Yes, there's an echo of Marx and Veblen here, but this becoming a big part of the economy is a recent phenomenon. It's a result of having vast manufacturing capacity.

Basic fact: for thousands of years, the big problem was making (or growing, catching, or mining) enough stuff. In the 20th century, that problem started to be solved. By the second half of the 20th century, the leading industrial nations had it solved. Then Asia caught up - Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, and finally China. China was the big one, being a huge country. Suddenly there was overcapacity in almost everything.

Now, as I write occasionally, it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff. It's now possible to have a successful economy with a huge non-productive underclass. Economics and politics haven't caught up with this yet.

Oh no, you said his name, and like clockwork my precious upvotes have started to turn to downvotes :-)

We agree, though. Capitalism is really, really good at growth and really, really bad at steady-state. We've never really come up with a good alternative for steady-state. I think Marx got the diagnosis right and the treatment wrong, which seems like a pretty modest hypothesis given the relative difficulty of the two. Regardless, we had better figure this out or things will get messy. Very messy.

TBH I have higher hopes for a couple more industrial revolutions to push the meltdown out beyond my lifetime. Bio and space, maybe? :/

> Economics and politics haven't caught up with this yet.

That seems unlikely. Political and economic leadership throughout the "White West" has been subsidizing and expanding the non-productive underclass for decades.

And most of that happened after the US ditched the gold standard in 1971, and part of the reason for that was a budget deficit. And the other countries often had FX reserves, only fueling the overcapacity and reducing bond yields.

Japan was already a powerful manufacturing nation well before the second half of the 20th century. Dont you know the defeated Russia at the end of the 18th ?

Japan defeated Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

They definitely weren't a major manufacturing economy in the 18th century.

This was also not a prolonged war (lasted about a year and a half). Japan had to commit all its forces to the (successful) campaign. Russia was forced to surrender due to internal conflict and a stagnant economy, but had much more manpower it could have sent to turn the tides.

> Rich people playing zero-sum games while the poor starve is the natural outcome of building an economy off of the notion that value creation is about doing what wealth-weighted-people want as opposed to what uniformly-weighted people want.

If so, the problem must go away with a sane wealth redistribution program. (What might be much more realistic than taxing marketing.)

Agreed, but even modest fungibility of wealth and power (which happens almost by definition) makes any such solution fragile.

The technological approach is more interesting to me. If you can make distributed manufacturing efficient enough that a single person or group of people can own the capital needed to sustain themselves, you place a lower limit on the extent to which market-based social contract regression can harm a population. Alternatively, from the capitalist angle: companies that directly trade goods for labor are in a unique position to profit from a glut of labor that is not competitive on the global market.

This isn't a new idea. We call them communes. They have a well deserved reputation for being a shitshow. Probably because what they're trying to do -- boil a globe-spanning sprawl of infrastructure and trade down to an acceptable MVP -- is really, really hard. Unlike the world economy, though, that difficulty is a function of technology, rather than politics. Technology improves over time. Politics does not. Which means there's probably going to be a crossing point. I haven't the faintest clue when. I do my (tiny) part by contributing to "industrial" open source projects (mechanical and electrical modeling and simulation), which sorely need any attention they can get, regardless the underlying philosophy.

I've been thinking about this a bit. I think we need to get better intelligence augmentation. We are limited in what we can produce, because we are limited in what we can manage. So we need to improve how much we can manage.

I'm thinking about it in terms of improving autonomy

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1cm/autonomy_a_search_for_a...

I've been trying to find a community. But it seems pretty diffuse.

How have I never heard of this before? (EDIT: oh, it's a really recent post.)

That list of bullet points hits hard. Bookmarked.

The name is excellent. It focuses on the work to be done, ties it to a traditional virtue, and jettisons the baggage that would otherwise come with references to earlier iterations on the theme.

Ditto that about the community being diffuse, although my failure to find similarly minded company may in part be due to the fact that I haven't figured out how to boil this all down to an elevator pitch. The "Autonomy" post helps.

I decided to put more effort into making a community, got a wordpress https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ and a subreddit so far. https://www.reddit.com/r/improvingautonomy/

Feedback and/or participation would be great

Cool. Glad you liked it. It was great to read your comments about similar ideas.

I think my next step is to see if it'll take on HN, so I've just submitted it. If not try and repackage it and get it on an interesting blog/website. Where would you expect to see something like that?

Communes need not be focused on producing anything.

Suppose you take a group of 20 people making minimum wage, and rather than buying the cheapest internet possible 1Mbps x 20, they buy a 100Mbps connection and share them. Well there is added HW requirements, but for the cost of 1Mbps everyone is getting 5+Mbps except everyone is not using at the same time so it's closer to 20+Mbps.

There is a lot of things you can buy in bulk and see similar savings. The most obvious being housing. The classic 15 collage students in a house can be a lot cheaper than a dorm room. But, it also applies say vacations with carpooling / car rentals and a beach house, or stables like bulk rice.

Forgot to factor in management and maintenance. Typically such projects fail because a key manager or maintainer disappears and there are not enough funds to hire a replacement or get good enough training for someone to replace them. Alternatively key people become overloaded and burn out.

Hardware is the cheap part, people are not. (Until infrastructure becomes really big such as roads, mass transit and big ISPs. Because these utilise economies of scale in workforce.)

Well yea, these things are unstable. But when the break even point is only 3 months or so you don't have to stick with it very long to see a net gain. What seems like a reasonable effort to save money when your a minimum wage collage collage student may not when your making six figures.

My point was most communes are closer to having roommates to collage fraternity side vs soviet worker camp.

The fundamental problem with this is that, as technology becomes more advanced, the facilities required to make it have become more complex and dependent on centralized manufacturing. For example, the cost of a fab capable of building even reasonably modern ICs is in the billions and there are a handful of companies that have the ability to run them, and they rely on equipment from a number of equally specialised suppliers.