R.C.Macaulay wrote:
These is an end of any line. Presently the unfunded mandates accrued
by the US gov't for social and health programs tops 50 trillion
dollars and change...
I think the severity of this problem is exaggerated somewhat, at
least with regard to Social Security. Our wealth is also growing. In
the distant future, when the mandates come due, we may have far more
money than we do at present. If not, mandates can always be recalled
or erased by the Congress.
Rumsfelt stated that deficits no longer matter.
That was a foolish thing to say.
As long as someone will work and produce sufficent food to give
away, the balancing is deferred another day.
This strikes me as an example of projecting present-day problems too
far into the future. At the turn of the 20th century Theodore
Roosevelt and others worried about "the Christmas tree problem;" we
were running out of wild Christmas trees. Apparently it did not occur
to them that Christmas trees can be grown like any other crop. They
also worried about "the Irish maid problem;" i.e., who is going to do
domestic work? They did not anticipate vacuum cleaners and washing machines.
On a more serious note, people today in Atlanta and elsewhere are
convinced that population growth and density are limited by the
amount of water that falls as rain. Even with today's technology that
is absurd. There is no reason why we cannot purify sewage, recycling
the same water again and again indefinitely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/us/27conserve.html
Drinking the water is at against the law at present. You have to let
it percolate through the ground first. But there is no technical
reason why we shouldn't drink it. The water is purer and safer than
the natural product. The law reflects irrational fastidiousness.
Getting back to your assertion of "giving away food": by the
standards of the past, we already do that. Food is essentially free.
It costs a pittance, and it takes only a few percent of the
population to produce it. Nearly everyone used to work on farm.
Around 1850 one farmer did enough labor to 4 people, and now one
farmer feeds ~80 people. In the U.S. the average wage is $17 per hour
before tax according to the Bur. of Labor Statistics. A pound of
flour costs $0.16, which is about a half-minute of labor. In the 18th
century it took the average person about an hour of labor per day to
earn that much food, as I recall.
In a century or two, food and other necessities of life will be so
cheap it will not be worth charging people for them. I suppose that
food will cost ten cents a day or so (discounting inflation). It will
hardly matter if a person wants to do labor for that money. We will
just give him the money if he does not feel like working, just as we
now give people a library card for free. It will not be worth
collecting or keeping track of such trivial sums. Robot labor will be
thousands of times cheaper than human labor, including most
"intellectual" labor. Today, one farmer feeds 80 people. In a hundred
years, there will be no farmers at all. Food factory production will
be completely automated. One food factory robot that costs a few
hundred dollars (discounting inflation) will feed a thousand people.
People will have to get used to living like today's idle rich people,
devoting most of their lives to education or hobbies or what-have-you.
We tend to forget how extraordinary computers and other of modern
technology is. Everyone knows that computers operate at 2 GHz these
days; that is, they do roughly 2 billion primitive arithmetic
operations per second. To put that in perspective, one desktop
computer can do more number crunching clerical work, such as adding
columns of numbers, than every single U.S. office worker combined
could have done circa 1900. (In 1900 clerks and other office workers
were ~5% of the labor force, which was 28.4 million people, so that
comes to 1.4 million people.)
Once robots are perfected enough to do ordinary household and
business manual labor, I cannot imagine there will be any work for
most people to do. At least, not as we define work today. It would be
like to trying add columns of numbers in competition with a computer.
The whole basis of our present economy is the exchange of labor for
goods and services, but human labor will be worth nothing. Either we
will let people starve, or we will change the basis of our economy.
Since we are clever enough to invent computers and robots, I am
confident that we will be clever enough to invent an economic system
that allows us to benefit from them.
- Jed
