Sort of like England to Ireland during the potato famine? Growing up in an English speaking layered society has obviously different from an English speaking society that has replaced each generation with a new generation of dissatisfied immigrants from England and the rest of the world. We are more generally dissatisfied and more than a little malcontent. Your Utopia with its happy lower class bears little resemblance to our here and the upper classes who believe that lower classdom is a moral failure makes a stable welfare state impossible. There's too much harassment. We have peace because we have police. As the police are being defunded, we will have less peace. But it is still interesting to me just how different the two English speaking societies are from one another. And then there is Canada and Australia. And then there is us. The Ainu of the English world. I must compliment you Keith on your erudition. I always something from your reading.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 3:49 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Almost Utopia To be realistic we will never have an energy shortage again. Because great slabs of compressed ocean mud have been repeatedly pushed under the 'floating' continental rock for billions of years then fracked methane will always be available for any realistically conceivable world population for any realistically conceivable future. There'll be few relatively small regions of the earth's crust where one or more deep strata of shale gas will not lie immediately underneath. Shale gas will be used for at least 1,000 years because, in the meantime -- and particularly within the next 100 years -- by far the most of the present excess world rural population will have ended up in the shanty suburbs of the presently fast-growing super-metropolises. There, if the present experience in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and other countries is any guide at all, birth rates will decline to less than replacement. If the world-wide research surveys of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are any further guide then, if the hovel-dwellers are offered sufficient free or state-subsidized electricity to drive a TV and to receive, or the chance to earn, enough to maintain a minimum carbohydrate diet then they'll be content. Those newly-discovered mirror neurons of the brain, which so powerfully help us to self-identify with the rich and the heroes we read in novels or see on the TV screen, will do the trick for the vast majority. Some of the hovel children, by virtue of a decent set of genes, exceptional parents and more than the normal ration of luck at different junctures, will be able to escape and the join the minority who live in the more prosperous parts of the super-metropolises. In this way they'll be similar to the small proportion of state-educated children in the advanced countries of the West who are nevertheless able to get into the elite universities from which they will almost automatically enter what I call the 20-class. Because of the lack of consumer goods with uniquely new characteristics (now about 40 years on in the West), we are fast proceeding to a steady-state economy (much to the befuddlement of our politicians and their growing consternation) in which profits (necessary for further investment) will come from innovations that will continue to increase the efficiency of our production systems and infrastructures, not from status enhancing googaws (which, increasingly, will not require people to make them). If the above sounds a bit Utopian, so it is. Quite besides a currency catastrophe which cannot be far off now due to the increasingly fragile Eurozone, millions of fracking wells in Europe, China and elsewhere will be joining the many thousands which are presently busy in America and supplying cheap methane. What is going to be the reaction of Russia and the Middle East countries which presently supply us with the bulk of our oil and gas? Their economies, almost totally deficient in small and middle industries, are completely dependent on their olefinic exports. Those countries will be creating a lot of trouble, we can be pretty sure. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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