitalized on opportunity are those people you would say "have merit."

So merit ultimately does not measure productivity, but investment. With this understanding strictly "meritocratic" systems are systems that do not promote social mobility.

Communism is often maligned (and it should be, because it empirically always results in authoritarian rule) and our schools did indoctrinate us with "communism is bad" and "there must be profit motive for people to work," but we have a blindspot for oligarchy which is a system with no social mobility and little public investment which is a much more likely outcome than communism. Wealth disparity results in oligarchy and we are very much on our way.

If people have no hope for their future they become a drag on society as a whole, so it is important that it is not just productivity, but willingness and ability to work that is taken into account. It is our responsibility to lift our fellow man up, so they do not drag us down.

If merit is the sum of opportunities capitalized on, then it's important to distinguish between those who have merit because they had many opportunities, and those who have merit because they capitalized on the limited opportunities they were given.

Maybe the second derivative of world popultion is collapsing but not the "world" population (at least if you mean world as a whole and not "developed world" only, because population of "developed world" maybe getting there).

>> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.

If by prosperity you mean key economic indicators like GDP, then yes. But those economic models are so primitive that I question they usefulness and validity. The nature of work changed so much for last 100 years due to technology that it amazes me that we still belive that it can be summed up with few simple agregate numbers. Even the most important domains such as Agriculture, despite growing population, are needing less and less people to produce almost enough (if we include the food waste it's more than enough, but lacking fair distribution). At this moment about 800 milion people are working in or around farming - that's only 10% of overall population. In year 2000 agriculture was employeeing more than 1 billion, that is - 16 % of population.

This is the real reason of production growth - technology advancements and popularisation, not population growth.