Abundance is important but misses the critical reason. Ted, you forgot to mention Decoupling!
There is a lot of stuff, but it's toxic soul crushing stuff, environmentally destructive stuff. Purchased from people who intend to do us harm. Our stuff too often represents "deals with the devil".
We need abundance, but of healthy supportive stuff.
We have a crisis of chronic illness, and self destructive escapist drug use.
We need healthy food. Potato chips and manufactured-frozen foods are exactly the problem!
The abundance we need is to put Poverty in a Poverty-Museum and nowhere else. (Yunus, acting Prime Minister of Bangladesh)
We need to be free from protection rackets, both from the neighborhood gang leader, the King of the Nation.
We need freedom from the multinational oil cartel which calls itself "The Free Market" as in "...don't mess with the".
We need protection from the rent-takers such as the "rental property cartel". In the 1950's we had to pass Redlining legislation to slow down predatory residential slumlords exploiting racist panics to build the landlord controlled ghettos with tenants that could not become homeowners because banks denied loans to "their kind". Today hedge funds are buying up real estate, and local governments are mostly refusing to allow affordable starter apartments to be built anywhere.
Abundance means an affordable home close to where your responsibilities require.
It takes a village to raise a child, or do anything else that builds character, confidence, and recognition and pride in accomplishment. But our villages have become war zones, or delivered to us as manufactured entertainment products. Without healthy interdependence with our community our life lacks purpose. Depression and serious self denial shut down our life, an adaptive response evolution has
Don't worry so much about imaginary constructs like ideologies, jobs, GDP, money.
Worry about real things. Human Rights. Access to real needs, especially fair access to Credit, as Yunus reminds us.
It worries me that we are hurtling into the AI era without humans having ever said out loud in an organized way what they want and need, for every human to have. We ought to make a statement of minimum human rights that 80% of us agree on, that applies to all people.
The much heralded UN Sustainable Development goals are a sub-minimum standard you wouldn't wish on an enemy. Principles like the Nuremberg principles are incomplete. UN Human rights asserted are horribly incomplete. If institutions powered by superhuman AI take control of our world, it's sad we never established for them what good treatment of a human would be.
In the past we usually claimed that Scarcity prevents us from being kind to strangers, and we shouldn't try too hard to develop the developing world, and sometimes try to inflict "deGrowth". That's why there aren't progressives for progress. We now anticipate the industrial capacity to provide far in excess of human needs. Easily achievable abundance denies us that excuse for imposing poverty on others.
Reality is we can have economic growth BY REDUCING POLLUTION. Cleaning up after ourselves is a big business especially if you aspire to get GHG back down to 280 ppm (today at 420) by 2045 or so, which seems like the only safe path. But the industry shills at the IPCC say we should stabilize GHG emissions someday. Earth says that won't work. Emissions don't matter-- that's the 2nd derivative of what matters... Ocean acidification and Earth's temperature. Today's GHG are already too high. Only increased industrial activity can fix it... but the panic stricken enviros preach austerity. "Stop the world, I want to get off!" is not going to work. Net-zero is ridiculous. Wouldn't help if we got there. We need a comfortable stable planet with a good maintenance culture protecting it's HVAC system, just like on a cruise ship. Earth is a sun cruise ship, and each year we make our elliptical circuit. Before asking lawyers, businesspeople and the military how to redistribute wealth, we need to be asking engineers and AI how to make sufficient wealth.
In the last 75 years, about 80% of armed conflict can be ascribed directly to conflict over fossil fuels. Imagine if we don't care because we have abundant energy from renewables including nuclear, available to every place on Earth, even the landlocked, or remote islands? We would not fight like our lives depended on it if they don't. YOu can't fight over uranium or thorium-- it's hopelessly abundant. The main obstacle is industry concern over how to make money when the supply is infinite. Hence the lucrative fantasy of "nuclear waste disposal" instead of infinite upcycling.
Most people, and most cultures, given the opportunity, create a clean beautiful world for themselves and future generations. Industrial abundance gives us the opportunity to provide a wonderful present and future.
We better create that supportive standard of human access to resources, tangible and intangible, soon, and let AI know what we decided on, so it can help us. If we don't bother to say what we want what are the odds we get it?
Abundance is important but misses the critical reason. Ted, you forgot to mention Decoupling!
There is a lot of stuff, but it's toxic soul crushing stuff, environmentally destructive stuff. Purchased from people who intend to do us harm. Our stuff too often represents "deals with the devil".
We need abundance, but of healthy supportive stuff.
We have a crisis of chronic illness, and self destructive escapist drug use.
We need healthy food. Potato chips and manufactured-frozen foods are exactly the problem!
The abundance we need is to put Poverty in a Poverty-Museum and nowhere else. (Yunus, acting Prime Minister of Bangladesh)
We need to be free from protection rackets, both from the neighborhood gang leader, the King of the Nation.
We need freedom from the multinational oil cartel which calls itself "The Free Market" as in "...don't mess with the".
We need protection from the rent-takers such as the "rental property cartel". In the 1950's we had to pass Redlining legislation to slow down predatory residential slumlords exploiting racist panics to build the landlord controlled ghettos with tenants that could not become homeowners because banks denied loans to "their kind". Today hedge funds are buying up real estate, and local governments are mostly refusing to allow affordable starter apartments to be built anywhere.
Abundance means an affordable home close to where your responsibilities require.
It takes a village to raise a child, or do anything else that builds character, confidence, and recognition and pride in accomplishment. But our villages have become war zones, or delivered to us as manufactured entertainment products. Without healthy interdependence with our community our life lacks purpose. Depression and serious self denial shut down our life, an adaptive response evolution has
Don't worry so much about imaginary constructs like ideologies, jobs, GDP, money.
Worry about real things. Human Rights. Access to real needs, especially fair access to Credit, as Yunus reminds us.
It worries me that we are hurtling into the AI era without humans having ever said out loud in an organized way what they want and need, for every human to have. We ought to make a statement of minimum human rights that 80% of us agree on, that applies to all people.
The much heralded UN Sustainable Development goals are a sub-minimum standard you wouldn't wish on an enemy. Principles like the Nuremberg principles are incomplete. UN Human rights asserted are horribly incomplete. If institutions powered by superhuman AI take control of our world, it's sad we never established for them what good treatment of a human would be.
In the past we usually claimed that Scarcity prevents us from being kind to strangers, and we shouldn't try too hard to develop the developing world, and sometimes try to inflict "deGrowth". That's why there aren't progressives for progress. We now anticipate the industrial capacity to provide far in excess of human needs. Easily achievable abundance denies us that excuse for imposing poverty on others.
Reality is we can have economic growth BY REDUCING POLLUTION. Cleaning up after ourselves is a big business especially if you aspire to get GHG back down to 280 ppm (today at 420) by 2045 or so, which seems like the only safe path. But the industry shills at the IPCC say we should stabilize GHG emissions someday. Earth says that won't work. Emissions don't matter-- that's the 2nd derivative of what matters... Ocean acidification and Earth's temperature. Today's GHG are already too high. Only increased industrial activity can fix it... but the panic stricken enviros preach austerity. "Stop the world, I want to get off!" is not going to work. Net-zero is ridiculous. Wouldn't help if we got there. We need a comfortable stable planet with a good maintenance culture protecting it's HVAC system, just like on a cruise ship. Earth is a sun cruise ship, and each year we make our elliptical circuit. Before asking lawyers, businesspeople and the military how to redistribute wealth, we need to be asking engineers and AI how to make sufficient wealth.
In the last 75 years, about 80% of armed conflict can be ascribed directly to conflict over fossil fuels. Imagine if we don't care because we have abundant energy from renewables including nuclear, available to every place on Earth, even the landlocked, or remote islands? We would not fight like our lives depended on it if they don't. YOu can't fight over uranium or thorium-- it's hopelessly abundant. The main obstacle is industry concern over how to make money when the supply is infinite. Hence the lucrative fantasy of "nuclear waste disposal" instead of infinite upcycling.
Most people, and most cultures, given the opportunity, create a clean beautiful world for themselves and future generations. Industrial abundance gives us the opportunity to provide a wonderful present and future.
We better create that supportive standard of human access to resources, tangible and intangible, soon, and let AI know what we decided on, so it can help us. If we don't bother to say what we want what are the odds we get it?