What's with this obsession with jobs? If all we wanted were "jobs", we could create 100 million real quickly. Just go destroy a bunch of stuff and get people to work, rebuilding everything again.
I think the article makes a far leap to say the internet is responsible for the decreasing middle class. There are many factors, such as manufacturing automation, in our changing economic conditions.
Overall, I do not think the internet will be huge catalyst for job growth - in terms of providing millions of new jobs. But it will always be a huge catalyst for economic growth.
The following was insightful:
"It suddenly occurred to me," wrote Packer, "that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up."
Hopefully those twenty years old developers will solve more meaningful problems than sharing cat photos.
As an aside, I'm surprised that any discussion on "basic income" - you know it's coming - hasn't mention the Star Trek economy. Seriously, how do people in Star Trek universe survive in their economy?
The truth is that cat photos are mostly shared by people in the middle class that is being destroyed. 20 year old developers solve problems they know, and sometimes this involves their mom.
In my mind, both extremes involve leaches wanting money for nothing, whether its because there are a few aristocrats, er, capitalists collecting "rent" for assets they inherited, or many people (I believe by Kiwi friend calls them "dole bludges") who simply expect a monthly welfare payout for nothing.
I'm so old, I remember a period in this country's time when we rejected the idea of an aristocracy, taxed the hell out of the well off, and used it to pay for maintenance of the commons. This maintenance involved people in many walks of life, whether it was filling pot holes in roads, or researching rocket science and brain surgery. This made work that paid well enough for many people to do things that were helpful to society as a whole, but that which it was hard to get a single person to pay for. Forcing those who benefitted most from the structure of society to contribute to its continuation is NOT the same as expecting a free ride. OTOH, I'm pretty sure that handing out "basic income" to everybody would greatly stagnate society, as 60 to 90% of the population would do nothing :-(
The descriptions (or, perhaps more accurately, "indicia") of the economy in Star Trek are so wildly inconsistent that its a really, really bad basis for any kind of discussion, even among fictional settings.
So people are left to live life how ever they see fit. No more commercials, since that's pointless. Without commercials, there's no TV shows just designed to get viewers since you no longer need them. If you manage to make something new you may as well share it with everyone (via a replicator) because... what else could you do? "Karma" is all that's left to chase.
Because it isn't internally consistent.
> It's consistent with techno-anarchy: scarcity is a solved problem.
You seem to think that I was using "inconsistent" to mean "inconsistent with some external expectations" or "inconsistent with my expectations of what is plausible", but I was referring to internal consistency, not consistency with external expectations.
> Without finite resources there is no longer any point to capitalism, a system which allocates finite resources.
Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.
> So people are left to live life how ever they see fit.
This is rather emphatically not a consistent feature of the economy of Star Trek.
Example?
>Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.
It is in the earth economy. Other cultures still have money, but humans do not.
>This is rather emphatically not a consistent feature of the economy of Star Trek.
Well, obviously you can't just go be a star ship captain because so many want to do this. But you certainly don't have to flip burgers at McDonald's. You can pursue any dream and it will only be your talents that decide, not your financial situation.
> It is in the earth economy. Other cultures still have money, but humans do not.
Well, yeah, that's claimed sometimes, but at other times the Federation does have a currency [1][2], and at least some resources are apparently rationed on Earth aside from the use of money [3].
If you want to rationalize the presentations into near-constitency, you could assume that the Federation has a monetary system but also has (or at least, core worlds like Earth have) a (by early 21st century standards) extraordinarily generous ration of most commonly used goods and public services, such that most people rarely bother to acquire or use money, though some non-hobby style jobs (including Starfleet!) exist that pay money, and interaction outside of the Federation (and, quite probably, off the core worlds within the Federation) frequently requires money (as occasionally might interactions on the core worlds.) But that's just a rationalization of what is pretty clearly an incoherent body of fiction, rather than what the designed reality of the fiction is.
[1] http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_credit
That's just a nutty idea. There will always be scarcity of something. For instance, there's scarcity of specific people. If I didn't have finite resources, I'd love to pay Billy Joel to play a concert in a tiny bar for my friend's birthday party. But so would everybody else, so his price to do that is bid up to a level that some people can afford to hire him for a small gig, but most can't. Ditto for everybody else on the planet with specific unique skills. Front-row center seats for any form of live entertainment is a scarce resource - not everyone can have them at once.
Many other sorts of experiences will always be scarce. Like: I went to East Africa for a photo safari and got to see the rare black mountain gorillas of Rwanda in their native habitat - out in the forest rather than a cage in the zoo. If everybody did that the experience of hiking through virgin forest would be ruined - not to mention that there aren't enough gorillas to go around. So you have to pay for a tracking permit. How would that sort of scarcity go away?
> No more commercials, since that's pointless.
Much of the point of commercials is informational - they tell you or remind you that some product exists and what its characteristics are. It's true that it'd have to be something that's scarce, that you can't just print yourself at home. Such as: jungle safaris or Billy Joel tickets.
If the cost of energy and automation comes way down it is very very unlikely that people would just stop using money. It is likely you wouldn't need money for a lot of standard stuff. As society becomes richer, the set of things that aren't worth charging for increases. Free water and napkins and air conditioning and light and access to a toilet and wireless internet access are becoming pretty standard now in the first world, whereas in the third world all those things might be expensive or unavailable. Today you can get free food in the form of "free samples" at stores that hope you'll buy something. In the future, more basic food and shelter will become free, but the high-end stuff will always cost. However many buildings there are, not everyone can get the top-floor penthouse suite with a river view. Scarcity exists; it's an unavoidable fact of life.
That's pretty simple: they have replicators. Food shortage? Gone. There never was a real land shortage, we create that with capitalism. Get rid of money and there is no longer any reason to rent out property. Rent it out for what? If everyone has a place to stay and you can replicate anything else, what would you use money for?
I guess you haven't seen any of the recent reality TV shows lately...
The problem as I see it is that we haven't lowered our standard work week to match our new productivity. We should be working around 27-30 hours at most.