Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

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This is similar to what Lewis Mumford has said in Technics and Civilization. Basically, more abundance means everything gets cheaper. Unfortunately the wealth created is locked up within a few classes and barely trickles down. Like the farmer who only produces cash crops and has no food to feed their family or the shoe maker whose children have no shoes. Mumford suggests that with such abundance we need "basic" communism which goes further than a guaranteed basic income. People will still have an incentive to work but they'll be spared the starvation and homelessness.

It's hard to get used to an abundance mindset but we're definitely at that point where we absolutely must. It's like pre-AWS and post-AWS: in the former we have to worry about provisioning more hardware and virtual machines and worrying about running out of space (I'm in that situation now where we have a private cloud and maybe 2 more VMs can be spun up and that's it). In the latter situation we would be able to provision as many VMs as needed. Sure your costs increase because you went overboard and provisioned one too many VMs but at least you got to worry about over-abundance rather than scarcity!

I think the other side of that argument is why the capital gets locked up in the first place? I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett actually wanting to keep people from resources or excess wealth if they had no use for it. Especially if it was just idling there doing nothing for anyone (themselves included). It just seems like that our situation is one born out of the interplay between institutions that have long since lost significance like a vestigial organ that only exists because the evolutionary cost to 'remove' it is greater than it is to keep it. But in this case, I think we can overcome these institutions it's just a matter of how.

" I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett actually wanting to keep people from resources or excess wealth if they had no use for it."

1. Na, some wealthy people would totally do that. It's their hard earned money and they're entitled to spend it however they want, after all. Get a job and stop looking for handouts!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-c...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/17/ro...

2. Who says they even have excess wealth to begin with? I may make a billion dollars a year, but I'm living in this cramped mansion, and I've still got payments on my super-yacht. Living this lavish lifestyle is expensive!

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...

I think the other side of that argument is why the capital gets locked up in the first place?

It's because there's excess surplus from productivity gains. If you work 1 hour a day you can be far more productive than just a few years ago. Either wages should increase to match that gain or hours should decrease to match that gain. In both cases, wealth would be unlocked.

If you work fewer hours you get more time for hobbies and side projects and other wealth-creation ideas.

If you work the same amount of hours but for a higher salary, you get money to shift into investments or to be able to take time off to invest in yourself and your family.

The current surplus wealth goes to the top and to the company itself.

It reminds me of what Ivan Illich (sp?) pointed out about over adoption of any specific technology. That we'll keep using it to such excess even if it harms us. I think if we use that truism as a guide on social norms with regard to economics then I think we've adopted the concept of private ownership to such excess that it harms the process of private ownership itself. I think it's time to go back towards a Lockean approach to the problem (if your actions harm others in their pursuits in common then it should be curtailed to ensure equal opportunity for all).

Does the improved quality of life get locked up? Americans have developed pretty staggering wealth inequality in the last 3 or 4 decades, for example, but the material quality of life has greatly improved in the same period of time. More people own homes, more people have more and better cars, everyone has access to more entertainment outlets, etc. Yeah, Steve Jobs gets a diamond studded speedboat, but everyone else gets Iphones. It's not equal, but it does represent a significant improvement in material quality of life.

Lewis Mumford talks about that as well in the book, in earlier chapters. He says that mass production focused on quantity rather than quality of life. More of something doesn't necessarily improve quality of life.

Mumford actually argues for more automation; and it makes sense. Why are there still cleaning crews and construction crews that work insane hours for not the best pay in the world? Why haven't we automated that so those people can pursue happiness? Giving them more TVs or iPhones won't improve their quality of life substantially. My favourite example is computers in the classroom; they haven't really increased the education of students, only made certain things more convenient; we still have classroom sizes that are too large to teach effectively, we don't cover the material properly, we teach to the standardized tests, etc. Those are all quality problems that can't be fixed with quantity of material goods.

It's "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness", not "life and the pursuit of wealth". Materially we're doing great and we could be going further with more automation, but in the mind, we have huge issues that have been swept under the rug and are only seriously looked at by academics.

> More people own homes

Source? My guess would be that in fact, more people are homeless, jobless, living on food stamps and/or without health insurance.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/home-ownership-rates-drop-to-...

> The U.S. homeownership rate fell to 63.4 percent in the second quarter of 2015, according to the U.S. Census. That is down from 63.7 percent in the first quarter and from 64.7 percent in the same quarter of 2014. It marks the lowest homeownership rate since 1967.

> Homeownership peaked at 69.2 percent at the end of 2004, when the housing market was in the midst of an epic boom. The 50-year average is 65.3 percent.

The key is that you have to qualify it by repeatedly stating the word 'material'.

There can be arbitrary amounts of psychological suffering that we trade for this material benefit and these are typically just discounted.

Key word: Material quality of life. So we're saving money on plastic deck chairs and pringles cans. But the cost of health insurance, real estate, and higher education has gone up.

Do you have any data on how the ratio of homeless-to-not-homeless has evolved?

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