It seems that the majority of the disagreement here stems from our different definitions of "scarcity" and "abundance". I will try to be clearer. Abundance means "more than enough". This is most easily seen with air. Air is abundant because anyone that wants it gets all that they need and more any time they want it. Air is most certainly limited however, so abundance has nothing to do with finiteness. Now, what this means economically is that air has no monetary "value". It still has value since without it you would die, but you cannot "sell" air. It's price is infinitesimal. Would you buy a can of ordinary air from me? No, because you can get all you want and keep your money/goods and the same time. You do not have an "unlimited" supply, but since you can only consume so much of it during any given time period, and it regenerates at a rate faster than that, then your supply over time is effectively "unlimited", relative to your consumption rate. This is abundance.
Scarcity is "not enough". This can be demonstrated by locking someone in a bank vault. Now, their air is still limited, but can no longer regenerate faster than their need to consume it. Thus, their supply is limited over time, compared to their rate of consumption. What this means economically is that air now has "value". You could very easily sell that person some additional air, because they will need it to survive longer.
The upshot of all this is, once you have the capacity to produce any product or service at a rate faster than a population's ability to consume it, then you can produce an abundance. This is what was achieved before the Great Depression, and why the value of things crashed: they became like air, too cheap to sell and therefor run a business on. Thus scarcity economics failed and a new form of distribution is required.
This is the whole buisness with technologists. You believe that at some date, before the Great Depression, someone magically created a situation where mankind would be able to consume as much as it is humanly possible to consume, in other words the magic couldran of abundance was finally discovered at the end of the rainbow.
That is not true, before the Great Depression, humanity was producing at MAXIMUM CAPACITY. Consuming vast quantities of raw materials, which were only available beacause of the increasing network of infrastructure, opened up resources that had not yet been tapped.
If humanity at any era had worked to maximum capacity, then they would have got an abundance of resources too great for them to consume, however to be honest most people in all eras have had this or that festival to celebrate, so they quite wisely didn't ever work at that capacity.
The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now things were run in order to maximise profit for people whose workload didn't change a great deal as a result, indeed quite the reverse. Capitalists.
In order to maximise profit, new techniques were developed to increase efficiancy and people had to work long and regular hours (unlike the peasants of most of history with this or that holy day).
What happened is the more people worked, the less they consumed and things were getting more efficiant. Before very long, the Capitalists (who were a small minority) were unable to consume most of the resources for mass-consumption which were bieng made, nor were the people that were working hard to make them.
The reason for this, was economic competion. As prices fell, they produced more, the reason they produced more is that their profits were falling, until the whole system went on a spiral down to destruction.
Of course not, but remember that since we do have the ability to produce an abundance, our scarcity is artificial. It was meant to be this way in order to drive up the value and therefor price of goods so that people could get paid again. The Price System and abundance are mutually incompatible, one of them has to go. We chose to get rid of abundance by destroying it. Read up on the 1930s. They burned crops, slaughtered livestock, destroyed goods, poured oil over oranges, etc. People still alive that remember that era will tell you the same thing (I know several in fact).
We have the capacity to produce an abundance and there is nothing new about this. It was just that capitalism broke the link in the minds of the people making the decisions, between a high production and a large amount of work.
Ultimately the solution is to cut the amount people work by placing the economy in the hands of co-operative producers who exist in a completely open system to fix prices for their products. People naturally want to work less and the fixing of prices removes the reducing prices which stimulate increasing production (and work).
All in all people have two competing demands, they want to work little and get a lot of wealth for doing little. Allow them to fix prices AND ensure the people fixing the prices are the producers, and you solve the problem.
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This was only true in the past. Now with self-powered machines, each person can do the work of many, and it has been increasing exponentially since the mid-1800s. The Price System has had to come up with many ways of both slowing this down, and getting around the extra ability to produce. This is most commonly done with waste. By increasing waste, you throw away productive capacity while keeping actual useful goods and services low, i.e. scarce. One (of many) ways of doing this is planned obsolesence. If you produce a product that lasts 100 years, you probably won't stay in business very long. Produce one that lasts only a single year, and people will have to keep coming back to you every year, guaranteeing your income and business.
Mankind has always used tools to reduce the amount of work they need to do. The difference is that the focus of technology changes from doing as little work as possible, to producing as much as possible due to capitalism.
Your example of planned obselescance, is a typical example of how abundance creates waste. For most of human history anyone trying such a wasteful system, would find themselves working themselves to death. Thus quality was everything, making something that would last 100 years, was a good idea since it meant less work making replacements.
This is a direct result of a combination of capitalism (which seeks the highest possible output) and the machines you mention, allowing that output to reach abundance.
In order to "solve" the problem, one has to create a co-operative system, where people will obviously work as little as possible (beacause they are the one's producing), and remove competion through price-fixing.
Not quite. Again, you're looking to the Price System for examples of how Technocracy would work. The environmental damage you mention is due to the waste I had just mentioned, as well as the fact that Price Systems require exponential growth in order to survive. Thus, since human beings can only consume so much, you have to find ways to get them to "buy" more. This comes with producing junk items, overpackaging, inefficient production practices, planned obsolesence, etc. etc. It's like getting people to buy water from France because it is somehow 'better' than local water, or designer clothes, or anything else that is purposely limited in production in order to raise their value and therefore price. It's the Price System that's wasting the planet, but this needn't be so.
Technocracy is a classic command economy, pulling something like this off would be so expensive that the system would collapse under the weight of it's own buerocrats, expecially on the kind of scale that it needs for "self-sufficiancy".
The waste is a result of the abundance created by machines+capitalism. The trick is to remove capitalism. Since people are lazy and producers no longer compete very much, this should ensure people not only do not waste the enviroment or create economic crisis through overproduction, but also do not work long hours.
Again, limited does not mean scarce. We can easily produce energy (solar, nuclear, whatever) at a rate faster than people can consume (even with properly run automation), and not faster than our ability to gain more, and thus not have to worry about "running out".
Nuclear energy is finate, uranium would run out pretty fast if everyone in the world used nuclear power exclusively, not to mention the nuclear waste and the 'accidents'.
Automating everything, would increase energy demands even more.
Solar and Wind power are more or less unlimited, if one is willing to cover the entire planet with them I guess.
The sheer energy demands for automising everything that humans presently work at, would probably be beyond the capacity of this system.
You misunderstand. Allow me to be more clear: Abundance encourages waste when one continues to use a scarcity-based economic system. I'm referring to two different things here: the technological abundance, i.e the "physical reality" of the situation, and the methods used to deal with that abundance, in this case one based on a scarcity model. This situation is called "artificial scarcity". It's what happens when something that is abundant, like air, is suddenly restricted even though it need not be, like putting a person in a bank vault. Or, for a more real-world example, taking something we can easily produce more than enough of, like say food, and limiting the supply just to raise prices. Did you know that this is why the government subsidizes farmers? Because we are capable of producing so much food that if we did produce enough to feed everyone, then the price of food would be to low for farmers to stay in "business". If they produce less, then they don't get enough money either. Thus the government has to "take up the slack", letting them produce only a small amount so that prices remain high. I'm sure that this is aggravated by profit motive as well, but it was one of the ways we destroyed abundance in response to the Depression.
No, it is not caused by abundance, it is beacause of abundance that there is waste. In your technate people demands would still increase to the point that your technate couldn't cope, vast waste would set up.
In a rational world, the farmers (or the goverment) would agree on a set price for food which they will *all* trade at,
removing the economic free market that drives overproduction.
Once farmers no longer have to produce as much, they can work less, or change the use of their land to something else. This has the positive effect of not only making their lives more pleasant, but protecting the enviroment.
Indeed, they could cut their fertiliser costs by leaving land fallow to regain their fertility. Which has enviromental benefits also.
The problem is that people worship the free market and they consider wasteful and excessive consumption to be a sign of success, beacause obviously consumers like lots of cheap goods AND the big companies like it also beacause it ensures that ultimately they corner the market.
This would only be true if "abundance" meant "the massively increasing inefficiency and waste produced by the capacity to produce more than enough when using artificial scarcity measures." Again, it is what we have today, but not what would be in the Technate. With all artifacts of scarcity removed, you can then make everything very efficient, and thus eliminate waste. You can see some of the ways to do this in this article. One example is Load Factor. If you take all the factories producing at only 33% (normal 8 hour work day), and make them produce at 100% (24 hours a day), you would need only one third of the factories in order to produce the same amount as before. Thus, you have saved 66% in what can only be called waste. And this is only a small example. There are hundreds of them (a few in that article), some saving up to 99%+ waste! There are just so many ways in which we can produce an abundant standard of living for people by ditching scarcity methods that it becomes scary that we do not! But you have to do more reading on Technocracy to see many of them (assuming you don't know how to find them on your own). When you do, you can start to see the waste everywhere. It's terrible!
The factories work at maximum capacity, if they do not they will go bust, and beacause they do this they go bust, all except the most productive who obviously work at maximum capacity. And so it goes on.
Getting all the factories to work at lower production, is what needs to be done. Or getting all the people together into fewer factories maybe.
Overall, the PoliticsForum quiz considers you a socially-orientated, theist, big-government, nationalist, protectionist, controlled-market kind of person, who also seems quite Marxist.
Economic Left/Right: -9.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.15