The history of the end of poverty has just begun

There are many things I would like to reply to this comment but I'll be brief and direct.

If you consider yourself in any way a Marxist or a leftist, you _aren't_, you are pretty far from it. You are not making a rational analysis of society, humanity or reality based on historical materialism. Going back 200-1000 years is not progress. Period.

Clearly, underdeveloped tribes living primitive lives are poor in almost every sense of the word. They may not be poor spiritually, which is debatable, but that's it. There is no colonialism boo-hoo here. Their means, technologies and knowledge are primitive compared to most current day humans. You are romanticizing them based on tedious with current day lives, but if you analyze their situation they _are not_ in a good position compared to humans in more advanced places in the world.

If you think you would like being one of them just think what their average lifespan is, or what their access to drugs, medical treatment, etc is, or what happens to them when there is a drought.

There is nothing to romanticize about it. They have it very rough and they are poor. You shouldn't based your world view on the "noble savage" myth.

I am totally stealing that phrase the next time I get in this debate. Thanks!

> Not at all. People need much more that wheat and widgets.

OK, let's expand. People need food, water, clothes, shelter, health care, education, entertainment and widgets. I see 4 economic categories.

- food, water, clothes, widgets: these are cheap and abundant in both the developed part of the 22nd century world, and in the 24th. That anybody is short of any of these is completely a political choice. They are abundant, but still limited. In both the 22nd and 24th century their abundance is constrained by the cost of energy.

- health care, education: constrained by Baumol's cost "disease", these will be more expensive in the 24th than they are now.

- shelter: we have more shelter in the US than we need, but it's in the wrong places, so it's incredibly expensive. It could be abundant -- a widget factory could cheaply build prefab homes to place in the middle of nowhere, so the extreme scarcity is almost entirely social & political. I hope that the 24th has solved this problem, but the basic conditions for our problem will be unchanged in the 24th.

- entertainment: in so far as this is mostly TV, movies, books, video games and holodeck programs that can be copied at will, these are truly unlimited non-scarce goods.

Thank you for a very thorough reply. Interesting read. We very obviously read different things. Basically what I hear you saying is: we have the technology, we can do it. Please correct me if im reading you wrong. And sure, that is the hope, and I'm not saying that we wont be able to find solutions - simply that our current solutions wouldnt work if scaled to the world. My argument is simply that we're on a massive ecological clock, and I dont see our current political systems or power structures being able to support the necessary change.

What I think your calculations miss is two things: 1) producing a fridge is harmful to the climate not just because it takes ressources to produce and ship and maintain, but because it uses limited ressources and pollutes after it is thrown away [1] and prices doesnt currently reflect the real cost on the environment. And 2) Technology is worth very little if politics and infrastructure doesnt support it. We could avoid a large part of the pollution of fridges if we recycle, but we need recycling plants, a government that mandates it, a culture of recycling, not to mention we need to share technology across borders.

My argument is not that its physically impossible, but that it isnt realistic in any way to imagine we could scale our way of living to the entire world with our current political, tehcnological and cultural infrastructure. Right beside everything you describe, there is an on-going climate-crisis of extreme proportions going on. The way we live in the west is built historically on fossil-fuels and direct exploitation of other parts of the world, and it has led us to the brink of ecological ruin. Even if technology might be able to ensure that the rest of the world wont need to rely on fossil fuels in the same way we've done historically and still do, there is not the political will or the infrastructrure to do so. There will be, maybe, in 10 years - we'll see.

So yes, my standard of living rests explicitly on poorer countries not living like me. Because we dont have the technology or infrastructure in place to support such a massive increase in living standard without it impacting the climate. It doesnt matter if we have the technology in ten years if its impossible to implement at scale.

[1] The cooling industry play a huge part in glomal warming: "Part of the problem with refrigerants, however, is that much of the harm they cause is after we as consumers have finished using them. It occurs out of sight, and so largely out of mind." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201204-climate-change-h...

100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.

I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.