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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

gmalandrakis.com

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#461

Post by bluGill »

organsnyder wrote: post #449
bluGill wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without. I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.

In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.

Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#462

Post by throw0101c »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #460
throw0101c wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. Perhaps one was/is sometimes a stretch, but starvation and famine were a thing: > Over two million people died in two famines in France between 1693 and 1710. Both famines were made worse by ongoing wars.[127] > As late as the 1690s, Scotland experienced famine which reduced the population of parts of Scotland by at least 15%.[128]…

I was never implying famine wasn't a thing, it has toppled empires... But to say one season of bad harvest will kill off everyone is ludicrous...

> But to say one season of bad harvest will kill off everyone is ludicrous...

"Everyone", sure. But the 1770-1 Czech example seems to have taken out 10%: that's not nothing.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#463

Post by [deleted] »

pandalism wrote: post #451
ffsm8 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laying flat is completely different though. It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps.…

Might be a nitpick this doesn't seem like a sword of Damocles type scenario, that implies the constant, and extraordinary, risk of decisions taken from a position of power, aka you get the throne but the swords there ready to kill you for a minute action/decision and you lose it all. I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that…

[deleted]

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#464

Post by bluGill »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #442
bluGill wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.

Modern civilization is ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests away from major disaster. If food costs 20x what it used to, a good number of people will starve or die in the political turbulence that will follow...

Modern society has much better transportation. The odds of correlated bad harvests around the world are much worse than local bad harvest in the past. I guarantee every place on earth will have a bad harvest, sometimes two in the next 20 years, but since there is enough harvest overall we are fine.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#465

Post by marcosdumay »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #442
bluGill wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.

Modern civilization is ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests away from major disaster. If food costs 20x what it used to, a good number of people will starve or die in the political turbulence that will follow...

> ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests

Yes, but that's quite an event. The odds are better that a major disaster causes those worldwide correlated bad harvests than the other way around.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#466

Post by bluGill »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #460
throw0101c wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. Perhaps one was/is sometimes a stretch, but starvation and famine were a thing: > Over two million people died in two famines in France between 1693 and 1710. Both famines were made worse by ongoing wars.[127] > As late as the 1690s, Scotland experienced famine which reduced the population of parts of Scotland by at least 15%.[128]…

I was never implying famine wasn't a thing, it has toppled empires... But to say one season of bad harvest will kill off everyone is ludicrous...

I didn't say it would kill everyone though. I said it would kill you. Your neighbors may get just enough to survive, but not enough to keep you alive. (If they have surplus they would help you survive - with the expectation you would return that favor in 10-20 years when the situation reverses.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#467

Post by captainbland »

bluGill wrote: post #461
organsnyder wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.

Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)

That's not true actually. US healthcare is both expensive at the point of taxpayer spending per capita and at the private expenditure level. It's really lose/lose.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#468

Post by bluGill »

mothballed wrote: post #436
doctorwho42 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.

Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your respon…

While child death was common, there is no reason to think it was somehow less devastating to the families it happened too.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#469

Post by randusername »

Nobody wants to live in a mining economy. Human slavery, extraordinary taxes, no public infrastructure. Conceivably you only need two roads total: one from the palace to the airport and another from the mine to the docks. Any more and someone might try to build a school.

It seems to me that human quality of life is really tightly coupled to economic systems where there is a high ROI in investing in the public.

This is what spooks me about AI. A slow but observable descent on the continuum from knowledge economy to diamond mine economy. The rust belt metastasizes and oversupply of human laborers is such a problem things get really hunger games about which libraries and universities get their bills paid.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#470

Post by [deleted] »

verisimi wrote: post #342
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried. Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets. I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than…

Monetary wealth is a proxy for power. > Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried. I think this is already the case.

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