Inevitable Obsolescence of Human Labor

It's just not theoretical anymore. the forecasts of the past century or so have come to pass. We're here, now. We need to be in the present when we're making public policy that shapes and guides the next steps into the future.

The End of Poverty

A Feature Film

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, author, "24,000 people die every single day from hunger and hunger related diseases. At least 24,000. That doesn't need to happen, we have plenty of resources, so that shouldn't happen; it happens because of the system we've created. We can say, without a doubt, that this system is an absolute failure. From the most rational, objective economic standpoint it's a failure. Less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States. We are consuming over 25% of the world's resources and creating roughly 30% of it's major pollution. That's a failure."

Idiocracy vs Postscarcity

Mark Taylor in Nature News suggests that we mustReform the PhD system or close it down. Awesome. Are we so pathologically obsessed with the status quo that we'd actually institute a systemic policy that intentionally retards the advance of knowledge and the continued growth of human intelligence? Really? It's not news to readers of this space that:

Higher education in the United States has long been the envy of the world, but that is changing. The technologies that have transformed financial markets and the publishing, news and entertainment industries are now disrupting the education system.

We'd rather shut down universities than contemplate ways to transcend this brief blip, this historical aberration known as the industrial capitalist, and post-industrial information revolutions? Why not declare victory, and move on to the next model? On the other disheartening hand, if the best that our best and brightest "surplus PhD's" can collectively figure out is to turn back to pre-middle ages, perhaps we deserve the inevitable zombie apocalypse idiocracy, after all.

Dude, that would totally suck. Let's please not.

Paul Romer: Many Hong Kongs

Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:28:40 -0700
From: Stewart Brand
Subject: Many Hong Kongs (Paul Romer talk)
Repost from: [SALT] mailing list

This talk was the first public launch of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years.

His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules.

Technologies rearrange materials with ingenious recipes and formulas. More people create more technologies, which in turn generates more people. In recent decades technology has enabled the "demographic transition" which lowers birthrates and raises income per person even higher as population levels off.

Rules structure the interactions between people. As population density increased, the idea of ownership became an important rule. A supporting rule for managing violations replaced the old idea of deadly vengeance with awarding damages instead: simply shifting value replaced destroying value. For the idea of open science, recognition replaced ownership as the main event, which means that whoever publishes first is most rewarded, and that accelerates science.

Rules can amplify or stifle technological progress. China was the world leader in inventing new technologies until about a thousand years ago, when centralized dynastic rules slowed innovation almost to a stop

.Romer notes that business keeps evolving as new companies introduce new rule sets. The good ideas are copied, and workers migrate from failing companies to the new and old ones where the new rules are working well.

The same goes for countries. Starting about 1970, China took some of the effective rules of Hong Kong (which was managed from afar by England) and set up four special economic zones along the coast operating as imitation Hong Kongs. They worked so well that China rolled out the scheme for the whole country, and its Gross Domestic Product took off. "Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history."

Romer suggests that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe import administrative control); rethink citizenship (support residency, but maybe import voice in political affairs); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on cities---on city
states like Hong Kong and Singapore.)

Paul Romer proposes that developing countries could invite instant Hong Kongs---new cities in new locations run by experienced governments such as Canada or Finland. They would enrich the country where they are built as special economic zones while also rewarding the distant government that makes the investment of building the new city state and installing a set of fair and productive rules. Over time, as with Hong Kong, the new city is turned over to the host country.

The idea is getting some traction in the developing world. This summer Romer is going public with a Bridge Cities Institute website for further exploration and eventual application of the idea.

One miracle of cities is that they sometimes renew themselves brilliantly. This could be a whole new form of that.

-- Stewart Brand -- The Long Now Foundation -- Seminars & downloads at http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

Missed Paul Romer in Realtime

Darn it. Missing this event Right Now ... in realtime. Maybe it will be on the Video Podcast. 

Star Trek: Postscarcity Economics for Dummies?

As far as I'm concerned, it's generally the chickenshit Status Quo Credibility Hedgers that hide behind the word "utopian," mostly because they are just too lazy or afraid to make the effort required to promote, provoke, and perpetuation progressive change. However, knowing that the world is as it is -- at least until we so-called utopians make it better for all of you; no thanks to your ankle biting -- it's worth noting small advances of popular awareness like this from Salon.com:

[I]n the long run, suggests Romer and as potentially demonstrated by "Star Trek," the benefit of expanding knowledge and technological change will be widely distributed prosperity: an end to scarcity, a future where the fundamental challenge of providing for our basic needs has been solved.

Click to read the rest of the story ...

Echoes of a Post-Scarcity Prophet

Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future. From Reason Online, by Ronald Bailey.