The Future Is Getting Farther Away
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
I grew up watching the original Star Trek series in reruns in the 1970’s.
2021 is not what I imagined.
Back to the Future 2 took place in 2015
Blade Runner was 2019
So, I’d say we all expected quite a bit more.
The world changed much more in the 50 years before I was born than 50 years after
Something definitely went wrong somewhere
Yes, the TV and Movie industries created a lot of unrealistic expectations in your mind.
1970-2020
I think most people would agree that in the 50 years before 1970, the world changed more?
Also my grandfather took a commercial plane in 62 from France to visit a California factory that sold screws already packaged in boxes of 50. Weird, but he smelled a good idea.
Also got paid leave in the 30s. That was huge.
The world changed even more in the second 50 years, just not the western world.
I am glad that things went better than dystopic predictions.
At least until the recent Star Trek, fans understood the Federation to be utopian. That was Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of human potential. That we would get past our current issues. Q even puts the Enterprise crew on trial in TNG's first episodes for various historical crimes, and Picard is able to argue that humanity has evolved past much of that.
It's only really with external threats and other cultures that the Federation's values are challenged, and sometimes compromised.
I think pre-1968 if there were fan theories by that point, they wouldn't have been so drawn to calling out some optimism that doesn't make sense.
But I really haven't watched enough Star Trek let alone caught up with fan theories to carry this further :).
Did George Takei get casted thinking "fuck this bullshit, I'm going to subtlety undermine the nonsense utopia with my acting?" Or was the pain and skepticism of cold war rhetoric more a subconscious war of vacillating between hope for the future, and skepticism that "United Space Ship" and "United States Ship" had enough distance between them?
I don't think many people were on that former level, say, pre-1968 at least.
But he’s wrong based on Star Trek canon (and throughout this I am not referencing Discovery and concurrent series, which are charged with being a change of tone) except maybe on war, and even then only if you take “on Earth” to mean, for war, “between nations of Earth, since they are all subordinated to a single government” and not “physically occurring on Earth”.
> Picard tells Lilly in the same movie that money is no longer used
This may be true on Earth, which seems like it uses centralized (possibly exchangeable) centralized rationing rather than (or at least to an extent that most people need not, if they do not choose to, interact with) a money economy, though profit-seeking independent traders exist in Federation space at least in the TOS era, and Federation citizens have and spend various forms of money for various things throughout the various series.
I remember Star Trek canon says 2021 Earth was a hell due to World War 3, but I'm not sure that idea was already at the original series.
Yep. Not old enough to actually verify this, but somehow I have feeling that in the old days the smartest kids of the block were lured to figure out how to get to the moon and how to get electricity from splitting atoms. Then somehow, we as a society came up with this novel idea that maybe we should lure the smartest kids to figure out how to circumvent financial regulation. We all know how that went. Then, we decided that maybe it would be good that the smartest kids started to figure out how to make people click more ads. I almost feel like we deserve what is coming.
Why would then people not just chose short-term gain?
And when innovation saved the world from a global pandemic you guys are still arguing about the tiny miniscule risk of side effects of a game-changing vaccine rather than getting back on the curve here. So great, enjoy your brave new world of amusing yourselves to death. That seems to be about all we're good at anymore.
If the situation is not to our liking, perhaps we should consider addressing the root cause(s) so the same thing doesn't happen the next time a crisis pays us a visit.
If the West had always been this risk averse with respect to science and technology, we wouldn't have gone to space let alone the Moon. We wouldn't have antibiotics and we probably wouldn't even have flight. So tell me how to restore America's healthy level of risk tolerance? Because taking medical advice from online pundits is incredibly risky and yet it's seen as safer than trusting science by a disturbingly large minority. And that's just one example of how badly we gauge risk.
And to be fair, I have the same viewpoint about the irrational fear of nuclear power.
They’re an adversary and should be taken seriously however they are not the threat that the Soviet Union was. China has too many headwinds to reach true superpower status.
The one child policy was a resounding success and a total disaster as now they have the fastest aging population on the planet. This has lead to massively increasing labor costs and a hollowing out of their consumer base which then makes their economy export-dependent right when the consumer base of the developed world is hollowing out. They are reliant on energy imports to keep the lights on and those imports go through the first island chain full of their most vicious and ancient geopolitical enemies. They are reliant on food imports to feed their population that rely on the same global trade routes that are or are about to go completely to hell. Their historically unprecedented growth over the last couple of decades was fueled by the most irrationally exuberant money printing and debt driven bender that makes the USA look like a miserly spend-thrift.
Exponential in regards to which variable? Money? Time? Effort? Or did you simply mean "vastly"?
This may be nitpicky, but we should expect people to get basic terminology right – at least on HN.
There are countless species in this world and all of them are doing just fine without the giant brain. A large part of humanity really just wants to live their live, reproduce, enjoy a meal, sleep properly, sit in the grass and look at the lake and the forest.
We keep arguing that we have to think our way out of whatever the current situation is but you cant find a single problem that was not created by similar "solutions" for the previous "problem".
It sort of blew my mind!
It took a very large brained human to come up with the bread and circuses. It takes such very large brain to punish innovation or to have people ignore it. It takes an even larger brain to argue "what is desperately needed". You talk of saving the world but the world doesn't need to be saved. People are going to die sooner or later regardless. If you or me get to live a little bit longer that would be fantastic for you or for me.... but for the world? The world needs me for what exactly? We are the parasite devouring the host.
I do get it! It seems terrible this "amusing yourselves to death" but why not amuse yourself until you die? Utopia is a world full of 300 year old grumpy old men? I'm sure we will get there eventually if we push hard enough but that will simply become the new problem that those few bright men with their large brains so desperately need to solve for us.
I look at my cat sleeping on the sofa, why doesn't she get to have this complicated disposition? Why isn't she worried about the economy and innovation? What a joke, after the great collapse she will just go fishing, catch birds, spiders and mice, fight the neigbours, roll in the grass, look at the lake and the trees. At least, assuming we leave any of that behind.
Think about it!
The moon? mars? why not go to Antartica if you feel we ran out of self-made problems to solve? Antartica seems just as much umpf as Mars?
Today, our external and internal enemies blind our people in every way they can. For example, convincing our brightest minds that they will be the most fulfilled if their bank accounts are the most overflowing.
My impression is that the smart kids from a few blocks would go to Nasa, and those are the ones we remember. Many smart kids had no access to higher education, or were lawyers and doctors (which is absolutely fantastic).
When I recently watched For All Mankind I wasn't thinking "people did cooler shit then". I was thinking "that particular shit was really cool, overall most people then and there were worse off, including most smart people".
May be it has to do with me being spanish and our specific culture, but Im pretty sure there were plenty of geniuses doing bullshit or evil back then. Why do you think otherwise?
I was not discussing whether we as a society are better off now than in the old days. (To me it is obvious that we are better off in most ways) I was discussing why it feels that the technological progress was faster in the old days than nowadays.
Why I think this? As said, I have absolutely no data, but only a hunch, that if you compare the incomes of nuclear engineer, aerospace engineer, banker and adtech engineer (whatever that was in the old days...), I would be quite surprised if the relative income has not tilted towards bankers and adtech engineers over time.
Technological reverse salients litter the landscape, making it harder to push forward with what we have and already know.
People have to spend time traversing high risk, low-payoff fields to unlock new slopes that will take us higher. It certainly isn't always obvious.
Why build more stuff if no one is going to buy it (near today's prices) and labor is already cheap?
To be fair these things were only invested in because we wanted the capability to bomb eurasia to the stone age
Part of it I think was just money. Wasn’t that all funded by the government? If you throw money at it, people will go there. It’s the same now.
There was also a naive optimism of what the future could bring with space travel and free energy from nuclear power … then reality hit.
Developing an electric self-driving car takes a monumental effort. It's easier to continue releasing a new internal combustion model every year. The factory only knows how to do one thing and it is expensive to change.
So we may never have cars like the Jetsons. Fantasy also wants to over-estimate the future for dramatic effect.
Printing infinite money might have fucked up the economy.
Care to elaborate?
If no one is buying, the future isn't worth investing in.
Conversely, if everyone is buying, tech will unleash material prosperity validating those larger dollar flows faster than "too many dollars" make us "go Weimar" and society falls part.
The mistake has been relatively inefficient forms of stimulus that arguably prop up asset prices more than they increase spending, but hopefully the pandemic checks demonstrate us turning a new leaf there: they clearly worked better than whatever shit Larry Summers told Obama to do, as the original graph shows!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH....
That's not as much, of course, but it's hardly chump change -- and yet I can't help but think that they're a lot less than half as impressive as they were back then. Look at the Constallation program, meant to develop a crewed launch system as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Five years after it started it was over budget and behind schedule, and after it was estimated to eventually cost more than the entire Apollo program it got canceled. Or look at the Space Launch System program, another rocket-making attempt: it started in 2011, has spent over $20 billion so far, was supposed to start launches in 2016, and might launch something next year.
NASA's general level of competence seems to have dwindled over time. They can still do impressive things, but not nearly as impressive as you'd expect if the same budget had been given to 1960s NASA with 2021 technology.
- If American industrial declines overall, outside the bloodsucking defense contacting sector that is naturally NASA-adjacent, won't those dollars travel less far?
- Nothing about NASA is a productive investment on short enough timescales to make it somewhat self-funding, boosting the economy as a whole very efficiently, (same with defense spending) so it's the exactly wrong foundation for industrial policy. First boost "productive" capacity, then funnel some extra riches into NASA. It has to be icing on the cake, not the cake!
Constellation was an earnest attempt that strangled itself with process and procedure. SLS is just a battleground for politicians and contractors trying to keep the money flowing in their own directions.
The NASA that people usually think about is found in the smaller projects, where they can go relatively unnoticed by those who would ruin them. But even then, there's probably too much risk aversion. The very idea of that kind of defeats the purpose of NASA, in my opinion.
Since then, so much else has grown immensely while NASA hasn't.
I'm not sold on the lack of competence though. They were just flying around a helicopter on Mars. It mildly amused the public for a couple days, but you could certainly argue it's among the most impressive feats ever accomplished.
Broadly: Political gridlock, defunding of science endeavors, the Forever War on Terror, etc.
Economically: increasing wealth disparity
More specifically: brightest minds being thrown at the most profitable, versus the most socially beneficial, outcomes.
> Internet dopamine is a huge brain-drain
> The world is far more complex now, i.e. were having to either clash with older systems/ideas or try updating legacy systems.
> Age distributions show many more old people who usually want things to stay similar.
Gibson and Stephenson were two of the people who actually tried to talk about the future, and they got a lot of things right. We didn't get the Jetsons type retrofuturism with flying cars and 60s suburbs on mars, but the internet alone has made the world a lot stranger than people imagine.
Economics, GDP measurements and so on are very good at capturing the world of commodity production, and indeed not much has changed, but when you look at how information moves around today a great deal has changed, and gdp statistics don't capture it.
the entire idea that 'the future' is measured in terms of economic output, where people are flying on huge rockets or something like that is itself a symptom of being stuck in the industrial age
One other aspect is that engineering is hard. It's probably harder to become a millionaire through engineering than by becoming a banker, say.
Heavy disagree. It might seem that way but only because tech and science are so specialized now that the average person can't wrap their heads around all of it at once anymore.
Society, technology, and culture are all changing faster now than at any point in human history.
And you are still alive today, that means you lived through the transition from analog to digital and the arrival of the Information Age. That’s a pretty big thing that has happened.
In the same way, the invention and adoption of all those things created a condition of poverty in the previously normal people who didn’t have them.
Wealthy people purpose the majority of their time themselves. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them.
When viewed this way, we see poverty is rampant here, even though many people have the various baubles and trinkets our modern society can produce.
Desiring full time employment is the double edged sword. The robots do the work for you but you still want to work and you want to do the "productive" part.
Part of this is an uneven global distribution of productivity gains, but even in developed countries there is plenty of room for innovation to stabilize prices and prevent shocks.
For a comparison across countries, see figure 6 in
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u.s.-food-expenditures-at-ho...
FWIW, I agree that the focus on productivity at the exclusion of everything else is bad, the point of productivity is to live well, but I think there's a lot of the world that doesn't live well, and I think it is perhaps a failure of imagination to not believe that we could live better as well.
Extremely cheap labor improves productivity numbers.
World GDP per capita last year was about 10,000USD.
Surely a globally equal society at that level of wealth is preferable to what we have now.
Focusing on equality is a distraction. If the poor are at the same level of poverty over 20 years, it doesn't matter whether the rich got richer or poorer. The fact is the poor are getting richer too, just not as quickly as the rich.
I'm not a free market ideologue. I'm just a practical person. If any system proves to be better at lifting up the poor I'll take it. Currently it seems a largely capitalist system with welfare and healthcare is a highly effective system. Certainly more effective than systems which try to destroy the markets.
It's safe to say the U.S. does a terrible job providing for it's citizens given the wealth of the country, but the European states we often hold up as models have gdp's per capita that are 4 or 5 times 10,000USD. That seems like the bare minimum we'd want to shoot for, rather than ensuring that everyone in the world lives like the fine people in Namibia.
Our biggest productivity gains came from burning coal, then oil. Productivity only started being sightly decoupled from oil usage since the early-mid 2010s.
We have something like 3 billion more who can't afford a washing machine. Think about the waste of human potential that is.
Not to mention that we have to get it so that all girls receive 13 years of schooling (that will help with global warming, as educated women have less children and at a later date). Not doing so is, again, a massive waste of human potential.
Both of these requires more resources, not fewer. We need more productivity, not less.
It actually just requires better distribution of the food. We've had enough food to feed everyone on the planet since the 1970s.
The owner class disagreed, and high productivity just meant higher profits because many more (increasingly lower quality) widgits are made per worker-hour.
But just look at that GDP!!
You are not living a 20th century lifestyle. You don't sit in a mostly wooden building with minimal electricity or gas lighting with reading and radio as your primary entertainment.
At the very least you now have a computer that was certainly manufactured and assembled on the other half of the globe and transported to you. You likely have a lot of electrical appliances like ovens, a fridge, AC, and hot water.
You likely don't live 3 or 4 generations to a 1000sq ft house.
That we work the same in general has more to do with (imo positive) lifestyle inflation than some evil banker sitting on their slightly larger boat than the one you own.
Your computer does _different_ stuff than a lathe. We need both computers and lathes in modern life.
GDP, which is what we were talking about, can rise forever because those who benefit will find ways to make it rise. Like, say, coupling difficult-to-access healthcare to it! Hey, now healthcare is a full fourth of it! Selling real estate and insurance to one another helps it increase, too! Line go up!! Something tells me that greater productivity allowed this cool and normal situation of proliferating middlemen to occur.
The existence of relatively inexpensive ovens, etc, has been the case since easily 1970, which is around when productivity started to decouple from benefits to citizenry.
I assume you're assured of this perspective because the existence of your boat makes you uncomfortable with the idea that we're using the insane productivity gains our species has realized to be gainfully employed not doing anything material or beneficial, but rather tricking people into clicking on ads. I understand whose shoulders I stand on, and I also understand that we don't really have to have the underpaid underclass to whom the ads are shown, we've just decided this way is better.
Right because you are now importing prefab assemblies produced from other countries, and using off the shelf bulk produced components like drywall. That supply chain DOES require significantly more people.
> Hey, now healthcare is a full fourth of it!
Well I guess you could go destroy the MRI machines that require a steady pure helium stream, unplug the 400+ computerized monitors that are centrally linked back to nurses stations, or get rid of all the neat robotics that allow non-invasive surgery and save some cash. We could go back to when medicine ended at what your local doctor could do by hand.
> Something tells me that greater productivity allowed this cool and normal situation of proliferating middlemen to occur.
Please go share this opinion with your real estate brokers. Ask them what they do with all their free time that they have so much of apparently.
> The existence of relatively inexpensive ovens, etc, has been the case since easily 1970, which is around when productivity started to decouple from benefits to citizenry.
Cheap per unit doesn't mean cheap to produce from scratch. You can't go buy a machine shop and crank out modern ovens. Let's not even get into safety testing.
> I assume you're assured of this perspective because the existence of your boat makes you uncomfortable with the idea that we're using the insane productivity gains our species has realized to be gainfully employed not doing anything material or beneficial
Not a boat guy, sorry.
You are about a hundred years behind in your understanding of economics. Production doesn't mean spinning yarn in your cottage. The broker managing real estate contracts is doing work the same way the person assembling surgical robots is doing. Life is no longer about building wooden cabins on land you claimed by fencing it off only to have your house burn down when your open top oil lamp turns over and catches your flammable ass bedding. Humanity has had progress since then.
> I also understand that we don't really have to have the underpaid underclass to whom the ads are shown,
If you don't like Hulu's business model then stop watching it.
>Right because you are now importing prefab assemblies produced from other countries, and using off the shelf bulk produced components like drywall. That supply chain DOES require significantly more people.
Yet those people pump out much more per worker.
>Well I guess you could go destroy the MRI machines that require a steady pure helium stream, unplug the 400+ computerized monitors that are centrally linked back to nurses stations, or get rid of all the neat robotics that allow non-invasive surgery and save some cash. We could go back to when medicine ended at what your local doctor could do by hand.
Why assume that I meant "destroy everything good"? Why not just remove the insane proliferation of profit-seeking middlemen in Merican healthcare? Pretty much every other first world country manages this fine, and uses less money to get better outcomes! How's the US life expectancy, again?
>Please go share this opinion with your real estate brokers. Ask them what they do with all their free time that they have so much of apparently.
Where did you get the idea that I'm saying that they have free time? They're very busy selling one another houses, and they are able to busily perform this profoundly useless economic "activity" because our society needs so little physical manpower to continue, as compared to, say, that of the 20th century.
>Cheap per unit doesn't mean cheap to produce from scratch. You can't go buy a machine shop and crank out modern ovens. Let's not even get into safety testing.
No, but it means cheap per unit.
>Not a boat guy, sorry.
So why assume that I am? It makes you look like an asshole!
>You are about a hundred years behind in your understanding of economics. Production doesn't mean spinning yarn in your cottage. The broker managing real estate contracts is doing work the same way the person assembling surgical robots is doing. Life is no longer about building wooden cabins on land you claimed by fencing it off only to have your house burn down when your open top oil lamp turns over and catches your flammable ass bedding. Humanity has had progress since then.
You've convinced me! It's about building disposable surveillance-economy "smart"phones, ignoring externalities, and quantitative easing!!
>If you don't like Hulu's business model then stop watching it.
Ooh, nice watch! Did you buy it with your salary that you're implying is greater than mine? It really adds to your argument! ...hey, weren't you just implying that I own a boat?
https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/33080/dimensio... sort of clears some stuff up. Economists are not that good at dimensional analysis, despite their worship of physicists, and every physicist knowing dimensional analysis is key to staying sane.
GDP, for the purposes of this graph, is stuff measured in dollars, per time, so "value"/time. The estimates are not that different from linear regressions, asymptotically. That's it.
"Productivity" is a nebulous concept. Ultimately, we only "see" the value in the market price of things being exchanged, so productivity is thus reasoning backwards with division/differentiation. There is no empirically rigorous notion of per-person productivity to integrate over, and whether the ability to divide/differential makes that platonically-valid concept nonetheless a murky philosophical debate one need not get into to understand this graph.
We have an aging population so more productivity will be welcome.
So orthodox neoclassical economics, at least before modern caveats, roughly says that the "financial recession" should be transitory -- the economy should hum along according to it's "real, material" characteristics, and something like a "mortgage crisis" is an accounting book gimmick which should only create a transient shock, after which things should "return to normal"
But if you look at the graph, it didn't bounce back. It just didn't. Regardless of any normative statements about GDP (is it progress itself? is it evil anti-environmentalism incarnate?) the graph shows something that doesn't accord to the theory.
Also, whatever one's true measure of "the future" is, it probably correlates with GDP absent some interesting things like big massive environmental regulation, which we plainly don't have. Or put differently, perhaps "plain old capitalism doing it's thing" delivers the future as a "byproduct" of GDP growth. That sounds about close enough for me.
If you're a Post-Keynesnianist like I think I am, this sort of a "well, duh", moment. The economy is like one big gnarly awesome disgusting internal combustion engine, and things like fuel/oil ratio, chokes, starter moters, friction, should all yield some interesting mental images and analogies. We fuck with the thing, overcome inefficiencies, and give it constant maintenance, rather than sit back and just let the platonic forms manifest themselves or whatever.
----
Where this starts to matter for HN is whether technology is viewed as exogenous or endogenous to the economy.
The same orthodox neoclassical economics says it's exogenous. We have some genius doing their thing, stuff may or may not happen, and the economy reacts.
The other, more (post-)Keynesian view is:
Demand expectations (our people clamoring to buy things and do you think that will roughly continue?) -> Investment -> the future -> investment pays off
In some sense the technology always "out there", and it's up to use to discover it and make it a thing.
As someone that has long been into functional programming, and now sees the mainstream kinda adopt it (react, typescript, go generics finally, etc.), but also kinda miss the big point (use types to improve collaboration at hitherto impossible scales). This makes sense. The whole SV VC ideology of "let's just go push out the technology the normies can't justify investing in" looks like an attempt to escape the dynamic Keynsianism describes, but it has limits. Like "pushing a string", doing supply before demand is inefficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law is horseshit) and has limits.
likewise, SV getting into UBI makes me happy. Put demand first again, so we are pulled not pushed. The rhetoric about a coming jobs apocalypse is false --- there is no reason to automate when deparate labor gets cheaper and cheaper --- but it is true that productivity increases beyond consumption increases for the last 50 years have already deflated demand. So do UBI not for the problems we will have, but the problems we already have. Hope people to work work less and charge more, make automation thus look good to the least imaginative bean-counter, and let's get on with the future already!
Sounds like a macro-economist to me.
There's a full-blown, easily predictable and indeed predicted, environmental crisis that's *never* going away. Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world, *and* among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it.
And handling that crisis will require even higher productivity and technological growth. Instead we see decline after decline.
That drop in living standards isn't required either. Some might want such a policy path, but that is a different issue.
I don't agree at all here. People in the developing world don't consume/pollute less because of some kind of moral virtue, they consume/pollute less because they physically can't consume/pollute more. If they had the ability to pollute as much as the developped countries, they would do it (and some are in fact already doing it).
Nope, unless you consider living in cities not suburbs intrinsically worse.
GDP has some flaws as a metric, but the "real good thing" so-far correlates with it simply because we aren't doing shit about the environment. There's no reason we can ramp up electrifying everything and live nice lives. Hell, if the population actually goes down as expected, maybe we can reduce total land devoted to agriculture too which would be really nice.
The best way to do it and feel rich is to not be so obsessed with expensive electric-battery cars, and do more public transit, which I why partly I say it's the suburbs that drag us down.
But if you look at some of the lines, that interpretation doesn't make sense. For example, the dark blue "2010" line is already well above the actual data (the black line) in 2010. So what do these CBO estimate "vintages" actually represent?
Whatever that phrase means... Because linking it directly with technology or happiness doesn't make any sense. It either means "if we use a less meaningful number that always got up, it would be higher" or "if people improved things faster, they would be better now, but let's not focus on what could improve faster or how".
First you see exponential increase as more and more opportunities to exploit the new normal are exploited. But then you see the rate of change exponentially reduce as the opportunities left to change gets exhausted, until there are none left and the new normal is reached. The typical example is how at first a technology is only used by a very small amount of people, then it becomes common and then it becomes ubiquitous. Happened with cars 60 years ago, computers 20 years ago.
So it isn't that the future is getting farther away, we are just running out of ways to exploit the advancements we made decades ago. We might make more such leaps, for example in AI, but you can't count on it. Instead any sensible economic policy should be able to handle both scenarios, ie the one where we stagnate and the one where we find new things.
Maybe I'm "being gen-z" but it's crazy to know that people actually bought into this when global warming, etc, are not accounted by people drawing the lines (and so are any forms of black sheep events/inventions)
Society has scalability problem. It might be the inability for the human mind to care about every little detail of life that makes it function or with increased scale comes with greater perverse actors and the system needs needs counterweight to it.
America has been divided packaged and sold with little care about the ramifications down the road. We started off well, we broke up monopolies,(standard oil) protected people woth(glass-steagall) but then we lost our way and trillions can now be lost by the pentagon with little then a blink. Local construction costs skyrocket compared to other parts of the world, and we've created a horrible system of guaranteed profit in both colleges and homes allowing the prices to be inflated.
I'm not sure that's true. We started off with slavery.
Then we had a civil war.
Then we had Jim Crow.
Then we had disco. ;-)
America has always had problems. We just have a tendency to forget about them and focus on the positive aspects of the past. (I think reasonable people can disagree on the merits of this approach.)
If money is a medium for people to convert goods and services from one form to another, then in a technologically advancing world where things become cheaper in terms of SI units, we should expect the value of money (relative to other items) to become higher, or for goods and services to become so cheap that we don't even bother about their prices.
In a technologically stagnating economy, we can expect the opposite: we can expect that if technology becomes worse off, then the value of money will get worse and the same physical item will become less valuable i.e will cost more in money. We see this happening with oil prices which are at the heart of energy intensive economies - gasoline is MORE expensive than in the 1970s even when adjusted for inflation. Same goes for other goods central to the economy, such as housing, healthcare and food. The more likely outcome is that to artificially stimulate the economy, central banks will keep printing more money and devalue goods in a never ending cycle. The only things that can really save us is technology that can make things cheaper.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjust...
It seems that Peter Thiel's ideas of a technologically stagnating society are making more and more sense.
But the people who are waiting it out? They are guaranteed to fall behind, they will be living in 2014 while I am in 2041.
The market will only look scarier and scarier as the numbers go up and to the right.
In reality my wife also works as an engineer. (my mom was a stay at home mom), our house is smaller, I work longer hours, and the house will be paid off later in life (after 60). The reason? Fake government inflation numbers. www.shadowstats.org .
One aspect of public housing that needs more attention is it makes the accounting dramatically simpler. Rents and taxes converge.
Bits are of course necessary for organizing large-scale energy and matter manipulation - but efficiency can never go above 100%. Transport switched from manually planned transport routes to optimally solving the traveling salesman problem (NP completeness doesn't mean it can't be solved efficiently for real world problems, see eg. Gurobi) - significant gains from planning are over.
Right now, global energy shortage is directly visible: coal shortage and electricity rationing in China. Total blackout in Lebanon. Gas shortage in Europe. Coal shortage in India.
Without a massive increase in energy production, rest of 21st century is going to return to the pre-industrial norm of ~zero economic growth per capita.
https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f... from "Six centuries of British economic growth: a time-series perspective" https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162
* - without going into fundamentals of physics that make them all, eventually, equivalent
spending/productity goes down
labor income goes down
spending goes down (rich people save much more)
spending/productivity goes down
...
In principle, this can continue until the now-overkill old (physical) capital falls apart, and perhaps knowledge that went with it, and living amidst ruins, spending/productivity stabilizes again.
Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem".
Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2].
Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3].
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men.
You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWMpHc77qNI
[1] https://www.youthfeed.org/mobile/most-expensive-phone/
[2] https://poshmark.com/listing/GUCCI-DOUBLE-BREASTED-SUIT-NWT-...
[3] https://youtu.be/1FjOIqSuhO8?t=679
Tyler Durden's Rubber Band
No wonder why society hasn’t transformed into a solarpunk utopia