The GDP per capita of the world is only about $12,000. That's technically "what we need," food, clothes, and shelter for a family of 4, but on a per person basis, it's below the federal poverty line in the US.

I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And although it's undoubtedly true that the wealthiest few deciles could give up many luxuries to provide more for the poor, it's much more arguable if there is enough for everyone to have enough without generating much more.

GDP per capita also counts children. $48,000 for a family of four sounds perfectly fine to me.

This isn't a realistic way to project consumption, though. A single adult living alone has more expenses per person than a family of four under one roof. An elderly couple will not get by on $24k. (And half of people are not under 18, 21, or 25 as you may prefer to define childhood.)

The assumes nothing ever goes wrong. One serious illness or injury and you’re bankrupt.

That’s what (mandatory) insurances are for. Not insuring against events you cannot deal with alone is gambling.

At $12,000 per person, you can't insure against much at all without seriously cutting into the food and shelter.

Healthcare is around 10% of GDP (bar some countries that have organized their healthcare system inefficiently like my native Germany).

That still leaves you with $10.800. A liability insurance costs here around 50–100€ per year for a family. What more insurances do you need? GDP per capita also includes pensioners, so you do not need to count pension into this.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...

My understanding is that reducing a single person's income from 12,000 to 10,800 is a big deal. And in any case, my original point was that this is barely "enough," and this is assuming a perfectly efficient and equitable distribution. It may actually, technically be enough, but it's poverty. It's only not poverty if you also receive the income for people you take care of who don't actually need all of the income (like kids). I don't think arguing over whether $11,000 is as good as $12,000 is particularly meaningful because I don't think $12,000 is enough either, and my main disagreement with the original poster was with the statement that there has been enough for a long time. That seems unequivocally untrue to me.

These arguments always ignore the fact that the only reason $X GDP is generated is because people are incentivized. Children don’t produce, so someone else is producing for them. If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work. We’ve tried socialism.

When did we try socialism?

> If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work.

This is obviously not true, since in every capitalist society, the hardest working people already make the least amount of money, and the laziest people employed already get given the most amount of money.

Capitalism has already proven that financial incentive has no correlation to how hard someone works.

What?? It’s the exact opposite. Those people HAVE to work that hard precisely for the reason I mentioned: they won’t be paid otherwise. This is precisely the issue. If you paid people irrespective of how much they work, they won’t work.

Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.

Do I really work harder as a software engineer than the garbagemen who bust their asses doing a dangerous smelly job? Or teachers wrangling a room full of kids?

I don't think so.

And yet I am paid 5-10X what they are.

I think you're basically agreeing with the comment you replied to. They're saying people who are financially secure (possibly like a software engineer) are less incentivized to work hard. Someone who really needs the money is more incentivized.

If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.

"incentivizing" is such an anodyne word for this cruelty.

I'm not advocating poverty, nor do I think was the parent comment. They were just in agreement with you that poor people work hard.

Do you have an actual argument or are you just going to nitpick word choices?

Words matter. Let's be clear about the human costs of what we are describing.

You are still completely missing the point. Stop deciding you want to be angry about my comment before actually reading it.

If you think I missed your point, perhaps you should consider rephrasing it to make it more obvious.

> "We’ve tried socialism."

I don't remember from school the bit where Mr Socialism said "let the workers sieze the means of production so they can shutdown the means of production, because they are lazy and stupid". "define:Socialism"[1] - "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively". NB. that it involves production, and is /not/ "Systems of social organization in which lazy people get paid for doing nothing".

> "If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work"

Have you never seen or heard of volunteers? There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3Asocialism&ia=definition

> Have you never seen or heard of volunteers?

Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.

> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?

You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.

Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.

> "Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons."

Yes, and that disproves your claim that people only work for money, and without more money people won't do more work.

> "You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is." If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.*"

Volunteers earn no extra money for their work, and yet still work. Many people work unpaid overtime out of loyalty for their employer / coworkers / customers / patients, many people work out of passion and interest and hobbying ("starving artist" trope).

And, again, you're propagandising "Socialism" changing from "people get money without working" to "people can't get more than a fixed limited return on their work", which again it isn't. But let's go with that definition - if everything collectively owned, the more stuff there is the more stuff is collectively owned, so the more benefit everyone gets. When the Federal Government builds more roads, you personally get more roads you can drive on as a benefit. So even if Socialism was "you can't earn more than the minimum wage {because the collective takes it from you!}", you are part of the collective, so it still wouldn't be the case that people got no more benefit for producing more, as you claim.

Or, perhaps you’re just wrong? You can’t even be bothered to answer the simple question of when socialism has been attempted.

I’ve been watching videos about tribes in Papa New Guniea and it makes you realize you don’t need very much for clothes or shelter.

Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and purpose. The tribes have all 3.

It doesn't snow in Papua New Guinea.

GC claimed that food is all that is needed, and that their wants were satisfied by the additional of the other two things.

The fact is that the average human is not actually content to be one notch above animal with "food, sex, and purpose". That is why we have progressed much further than just accepting those basics as all we need. But I think our improvements on those things do provide enough value for the average person to be happy.

- Tasty food

- Safe sex (and relative ease of reproduction)

- Multi-variate / chosen purpose.

Plus other methods to remove annoying friction from your life:

- Optimized shelter

- Optimized travel

- Consumption of various raw goods (not for food and not for shelter). e.g. 3D Printers!

GDP per capita of $12,000 implies family of 4 is $48,000, because "per capita" is per person in that family.

Yeah that's why I said for a family of 4. $12,000 is hardly enough for food, shelter, and clothing for a single person.

Human wants for things are endless. Human desire for extra time, even more so. Human needs are subjective to each and every human. Why does Bezos get up in the morning?, if you’d like something aphoristic you may reply to in many creative ways.

There is a lot of hubris in saying we’re pretty much maxed out now, thanks and time to stop. I’d suggest instead we need to make smart choices, and that usually smart answers are not found at the far extremities. This “we have all we need” bit reminds me of scientists saying physics was over in the 19th century, combined with a bit of Thomas Malthus in such a way that we all die unless we halt innovation. It reminds me of that, but I’d be overstepping to put those words in your mouth. After all human intention has endless range to match the rest.

>Human needs are subjective to each and every human

After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in the world, many people without shelter and further millions who have no access to healthcare education or even clean water. These are not subjective needs.

Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.

> Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.

I don’t think this is really true, part of the problem is that the wealth that you think could be allocated to this problem was only generated by incentivizing people to build it with compensation, if you turned around and took it away from the people who built it and gave it to people who did not build it, you would disincentivize creation of more wealth, and the wealth you reappropriated would deteriorate, because you neglected to create an incentive and maintenance infrastructure to keep it working. This is exactly what happened when we tried this, starting with poor people in our own communities.

Public housing projects and welfare programs are money sinks that are notoriously counterproductive at meeting their stated needs; and we can’t get people to consider the structural imbalances that result because the need for these programs is an article of faith and among the believers the only acceptable reasons for their failure are “people who don’t agree with the program” and “lack of funding.”

Ah, thanks. I felt that was a separate point to the idea of stopping progress because we have enough. I didn’t realize that was the main point? Yes indeed, we have enough to ease those burdens and it’s a terrible thing that they continue!

I've spent what is likely way too much mental energy wondering about this, and I'm no closer to an answer. Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume? Intuitively it seems obvious that there should be something like that, but in the 1800s our growth today would seem like it should be enough.

Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa? Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?

And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.

I don’t. There is the consideration that more money comes with more problems. You can say that more money would fix those problems, but at the end of the day, you still had to spend energy thinking about it.

You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.

And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.

Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.

I agree. All I want is peace. Time with my family and friends, a garden, time to read, that kind of thing. Why anyone bothers with loud cars or big houses with huge lawns is beyond me.

I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day.

Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.

What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?

How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.

> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"

OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?

Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?

Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition. DenisM mentions status in his comment. Status will demand Versailles bigger than can be passed at light speed during a life, just to impress. There will be galaxies full of combat drones, just to keep the balance in fighting power.

I already have everything in the Universe outside your lightcone as my personal Versailles most remote wings, and you can't prove otherwise. My robots are on their way back and information about them will arrive with you approximately a second after you die, whenever that is.

See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.

> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"

Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.

What if it's not about keeping individual humans comfortable with nice experiences but about growing the amount of awareness? We think of humans as a resource problem but they are also the source of innovation and creativity. Will resources be limited if there is the chance to grow the number of aware beings to new heights with the potential to reach new levels of civilization?

If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading up on dematerialization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think about.

Status is a big deal. A wealth differential allows one to order other people around, building up status. Those others then feel the need to get out from under the yoke, or at least to be in the position to order around other-other people. All of this requires continuous wealth accumulation to which there is no limit. You would have to redefine status to end this game.

Also note that a situation where humanity's productivity is expanding is way better from a social standpoint than one where it is stagnant. The first allows positive sum games to exist. The second is a zero sum game. Of course there is a limit to growth as the reachable universe is finite.

If the goal of wealth accumulation is not actually to be better off but to be better than your neighbour (as it is), then positive sum games become zero sum games functionally.

So no, that's not really a solution either.

But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.

We’ve shifted the goalposts from “providing every human the dignity of a home” to “providing every human a home that doesn’t look too shabby when compared to the highest bar in society”

Certainly, the first is enough, I'm just trying to answer why it is that people increase their consumption without end while it doesn't really make them happy.

> Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation?

If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into orbit.

See that's exactly the thing. We can point to excess today and say "How could that be sustainable" but it seems like the novelty would wear off, no? Like in some hypothetical future where resources are 1000x more available, would people launch 1000 cars into space? It seems unlikely. Somehow I feel like there is some inelasticity to consumption that we just haven't reached yet. I'm not quite sure why I feel like that though.

Ever watch someone burn $500 in gas running a boat for an afternoon?

Yes. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the feeling of self-righteous rage that comes with it.

I don't think launching sports cars into orbit is inherently any more wasteful than say the development of the Deep Blue chess computer. It may have been a vanity project, but the ultimate goal was to test a proof of concept.

I didn't say it was wasteful or make any judgments about it. It's just a fact that a level of lifestyle that allows a person to launch his personal sports car into space has been achieved.

It's a level of lifestyle that allows a person to donate his personal sports car to replace an inert mass, because he'll buy another car.

While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.

I could afford to donate a $100k sports car to be launched into space if I really wanted to. Lots of people here could. How many billions of dollars short of being able to set off a chain of events that actually make that happen do you think I am?

That's the thing, being at an influential and part-marketing position at a space company isn't inherently a lifestyle thing. It's a rare opportunity but I could easily see a world where some engineer's car went up instead.

> being at an influential and part-marketing position at a space company isn't inherently a lifestyle thing

I think it's more "vying for the 'richest person on earth' title" that's important here.

I mean I don't think that quite qualifies as lifestyle inflation. A Roadster in Space just costs Elon $100,000 since his business planned to launch the rocket anyways. That's nothing compared to the price of a megayacht.

Except getting a $100k car shot into space also probably requires personally building the company that is "launching the rocket anyways." The SpaceX waiting list to launch junk into space for laughs is a very exclusive club.

I would say the Dear Moon project is more of an example than launching the car. The car was just for an initial test flight. It took the place of a block of aluminum like in one of the Falcon 1 launches.

The question isn't lifestyle in the abstract. Everything that people buy today is specifically intended to impel more buying. Whether that's cars, houses or sugary foods. The situation is incredibly different than simple "everyone gets what they need" society.

Take a look at just about any book on consumerism

But again, it seems like there are physical limits to how much people can consume. Like, we can agree that if everyone had a machine that could magically summon up to 10 thousand cubic meters of material every day, we realistically would have universal material abundance. Even if we exceeded what the boxes could make, one or two dedicated to making more would result in runaway exponential growth that would speed up much faster than human consumption could.

Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how close to universal replicators do you need to come before people can't want more things fast enough.

> how close to universal replicators do you need to come

We'll probably reach technological self-replication singularity before AGI. I envision a small self replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers, robots and tools for making tools.

But I think in reality there will be limited resources, energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology, and it will get good at recycling anything.

There is a manga series which is set in this concept of exponential self-replication technology gone wrong somewhere in the past (thus a futuristic dystopia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21

>> The "Netsphere", a sort of computerized control network for The City. The City is an immense volume of artificial structure, separated into massive "floors" by nearly-impenetrable barriers known as "Megastructure". The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman tribes as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon Creatures. The Net Terminal Genes appear to be the key to halting the unhindered, chaotic expansion of the Megastructure, as well as a way of stopping the murderous robot horde known as the Safeguard from destroying all of humanity.

Then people would create television shows demonstrating innovative ways go waste 10,000 cubic meters of material every day.

I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.

> I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded

I kind of am? Besides, people don't need to never be stupid again, they just need to become stupider at a slower rate than productivity increases. If hour by hour production significantly increased, how could people possibly waste enough?

More importantly, would they? We waste resources to signal wealth. Wasting an ever greater proportion of your allocated geyser of materials doesn't signal anything.

Comment aside, I’d never seen the word impel before. Interesting.

For anyone curious: https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/compel-vs-impel...

Yes, There are a lot of people who make more money than they care to spend. Some of those people give the money away.

and also

No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a 300 foot yacht, etc.

>Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation?

There ought to be a point at which continuing increases in income fail to generate increases in either life expectancy or the proportion of adults who are able to work (not necessarily working). It would be necessary to distinguish this from the effects of anti-aging technology, but it should be possible in principle; improving diet/sleep/exercise and reducing pollution exposure isn't "anti-aging technology", nor are childcare/education.

I've also spent mental energy on this, about 4-5 years, and recently I've been reaching a conclusion (in a great walkabout about AI, ethics, and the meaning of everything).

My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing, hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original: Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century).

"I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH

Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves, i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're depressed or in despair.

"The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." -- WvH

You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e. a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate those connections. Really the goal is not with any single individual -- our goal should be with every conscious being. That's why we should not plan individually, we should plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them).

In other words, we should take the Golden Rule literally. (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably): every conscious being has the same value to yourself as yourself.

Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole, currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating quality of life).

I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society. I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'.

That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to space exploration, space colonization, prevention of extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear conflict, still not completely out of imagination, could perhaps still collapse society).

How to do it? I think part of it is simply enlightenment, discussion, writing and reading; the other is indeed recreating our institutions, including our economic and political systems (focused around this goal).

This century is when we decide whether we become the Borg or the Federation. Cylon or Human. Dalek or Doctor. (or just slowly collapse... hopefully not; we have potential)

This way of thinking, as you draw the lines into the future, correspond to rational analysis. Could be called quality of goal-sets, as opposite to "crowing on a pile of dung" as is now the ongoing mindset of our elites. ...fascinating and not depressing the observance of reality, your way would be beyond and far of what is now passing for science, politics, societal engineering, technology layers without a grand design. It is not going to happen, goes against the history of mankind pointers. You Sir, must be one of the few, your status thus would reside in other then wealth and ego, you posess the suicidal gene!

My view may have come off as a little hedonistic.

To be clear, by conscious experience I don't mean just pleasure (or even just "happiness", just joy). Experience is much more complicated than pleasure alone, or any single feeling -- although of course generally they are good proxies in most situations (if you're happy it's usually, but not as a law, having good experiences).

I'll leave it as a reflection to the reader exactly what it entails -- with Humboldt's observation in mind (of "harmonious development [...] to a complete and consistent whole).

Another important observation to be had, is that we should have freedom to chose, in a way, what gives us pleasure, what's engrossing to us -- guided by reason. I call this concept 'freedom of utility' -- sure, we (generally) enjoy physically food, sex, and various other things (sometimes drugs that destroy our bodies and our minds); but what should we like? Imagine our intuitive tastes could be aligned to changes since we've developed millions of years ago, living in totally different environments under new light of reasoning, and new understanding of the universe.

Could you mention where Wilhelm von Humboldt shared These thoughts?

I think it's a good sign that per-capita energy consumption is decreasing in the US; there are limits to consumption.

Does that take into account the energy needed to produce what Americans consume?

Yes, that's almost all of per-capita energy consumption. It would be a really dumb metric otherwise.

It is a pretty dumb metric actually, and IIRC it doesn't actually include the energy needed to produce goods that are imported.

People can't all reliably afford food and shelter, so I don't think lifestyle inflation is the real problem.

Overpopulation is a problem. People will claim that the plant can support 20 billion+ people but they conveniently forget that these people will have an incredibly low standard of living.

Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of living will include mass starvation and death so there is a real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a virtue.

That I'm definitely not convinced of. With current levels of technology, poverty in a global setting has more to due with infrastructure and unrest than it does actual shortages. I suspect that we could pack on even more people with the industrialization of the third world, vastly increasing productivity.

More importantly, there's absolutely no reason to think that technology will somehow stop pushing the carrying capacity further. More people will yield more innovation, yielding more growth, yielding more people. If there's an endpoint to that, I doubt we'll see it any time soon. Yes, I too see how insane it is to think that sometime relatively soon global GDP will double twice in a year. But twice in a decade would be just as crazy 500 years ago.

There's certainly people who eschew technology and live in a historical fashion. They might even be happier for it.

If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more humans.

With exponential growth, we might be closer than you'd think. Clearly people always want more, but the rate at which we want more seems like it has to have to have a limit. At the very least, it can grow faster than the population can (almost automatically, since more people increase growth as well).

Read some Culture novels.

Oh man, I'd love to but there aren't any more. Fantastic concept, solid execution.

> Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume?

We're already maxed out on information, tools, media and interactions.

Came here to say the same thing.

People might still be more unhappy even though society at large delivers them things that could be unimaginable today. The creators and owners who can deliver that future will be richer than everyone else (rightfully so, imo) and that divide is what I think could make people more unhappy although they will be much better off than what we are today.

That's why the article goes on to explain how to fix that. I believe they are two independent points, the taxation proposition is independent from the AI revolution and could be applied today. What the article argues is that the AI revolution would make wealth accumulation so massive that we will need laws and taxes, and new ways of looking at the world.

I doubt that. People who are ultra rich use money as a proxy for power, influence and status. In a post scarcity world money likely won't be a great way to attain status so the hope is that status will be obtained through other means like creative expression or charisma.

What ai wil change though is the ability of large categories of labour to win what they need on an open marketplace. I think this initiative is trying to anticipate that.

yep... expectations scale with wealth. if we set a standard of living around that of ~100 years ago there would be "enough" for all. more likely outcome is that wealth disparity remains about the same (or gets worse) but everyone is a bit better off

> We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago.

That's obviously not true today: There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.

There almost certainly will be enough eventually, but human beings live in the now. There will be another pandemic someday. Or some other natural disaster that creates localized or temporal scarcity. We can't just spin up a new lifesaving drug or a million new homes overnight. Maybe someday we will?

> There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.

That is mostly a question of regulations. The part that takes so much time is getting the vaccines approved; many researchers don't even try because they know they wouldn't have enough money to get their vaccine approved. Also, most governments negotiate hard to reduce the prices, despite the fact that economic damage from lockdowns is much greater.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfried_St%C3%B6cker

"This revolution will erode enough biome for every human to be dependent on the industrial complex to survive, while animals are basically left to starve."

the wealth-hoarders are interfering with this...

How does one hoard wealth? Am I made poorer because Bezos owns 9% of his own company?

His workers are poorer because his company's enormous valuation comes from the surplus value they produce but do not receive as compensation. You might be poorer if you own a small business those workers would frequent if they had more money.

Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-competitive practices.

Wrong mode of thinking. The problem is that there aren't enough alternatives. If you want an economy that is fair for workers then you need more jobs per worker so the worker can choose the best offer. That also means you want more employers, including the Jeff Bezos types.

Would this not apply to industries with lots of competition like restaurants or hotels?

Labor theory of value lmao. Amazon workers are richer because they've been given an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have. If they could have a better job they'd take it.

trickle down economics!

How about his workers are richer because they receive a portion of the value they produce, because by combining their labor with Amazon’s capital they can produce vastly more value than without it; and if people didn’t get their share of value from producing and renting out capital they wouldn’t do it and there wouldn’t be any capital to use.

Yes you are, very much so, a multiplication of what you yourself could theoretically approach in a life-time.

Sorta. Wealth like that is control and power, and while governments theoretically have absolute power over business, actually using those powers can break things. If the government owned the same shares, you would have slightly more direct control over what Amazon does in practice. Probably. Perhaps.