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[10ebbor10]

On a side note, a State Controlled Economy is a more efficient way to industrialize a country than Capitalism. Such a rapid industrialization might have side-effects though.

[Tack]

-If every single programmer stopped developing games, they would become scarce, assuming that you want new, different games. A single piece of digital property could possibly be regarded as not-scarce, but digital property as a whole cant be.

-If no one produces solar panels (which are scarce), than solar energy becomes scarce.

1. I mentioned that. I said that companies would topple because of piracy and they still might. The only thing keeping it from happening currently is the fact that pirates seem to have a soft spot for indie developers, who can't recoup the losses, and target the larger developers, who can. But this isn't a piracy debate. What I'm saying is that once you create a digital work, it can forever be copied without removing anything from the original - Something that Solar power has in common. You're taking without using something up. Indirect costs, yes, because creating solar panels is prohibitively expensive, as is developing games. However, once these initial costs have been paid, the end result is a limitless source. Yes, the panels and computers themselves may break down, but the sun isn't going anywhere for a long time, and once a large digital work hits the cloud it is immortalized.

That is what i mean by non-scarce. It can be endlessly produced without using it up. The sun won't be around forever, no, but we can't burn it out faster by building more panels.

[alexandertnt]

Well, your definition of scarce differes from the economic definition of scarce, which is what I was going off.

[Tack]

... Artificial scarcity

[GreatJustice]

While resource depletion is indeed an inevitable consequence of intelligent life, capitalism is an egregious offender because it incentives maximum extraction from a short-term viewpoint, in order to maximize profit. This makes the threat of depletion far greater than it otherwise would be.

Your listed examples are just jumping from one source to another as they are depleted. That's the problem. Capitalism does not encourage sustainability. (This is partially off topic, but we don't have real shortages of diamonds. They're quite common, but DeBeers creates artificial scarcity and inflated prices in the name of profit.)

Generally speaking, Capitalism is fairly sustainable in terms of production since it follows the laws of supply and demand, as well as changes in efficiency created by new discoveries. That's why society doesn't collapse every time some sort of product runs low, because by the time people realize that it is running low they're already looking for alternatives and may even find a better one. Resources generally aren't depleted because if they get sufficiently low then they're already unrealistically expensive for everyone involved.

There are exceptions, of course, but they often have little to nothing to do with Capitalism at all. DeBeers isn't a capitalistic enterprise, they basically line the pockets of every person of importance in countries like South Africa in exchange for them being granted monopoly over the effectively government owned diamond mines (little known fact, if you find diamonds on your property in South Africa the government will march in, nationalize your house, basically give everything to DeBeers, and punish you if you dared keep any of the diamonds you found). The very, very few non-DeBeers producers are obliged to sell through the DeBeers organization.

Cost does not equal capitalism. While cost will almost certainly persist, the exact nature of that cost is the important part. Whether or not something is "truly" scarce is an irrelevant distinction when it costs so trivially little to produce that it might as well be free.

As for the second part of your argument, cutting costs and maintaining/increasing quality are usually at odds. It isn't a meritocratic race to produce the best product. It's a race to produce the most bought product. You can benefit from quality, but you can also benefit from the psychology of economy, market manipulation, and destroying competitors. What matters is the bottom line, and that means getting away with spending as little as possible while getting as many sales as possible. As I said, the capitalist "sweet spot" is not what is best for consumers.

But the neat thing about Capitalism is that the company that produces something cheap and the company that produces something of high quality aren't even necessarily competing. Cars would be useless if they were of incredibly high quality but cost so much that only the richest people could afford them. What makes the system work is the fact that you can have an expensive, high quality car, a cheap, low quality car, or a moderately priced decent car. Anyhow, you can only cut certain costs so much before you start losing anyway, which is part of why companies tend to leave a fair amount of money behind for R&D, which isn't "immediate" profit, because they're sure to fall behind and lose out if they don't.

[majikero]

Nah, diamond production is more spread out now.

http://geology.com/articles/gem-diamond-map/

The reason diamond gem stones are expensive is because propaganda.
The real value of diamond is it's hardness and thermal conductivity.

Here's more diamond info.

http://geology.com/minerals/diamond.shtml

[Helgoland]

Two words: Social democracy.

Basically having a free market whose parameters are defined by a medium-strength state. Worked well enough for post-49 Western Germany; they called it Rheinischer Kapialismus (Rhineland Capitalism).
Works around the problem of false incentives by allowing the state to add, remove or modulate incentives (via taxes, anti-trust legislation, cap-and-trade systems etc), and the problem of efficiency, as all production is still in private hands and sufficient competition exists to achieve efficiency gains.

Otherwise PTW, this might get quite hilarious.

[LordBucket]

I'd kind of like to see money go away. I suspect human technology and civilization might be past the point where it's useful. Granted, the transition from a money to a non-money system might be turbulent given that we're so used to the work-->money-->buy stuff model, but there's no fundamamental need for that system to exist.

Like others have pointed out, while profit can provide incentive for progress, it can also provide incentive to prevent it.

Capitalism is fine, but we might be ready as a species to outgrow it. All that really needs to happen is for survival essentials to become so trivial to acquire, that nobody "needs" to work.

Many systems that consume a great deal of time and energy to maintain could be made irrelevant simply by doing things differently. We could eliminate a massive number of accountants by simplifying the tax code. We could eliminate a massive number of postal positions by transitioning to electronic payment. Centralized water purification and distribution would be irrelevant if our society simply used water condensors. Yes, condensors would still need to be manufactured and distributed, but that distribution could more easily take the form of individuals buying/acquiring them and transporting them themselves. Individuals will obviously be sufficiently motivated to go to the store and buy and take home a condensor and install a septic tank, whereas maintaining underground pipes and purification centers over countless tens of thousands of square miles of city is much more difficult to maintain, and requires a dedicated workforce for the task. Electrical production and distribution could similarly be made obsolete if we simply did things differently. Maybe solar and wind electrical generation technology needs to get a little better before that's practical, but it's not that far away. Roads could be made obsolete by personal air transport. Again, maybe we're not quite there yet, but I don't think we're far away.

But how politically attractive does that sound? People apparently want jobs and are trying to create them. Eliminating jobs is unpopular, and a gradual transition from the job model to the no-job model might tend to be...as I said, turbulent. There's a vast portion of useless work being done, but who wants to be the first one to have their industry made obsolete in a system that hasn't completely made the transition to money not being necessary?

Consequently we're in a situation where capitalism is providing incentive to inhibit rather than encourage progress.


3d printing has potential to provide an alternate route. Once the technology gets better...once you can go into your backyard and dump weeds and dirt into a nano-disassembler to provide base components to manufacture food, clothes etc. at the press of a button...at that point, the entire system pretty much instantly collapses.

[SalmonGod]

3d printing has potential to provide an alternate route. Once the technology gets better...once you can go into your backyard and dump weeds and dirt into a nano-disassembler to provide base components to manufacture food, clothes etc. at the press of a button...at that point, the entire system pretty much instantly collapses.

And the people sitting on top of the system will do everything in their considerable power to prevent this from being possible.  I think the debate over printable weapons is the first of many skirmishes to come on that front.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

[Helgoland]

3D printing is... overrated, I think. It's great for prototypes and models and such, but if you need 10.000 plastic cups by next tuesday, a factory in China is a helluva lot better than a 3D printer which is very versatile but not especially efficient at one particular job. Same thing goes for most stuff: The efficiency gains of mass production can hardly be underestimated.

And that 'outgrow' stuff: That's a couple centuries away. Currently, roads are cheaper than personal helicopters (especially if you consider the transport of goods), and sticking a couple of pipes in the ground is much easier than having everyone recycle his/her own water. For niche applications, like Antarctic research stations, the ISS or some remote jungle village, they are viable, but they're not efficient enough for the mass market and won't be for quite some time.

[Thecard]

Wait... if we replaced money, what would we replace it with? The barter system? The honor code?

[SalmonGod]

Reputation?  I think if anything replaces money in the future, it will be something like what we know right now as social media, but formalized and structured for the purpose of improvised and scale-able organization.  How good faithed a person's behavior has been will be easily trackable through this format, and their ideas and needs will be given weight based on that.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The thing about 3D printing is that it has been following the same model as computers, an exponential increase in ability with steadily decreasing prices. That's the sort of thing that can sneak up on you. If today's 3D printers are like Apple II's, what do you think the iPhone 5 analogue is going to be like?

Wait... if we replaced money, what would we replace it with?

Money is just a mutually agreed upon physical representation of labor and energy. Technically, anything that can fill such a role could replace it.

The honor code?

Well...

There is a certain appeal to an economic system where your wealth directly correlates to how much of a dick you are or are not.

I am also reminded of the German city bus and train systems. They do rely mostly upon an honor system. Most of the time, you can get on a German bus, and get off again without paying a single cent. You aren't supposed to do this, you are intended to buy a pass, and occasionally employees will check. People who try to freeload are called Schwarze Reiters (literally, "Black Riders"), and the stigma of being caught is so extreme that most people buy passes even though they are unlikely to get caught.

[10ebbor10]

The thing about 3D printing is that it has been following the same model as computers, an exponential increase in ability with steadily decreasing prices. That's the sort of thing that can sneak up on you. If today's 3D printers are like Apple II's, what do you think the iPhone 5 analogue is going to be like?

Fragile, overhyped, overpriced; white, no corners and a single button? [/joke]
However, the point with 3d printing is that at the moment, they can only print in a limited amount of substances. While that might change soon for some substances; it won't for others.

On a side note; here's a message from the pope. Link

[Thecard]

Wait... if we replaced money, what would we replace it with?

Money is just a mutually agreed upon physical representation of labor and energy. Technically, anything that can fill such a role could replace it.

Well duh, but it would still be money. A rose by any other name buys you just as many candy bars. The point of money is as a medium of exchange. I was kinda asking that rhetorically/sarcastically because someone said we should have a non-monetary system.