Tipote said:
Kryptos said:
Real wages can go down all they want, standard of living is still up. Again, we are able to communicate without ever seeing each other while taking a crap. This is literally unheard of half a century ago. I know wages are going down and all that, my point is that the poorest of the poor today live like the kings of old.
Are you saying we have a good standard of living because we can talk while having a poo?
Should we be comparing our society to feudal society?
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And no, there isn't enough money to go around. Not enough money to have kids and support them. 5000 years ago there wasn't enough fire to go around, and the tigers ate your kids before you got to support them. 500 years ago, not enough food, and 75% of your kids died to disease by age 10. 50 years ago, well, the population was smaller. Too bad condoms were borderline illegal, would've probably slowed some of this shit down...
What are you talking about? 500 years ago there wasn't enough fire? What?
There isn't enough money to go around? Why?
Oxfam says wealth of richest 1% equal to other 99%
US wealth inequality - top 0.1% worth as much as the bottom 90%
so, yes there have been advances in 5000 years. Perhaps I missed the point there.
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My point is, all of these things are caused by some major systemic issues. Complete reorganization will require a lot of work.
Yup. Again, what is your point?
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Population stabilizes based on the carrying capacity of the system. If the population exceeds the carrying capacity, the population corrects back down. So, either we put some scientists to work on some GMO-and-solar-flavored expansions to the carrying capacity of the environment, or we get use to a population correction.
How are you assessing that carrying capacity?
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Parts of the world starve, parts of the world's hearts detonate at age 35, and part just don't have health insurance.
Yeah, its fucked up. Again, what is your point? Planet Earth doesn't need to have such gross inequality. Its nothing to do with carrying capacity.
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Suicide is a symptom of despair caused by that realization in some form, the realization that you and your life is a resource to be used whether you want it to be or not, by powers largely outside your control. Some people can work in the system, some people can't. It's all part of the natural growth and stagnation cycle.
I really don't think youre making the case that suicide is a good sign.
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Heck, let's go back to the OP a little bit more-the whole siege mentality thing. As soon as people are no longer either totally in control or slowly gaining ground, they feel like they are losing. It's why the neo-nazis and alt-right keep popping up everywhere fighting for white people. To them, the slight erosion of an utter domination is too much to bear. Think they're okay living equal to their fellow man? As long as their "equal" has an extra 500sq feet of floor space more than their neighbor...
I agree that those who dominate don't want to give up their power.. So? Are you saying that equality is destructive on that basis? Did I misunderstand your point?
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Humans have long evolved to take and not give. Heck, it's wired into our biology. It's why it's easier to get fat than to lose fat.
I think that is exceedingly simplistic and limited.
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Everyone wants a leg up. So far, capitalism has provided a good way to do that, and I think inflation is a genius way of doing so.
I dont get your inflation point..
Also, capitalism has not provided everyone a leg up. Not sure where you are getting that. Have there been huge advances? yes of course, but capitalism promotes unequal development.
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Eventually, the cost of science exceeds the effectiveness of the boundary extension, and we choke. Fallen empires. Rome. ...
huh?
Yes, why not? Feudal society, in the grand scheme of things, was really not that long ago. But even if you don't buy that, compare us to our grandparents. Standard of living is way up. Your grandma have a 55 inch plasma flatscreen? How about a 54mbps internet connection? Standard of living is up. There is no question about it. Even if wages are down. However, that does not mean that we have "enough", because the very nature of life is that nothing is "enough". There is always more than can be had, more cars, bigger TVs, more gold, bigger building, bigger rocket. That's the nature of life. There will never be enough to go around, because the very concept of "enough" is foreign to our lizard brains. Got food for today? Grab those leftovers for tomorrow. Might not be enough food tomorrow. You see this play out everywhere, from the doomsday prepper to the wall street banker to the me in a lab meeting. One stockpiles food, one stockpiles money, I stockpile information and social capital, because there is never enough. We will not change this mindset without fundamentally changing our humanity, because evolution has drilled the concept of "more for me and screw you all" into our skulls. Even traditionally collectivist societies do it for selfish reasons. "I give some benefit but I get more".
By carrying capacity, I mean the total sustainable population capacity of the planet. Before the invention of fertilizer, it was about 4 billion. If we were to cover the earth with farms and get rid of all the fertilizer (you know, organic!), then a little under half of the world's population would starve to death in the next few decades. Fertilizer expanded this carrying capacity. This is how I define carrying capacity. I think the next limit will be one of energy though, not food.
If someone commits suicide, that means that they weren't to attached to life to begin with, and I'm assuming that means that if they were put in a life threatening situation, they may choose to not escape. The fact that they are around to commit suicide means that there are not enough life threatening situations anymore. I'm not trying to make the case that suicide is good, just that it means the most basic needs of society are met. Of course, I really don't have any information to back this up. If suicide rates have risen throughout history, well, I'd see that as some evidence in my favor.
Suicide is also a death of despair, much like drug OD. This shows that society is not doing enough to take care of the mental well being of its citizens. I'm sure that cutting healthcare for everyone will help though.
Anyway. I agree that assuming humans have evolved to take and not give is exceedingly simplistic and limited. The only thing is, something being simplistic and limited doesn't make it wrong. This is illustrated by the presence of authoritarian dickweeds throughout most of human history, recorded or not. Heck, even in the Bible, God *makes* the pharaoh an authoritarian dickweed just so he can cast all twelve plagues. (Read closely, after each plague, there is a verse that says "God hardened the pharaohs heart") Which in my opinion makes God the authoritarian dickweed of the day, but oh well.
I think capitalism is the best controlled reflection of this. Just like sports are occasionally referred to as bloodless combat, capitalism is bloodless robbery. And of course, much like in sports, sometimes someone gets a little riled up and a fight breaks out, but ideally the ref will step in. Unless the ref gets deregulated. My point about inflation is that capitalism doe this through inflation-the minimum wage today, in linear value, not in real value, would be the kind of take home the 1% see a century ago. Which means, that if nothing changed, the old one percent would be minimum wagers now. Of course, this ignores the tendency for money to grow exponentially above a certain point, but it provides a reasonable example for the bottom 90%-someone who is making 100k/year is about three generations away from being paid minimum wage. Their pay *has* to go up to maintain that standard of living, because the entry level when they're old and gray will be where they are. this forces them to advance, even if only on paper with the standard 2% or whatever yearly raise.
As for the science point, I think of it this way: There are four primary forms of economics: Primary, which obtains raw materials, secondary, which is manufacturing, tertiary, which is service economics, and quaternary, which is basically academia. Scientists don't really produce anything for society, they just have this unspoken contract with society which basically says "You, society, will support me and take care of my needs, and I, the scientist, will dedicate my life to crapping out something cool you've never seen before". Science is the last thing to develop, because that entire societal framework that currently pays me and provides me with places to spend my money on food, phones, and the customer service people that bring me both, needs to exist before I can. I'm expensive. Heck, I use a multi million dollar piece of equipment that costs hundreds of dollars in energy and gas and materials to operate on a daily basis, and it doesn't created any kind of value besides experimental data. I don't pay for it. Society does, because this machine helps me try to make society better. The thing is, as science gets more advanced, it starts taking more and more effort to push it forward (see: me and my multi-million UHPLC/tandem mass spec vs. Boyle's jars of air), and I imagine a theoretical limit on human knowledge being the point where it takes a full human lifespan to teach someone enough known basics to discover something new.
Now, let's relate this to my fertilizer thing from earlier. If science hadn't given us fertilizer, we couldn't have possibly gotten to 7 billion people. even more basic, if science hadn't given us the idea of crop cultivation at all, we'd all be hunter-gatherer nomads. So science expands the carrying capacity of the world. However, science becomes more and more expensive, and there are diminishing returns. Eventually, I think expanding the carrying capacity will become infeasible due to cost, and a bunch of people will die as the population levels experience a correction. Just like the stock market.
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