Productivity Leads To Liberty

[Martin Hash]

I have no problem with the upcoming Robot Age where many people don't have jobs, as long as the goal remains "the most liberty to the most people."

Robots imply increased productivity, and increased productivity implies less work for the same Quality-of-Life, so presumably a huge chunk of the population could live a satisfactory life with little expenditure. Star Trek economics seem attractive & inevitable.

[de officiis]

Productivity in the U.S. has been increasing ever since the Industrial Revolution, yet a great many families have two wage-earners and the middle class is shrinking. So what gives?

[Fife]

Things are actually getting produced for ubiquitous consumption.

Who has it better: a pre-Revolutionary Parisian laborer (or French farm worker), or a married couple working in 2017 at the Walmart?

[Speaker to Animals]

Things are actually getting produced for ubiquitous consumption.

Who has it better: a pre-Revolutionary Parisian laborer (or French farm worker), or a married couple working in 2017 at the Walmart?

If you were somehow able to qualitatively normalize the impact of technological progress on our quality of life, I think the pre-Revolutionary farmer is objectively better off than the modern wage slave.

[Martin Hash]

Cell phones are so cheap everyone can have one. So are food & electronics. Those things & many others have experienced dramatic productivity growth. Unfortunately, housing & energy, not so much. It's not difficult to imagine energy becoming almost free in the future. Transportation, healthcare & a few other essentials need a breakthrough. However, as long as status is the #1 pursuit, its cost will never go down.

[Speaker to Animals]

The salient intellectual experiment is to imagine the pre-Enlightenment social and economic systems with our present technology.

Would people be freer? Probably not. Would they be happier? Probably.

Like I said before, if you want extreme individualism, then you need to just suck it up and join Sauron and his all-embracing centralized state. The two go hand-in-hand.

If you want to be a reactionary, then you have to embrace social and community duties and obligations.

[Martin Hash]

Things are actually getting produced for ubiquitous consumption.

Who has it better: a pre-Revolutionary Parisian laborer (or French farm worker), or a married couple working in 2017 at the Walmart?

If you were somehow able to qualitatively normalize the impact of technological progress on our quality of life, I think the pre-Revolutionary farmer is objectively better off than the modern wage slave.

Lot of romance in that supposition...

[Speaker to Animals]

Things are actually getting produced for ubiquitous consumption.

Who has it better: a pre-Revolutionary Parisian laborer (or French farm worker), or a married couple working in 2017 at the Walmart?

If you were somehow able to qualitatively normalize the impact of technological progress on our quality of life, I think the pre-Revolutionary farmer is objectively better off than the modern wage slave.

Lot of romance in that supposition...

I'd say the same about the opposing opinion, dude.. I am realistic. I am not saying it was utopia. I am just pointing out that at no time were suicide rates this high. At no time were so many people leading fruitless and helpless lives as they are today.

It's not technology that's the problem. It's the people themselves. Their values. Their mindset.

[Martin Hash]

The salient intellectual experiment is to imagine the pre-Enlightenment social and economic systems with our present technology.

Would people be freer? Probably not. Would they be happier? Probably.

Like I said before, if you want extreme individualism, then you need to just suck it up and join Sauron and his all-embracing centralized state. The two go hand-in-hand.

If you want to be a reactionary, then you have to embrace social and community duties and obligations.

R U saying slavery gets an undeserved bad rap.

[Speaker to Animals]

And the broad choices arrayed before you:

(1) Some form of progressive. A utopian, or marxist, or some other person who choose centralized states that dole out your "liberty" by the barrel of a gun.

(2) Some form of conservative. A guy who likes his centralized state just the way it is, thank you so much.

(3) Some form of reactionary. A guy who is saying, hey now, this didn't go well, maybe we need to back the fuck up and start from where it worked.

(4) A libertarian. A guy who wants his cake and to eat it too. i.e. the guy in the guillotine when the utopia is realized.