Some Economics of Abundance
musingmind.org
musingmind.org
"Abundance is the process through which more and more citizens gain unconditional access to the material resources for survival and participation in society. Abundance is not receiving an income high enough to afford all you need, because income is conditional upon labor, which retains scarcity, or the conditional access to resources, as the organizing and motivating principle of one’s time use.
Rather, abundance has more to do with wealth: unconditional access, or ownership, to all the material resources one requires."
In other words, with the current workforce, the GDP pie is real big. So we're going to take the pie, and cut it so that people have a high standard of living without having to work. The wonderful thing is that, like magic, the pie stays big! Even as the workforce plummets as people retire and young adults fail to enter the workforce.
The traditional GDP would shrink in the long-term, but the idea (drawing from Charles Eisenstein, Paul Mason, etc) is that gift economies and communities would grow to replace the goods & services we currently rely upon traditionally economic transactions for.
And you're right that policies trying to democratize abundance (unconditional affordances like UBI, healthcare, etc) would restructure the labor force. But David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' is a strong case that the labor force needs restructuring anyway.
And it grows increasingly difficult to earnestly frame these abundance arguments as fanciful, wishful thinking, when some of the most reputable economists who've ever lived argued the same. Thinking of John Maynard Keynes, JK Galbraith, and so on. There's a serious economic discourse, and potentiality, around the idea of lessening the amount of necessary labor to negligible amounts in order to secure access to all one needs, leaving production and 'participation in the workforce' to be an increasingly voluntary decision, taken on because one wants to make something, rather than one needing the paycheck to continue living their lives.
What do you think? The idea of abundance doesn't seem like a hippie discourse anymore, especially in light of folks like Mcafee's work. Why do these ideas continue striking folks as wishful thinking?
The move toward a shorter work week seems like a good idea, but this would reduce GDP and the tax base, and would necessarily be counterproductive to the author's goal of redistributing more wealth to the poorest.
Why would we expect gift economies to increase as total output decreases and gift dollars are more dear?
I haven't read 'Bullshit Jobs', but based on a quick Google, he uses the meaninglessness of some jobs as an argument for UBI. His first premise may have merit (it has probably applied since the industrial revolution) but his prescription of UBI as a cure is odd. I would be interested to see a comparison of the mental states of people with "bullshit jobs" vs people who live off the file. And anyway, a Libertarian may make a decent case that taxation is theft, but that doesn't magically make the Libertarian ideal of a voluntary society a realistic proposition.
Your reference to Keynes and Galbraith seemed to argue for a general endorsement of a vague notion of progressive tinkering-- what exactly did they endorse in this regard? In any event, there is nothing wrong with tweaking the economy in considered and careful ways. UBI is neither considered nor careful, which is why it does not deserve serious consideration. Big ideas (like actual socialism, communism, and UBI) that require a massive top-down rework of the global economic system are doomed to fail. And that makes them dangerous. Careful, considered action over long periods of time aren't sexy, but they're safe(r), responsible and more easily refersable.