How to Make Economics Virtually Obsolete: Productivity & Technology
If you are a person who is concerned about things like sweat shops and unequal distribution of wealth, then you should be a big fan of technology. Technology is the great equalizer; it makes things cheaper and thus more readily available. The late visionary architect Buckminster Fuller once suggested that ”technologically we now have four billion billionaires on board Spaceship Earth.” The rationale for this statement revolved around the fact that regardless of monetary status, most contemporary humans are able to enjoy conveniences not even available to the richest people of the world a scant hundred years ago.
The necessities required to maintain a comfortable existence aren’t all that elaborate; a person needs a cool dry shelter, clothing, clean water, a full stomach, health, and sanitary waste disposal. At this point in history, if our only objective was meeting those basic conditions, we could probably all live comfortably on approximately 10 minutes of labor a day (or an hour a week, or 4 hours a month). However, we seemingly want a bunch of extra, unnecessary junk. And so we accept this system where we spend 8 hours or so a day working to make, sell, and consume a bunch of extra junk we really don’t need. This junk comes in the form of everything from lawyers to tax preparers to government projects (war) to designer cloths to entertainment to automobile accessories… Only a dwindling fraction of working people in this world spend their days toiling away at producing things people actually need–especially when you consider that a lot of the most essential labor is now done by machines.
Whenever a person loses a job to a machine, that is a great feat. And whenever a middle man loses his job, that is also a great feat. When it comes to work, a person’s objective should always be to work less, get more done, and thus drive down prices. One of the easiest ways to make that happen is to get rid of middlemen, hand work over to machines, and thus replace work with a little bit of machine maintenance. As productivity increases with technological advancement, goods and services get cheaper, and so people don’t need to work as much to produce and purchase those same goods and services.
If you want a job that isn’t going to be lost to machines, go into engineering so you can design, build, and maintain machines to replace human labor. When we are all educated as tech savvy engineers, instead of brainless consumers, we will live in a world of 10 minute work days. Then people will have time to do the kinds of things they really enjoy without worrying about how to make money off those things.
Education and entertainment are examples of the types of things people will often do for free in their free time if they have the luxury to do so. Just look at YouTube and Blogs. Most YouTubers and Bloggers aren’t making much, if any, money educating and entertaining people. However, those people do so anyway because for them it is fun—which is a type of payment.
I enjoy blogging and making YouTube videos, but in the current economic state of things, I don’t exactly have the luxury to do so without expecting to make some money while I’m at it. Thus, I need evermore link-ins, subscribers, and evermore people checking out the ads featured on my weblog in order to keep it worth my while to educate and entertain people. However, in a highly efficient world where I had the luxury to do things not for profit I could educate and entertain all I wanted.
If we were smarter as a civilization, our education would revolve around engineering. It is technological aptitude that will eventually make us freer, safer people, with more free time. We don’t need socialism or other kinds of government sanctioned social systems in order to make a world where everyone lives a physically comfortable life. We just need brains. We need brains to fully utilize technology and in doing so fully utilize things like the immense amounts of untapped clean energy all around us.
The other day I read an article about a U.N. report stating that American workers are the most productive in the world, each producing on average $63,885 of wealth a year. However, having a huge economy of indebted working people producing a lot of non-essential and abstract goods and services is not exactly commendable as progress in productivity. It is easy to appear productive when you are producing abstract goods (such as paperwork and entertainment) and services (such as financial services) rather than essential material goods and services. Just think, how long could America survive on just its own GDP? If we were really so productive, we would be figuring out how to produce more and more essential goods cheaply and efficiently at home in the US.
Most people are still trapped within the habitual ideas about how a society and economy should operate. We need to start thinking in terms of streamlining and getting priorities straight. Putting our efforts into producing and consuming unnecessary junk just makes us slaves to our junk and diverts resources of all kinds into waste that could have been better used elsewhere.
For as long as people think they have to have a regular 8 hour a day job, people will invent unnecessary jobs, goods, and services to fill up that space in order to make the money necessary to sustain and grow other unnecessary jobs, goods, and services. It’s a vicious cycle that for most people kills much of the advantages of better technology—eating up resources, driving up prices for energy/raw materials, and keeping the 8 hour work day alive.
There is certainly a better way than the way we operate today. Better utilization of technology and efficiency wouldn’t make the world perfect, but it would make it better and more sustainable. Yes, people would still find ways to be miserable and fight with each other. But at least people would have the free time to spend on training their minds to be sane if they so desired.
Growing or even sustaining the economy is not what we need to focus on; instead, we need to focus on transcending the economy by making it virtually obsolete. That should be our objective. But it is an objective that first requires brains—brains to advance technology and also brains to replace our current debt based perpetual growth monetary system. Technology alone is actually not enough. We also must replace our parasitic debt based monetary system. But that is a subject for another day and the next article.
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