I wrote:
> "Economists will say, and I believe that they are correct but in some
> unknown time-frame, that *eventually* having the added productivity and
> efficiency will result in demand for 5 extra factories to produce more and
> more goods... so *eventually* we will have converted ALL those 300 macjobs
> to decent jobs. All it takes is capital."
>
> I would like to think so, but I doubt it. There is a limit to how much work
> needs to be done. There is a limit the number of goods and services a
> normal person can consume, or wants to consume. Of course there will be
> plenty of work at first. We must clean up the environmental mess left by
> the 20th century, build nice houses for everyone, educate all children,
> teach everyone on earth how to speak English fluently, colonize the moon . . .
Of course I realize we are not doing these things now. I meant that I agree with Beene. Conventional, existing economics could pay for these things. There is a gigantic world-wide pent-up demand for nice houses, educated children, and English fluency. People everywhere want these things, and I hope that many 21st-century moguls become rich by allocating capital and meeting these needs. These goals can be accomplished by exchanging human labor for money.
What I mean is, after we get through meeting all of these needs, and after robots and computers improve to the point where they can do all manual labor, such as factory work, driving and brain surgery, we will eventually run out of ways to exchange human labor for money. Of course most work will be brain-work, such as thinking of new jobs for those armies of robots to tackle. But even that will be limited after a while. There is only so much brain-work needed to run the world, or the worlds, including Earth, the Moon, Mars and where ever else we inhabit.
As for material goods, there are some noted prizefighters and dot-com millionaires in Atlanta who own fleets of automobiles and 40,000 square-foot mansions equipped with bowling alleys and movie theaters. Does this mean we can expand the production of material good indefinitely? Will we all end up living like Saddam Hussein did? I doubt it. To me, this lifestyle would be nightmare. A sane person would grow sick of it after a week. In Japan, the market for material goods such as clothing, automobiles, computers and CD players peaked years ago when the population stopped growing. Most sales are for replacements, as things wear out. Even the housing market has stopped growing. Normal people do not want mountains of material goods.
In the distant future with "replicators," where you will be able to possess anything you want at a moment's notice, most people would not bother to possess more objects than they need at the moment. When they finish with a book, a meal, a luxury yacht, or a 2000-kilometer-long space based linear particle accelerator, they will tell the robots to toss it back into the hopper to be broken down into atoms again.
(Incidentally, some people imagine that robots should not perform surgery, or they will never be allowed to. But they do already, including procedures too delicate for human hands, such as laser eye surgery.)
- Jed
