Live data from Hacker News

The World After Capital

worldaftercapital.org

101–110 of 123 posts

Re: The World After Capital

#101
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to argue that scarcity has been reduced significantly, and continues to be reduced. It's been replaced by hoarding. I agree that this book is a little naive in that way (from what i've skimmed) but it's also important not to dismiss the spirit of the claim just because we haven't totally solved all of our dependencies on limited resources. edit: I also wanna point out that i get frustrated when peop…

Average life spans in the first world beginning to actually fall is a sign of some kind of decline.

Oh there are lots of ways to show that things are declining, but capitalism has been successful in concentrating wealth in the hands of those who have it. That system is working for those in power and as such I think it's extremely presumptuous to say we're living in the "late stage" or that we're anywhere knowably near the "post-" part of capitalism.

Re: The World After Capital

#102
post #10

Wikipedia defines capital as "a factor of production that is not wanted for itself but for its ability to help in producing other goods". That's the definition I learned in high school while studying Marx. There is not an "after capital" world. To manufacture anything you need capital first. Even for software services you need software, that's also capital. So to reach a world of post-scarcity you need a lot of capit…

Funny thing the scenario you put forward in the last part is exactly how Marx envisioned the transition from capitalism to socialism (iirc, communism was seen as a possible stepping stone). Thus he expected it to happen in heavily industrialized nations like Germany or UK back when he was writing. Supposedly Lenin was able to meet Marx once before the latter died, and asked Marx about his opinion on bootstrapping Rus…

And Marx was right. Russia was communist in the same way America is a democracy.

Re: The World After Capital

#103
post #48
post #19

> We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this issue. I believe that at the end of the day attention is the only finite resource. Sure, you can say time, but that’s more relative. For example - waiting in line at the supermarket seems like a waste of time, but if mind’s attention is uplifted / benevolent / doing some…

High quality land will always be a finite resource. They aren't making any more of it.

As a real estate investor, this is kind of true. Though for now there’s a lot of undeveloped land, if you venture beyond cities. And we could always build vertically. And some kind of Elysium-like thing. Some of it will have to be farmland, of course.

Re: The World After Capital

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part 3 of the book is a program for that reason https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/cont...

"Free ourselves from scarcity thinking." Brilliant. Do not worry about the decrease in arable land, shortages of drinking water, decline in biomass in fisheries, scarce minerals, or any of that stuff. It's all in your head! Mind over matter, man.

> Do not worry about the decrease in arable land...

Apply more technology: agroforestry combined with Boston Dynamics-type robots. Look into published material from/by Ernst Götsch, F. H. King, and Masanobu Fukuoka among others on principles. The techniques they worked out and published can be used to rebuild, reclaim, and build de novo arable land. Main criticism of these techniques is they are too labor-intensive. There isn't a law of physics that enforces wheeled farm machinery, so robotics-based farm machinery can assist with capturing scale. It's a new frontier, so no established player wants to pursue it at this time as long as our backs aren't against the wall when it comes to available arable land.

> shortages of drinking water...

Apply more technology: potable water supply is roughly a derivative function of available energy. Push comes to shove, we as a species are going to widespread nuclear power if necessary instead of the leadership dying by dysentery.

> decline in biomass in fisheries...

Apply more technology: mega-scale research and engineering to build fish sanctuaries/breeding grounds in the relative marine deserts of the open oceans. We're still in the relative hunter-gatherer phase of our aquaculture tech. When we have vast farms in the deep open water ocean that grow algae, then plankton, and upwards, raising an entire tower of consumption, instead of catching wild fish to feed domesticated fish, then I'd say we are relatively progressing into true aquaculture. Wouldn't hurt to develop at the same time genetically modified sponges and coral to capture and entomb mercury, and start millennia long filtration while we work out how to stop dumping it into our ecosystem.

> scarce minerals, or any of that stuff. It's all in your head!

Apply more technology: von Neumann mining while at the same time sending out starwisps to scout nearby star systems. Hundreds and even millennia-long timelines here, but not constrained by the known laws of physics, only by our species' own will to overcome our internal dissension.

The question I'm unsure of is will capital allocate to the "more technology" solution space before we as a species run out of time? I'm not entirely convinced capital markets actually understand the timelines, scales, and civilizational risks we are working with here, and even if individual people within the markets understand them, there is an argument to be made that the incentive structures of the markets combined with people's natural lifespans combine to create perverse incentives for funding Long Now-scale tech.

The dominant thesis the markets have embraced thus far is "the tech will become available when the threat becomes clear and present", which is outright faith and not based upon any settled science. Once the timeline to develop and deploy the tech to solve or even mitigate the challenges you outlined above exceed the timeline to catastrophic civilization-wide impacts, the capital markets have failed their anticipation function.

Re: The World After Capital

#105
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average life spans in the first world beginning to actually fall is a sign of some kind of decline.

Oh there are lots of ways to show that things are declining, but capitalism has been successful in concentrating wealth in the hands of those who have it. That system is working for those in power and as such I think it's extremely presumptuous to say we're living in the "late stage" or that we're anywhere knowably near the "post-" part of capitalism.

The question is whether that state of affairs can exist forever, or if the system can find a way to adapt and head off any cataclysm.

Re: The World After Capital

#106
post #48
post #19

> We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this issue. I believe that at the end of the day attention is the only finite resource. Sure, you can say time, but that’s more relative. For example - waiting in line at the supermarket seems like a waste of time, but if mind’s attention is uplifted / benevolent / doing some…

High quality land will always be a finite resource. They aren't making any more of it.

Not until we start building orbital colonies at least.

Re: The World After Capital

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Free ourselves from scarcity thinking." Brilliant. Do not worry about the decrease in arable land, shortages of drinking water, decline in biomass in fisheries, scarce minerals, or any of that stuff. It's all in your head! Mind over matter, man.

> Do not worry about the decrease in arable land... Apply more technology: agroforestry combined with Boston Dynamics-type robots. Look into published material from/by Ernst Götsch, F. H. King, and Masanobu Fukuoka among others on principles. The techniques they worked out and published can be used to rebuild, reclaim, and build de novo arable land. Main criticism of these techniques is they are too labor-intensive.…

I find it hard to believe that individual actors acting in their own Rational Self-Interest will ever do what you are proposing. Governments, or private actors working hand-in-hand with the government, could do probably do so, even on the framework of a capitalist system, but you'd have to completely reverse the trend of privatizing and selling off everything.

Re: The World After Capital

#108
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that capitalism, voluntary exchange, and the free market is the _only_ system that is capable of rationally allocating resources in a society Wow. Before one is the _only_ shouldn't one be first _one of_ ? Afaik it's quite clear by now that capitalism and free market are not rationally allocating resources, or is your definition of "rationally" equaling "give more to those who already have too much"?

Rationally can be understood to mean something like: * Put goods to their highest use * Allocate capital to those who can produce more rather than consume it In general, nothing is given to anyone. Increasing capital (i.e. by a single individual or within a single firm) is quite difficult and getting moreso every day. If 1% of the population is a super-producer, 9% are regular producers, and 90% are largely consumers…

It might be correct if that would be what happens. However people who create more are usually at the bottom end of the food chain in our current system. People who don't do much more than play political games usually end up at the top, sometimes earning 5 times of what the actual creators earn.

Re: The World After Capital

#109
post #50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that capitalism, voluntary exchange, and the free market is the _only_ system that is capable of rationally allocating resources in a society Wow. Before one is the _only_ shouldn't one be first _one of_ ? Afaik it's quite clear by now that capitalism and free market are not rationally allocating resources, or is your definition of "rationally" equaling "give more to those who already have too much"?

"giving more to those who already have too much" who are you to say what quantity or quality of goods people should have? That by itself isn't a "rational" allocation but a highly subjective one. When I say rational I mean that objectively, capitalism and markets reward agents who make the right market choices, and that in my book is allocating resources efficiently.

Well if I sit in a meeting with 2 programmers who work 80h+ to produce value for the company, 2 consultants, 2 managers, 2 architects, each of them earning 3x-10x of what the programmers earn, but all living off of what the programmers produce, then I think it's quite clear that this is not sustainable.

I think that's good enough as an explanation of why it's not rational. There doesn't need to be a known truth about what's rational to see that this is not rational.

And now don't come to me with "each of them does different tasks". I can distinguish between architects who design systems and architects who happen to come to 10 biweekly meetings in a row without having designed anything.

Also please note that I'm not blaming anybody. The programmers are just as responsible in my eyes, sometimes even supporting the other people in their parasitic positions.

Last but not least there's also literature out there showing that nearly all systems in their early stages contain huge amounts of people willing to sacrifice their own good for the community, thereby creating public goods, and later stages societies more and more focussing on stealing and centralizing the goods in a private manner. Capitalism is simply a system in its later stage and will be overcome by a just-as-flawed system at some point.

Re: The World After Capital

#110
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author is talking about different ages there, and reasoning that capital abundance will lead, amongst others (like technology development), to the transition from the industrial age to the next one, "the world after capital". Wikipedia says industrial age began around 1760. I don't understand why you talk about 1990.

Because the worldbank.org GDP per capita data start at 1990 :D. At it was still about $15 per day. I don't know if the poverty threshold was different back then. [ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD ]

Angus Maddison's data date back to the year 1 CE. They are frequently used in historic economic analysis.

https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/

Post reply on HN