Civilization
Which way will we go?
I've been reading histories discussing the rise of capitalism as a dominant economic system. It is a tale full of woe and misery, let alone bloodshed. A tale about how economies boom and bust and the busts hurt the poor a lot. That's on top of the fact that capitalism has tormenting unlucky people as a key part of it's incentive system.
And yet, at the same time capitalism is so productive that even though it's so nasty in some ways, it has raised more people out of poverty than any king, let alone a benevolent philosopher king.
And the boom/bust nature of the economy enabled what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.
That is; after each bust the subsequent boom takes us all farther forward, somehow, than if we'd just rested on our accomplishments.
The capitalists were sanguine. At the beginning of the story the main way of capital accumulation was investing in slave ships selling African slaves to plantations. The plantations were a precursor and model for later productive resources like factories. They were comfortable with the fact that their riches; their mansions, and pictures, and jewels and churches - all of the things that they called civilized - were based on exploiting unlucky people. For them it was not a bug. It was a feature. The harshness of life at the bottom served to keep the rabble under control (usually). I read many times the idea that economic hardship imposed 'discipline'on labour
I think that our society is in fact a pretty good society even given all the bad that is easy to see.
I can imagine people living happily in a resource rich environment who didn't need or want a capitalist productive system.
In fact, the First Nations here in BC lived in that kind of situation. And their culture was almost wiped out by settlers from Europe.
But - being who I am now I wouldn't be happy living in a First Nations longhouse 300 years ago.
It's not just that I'd miss my computer.
It's that I like knowing what I do about reality and that knowledge was just not there in the longhouse.
And I can imagine that my personality type might not prosper in a longhouse too. I like the looseness of social relations that our society provides.
I share Stephen Pinker's view that life for most people gets better and better.
I am aware that there are a lot of people who don't share my good luck in living in a peaceful place like Vancouver.
There are wars and threatened war and with contemporary weapons the bloodshed is or would be immense.
And the anguish will be shown almost in real-time to billions of people all over the world.
But - that people all over the world get to experience the bloodshed (even indirectly) also increases popular pressure to make things better.
I think that paradise implies the aspiration we all share for civilization. A place where everyone has a good life as just the natural course of things. And I think that humanity is potentially on a cusp of flipping to a civilization that is much more like a paradise than what we see now.
On the one hand we don't really have a problem of scarcity now. We have a problem of misallocating resources.
On the other hand ideas like the UBI and Modern Monetary Theory are debunking the myths of conventional economic wisdom.
One of the myths of conventional wisdom is that there is not enough money on the planet to give all 7 billion people a UBI of $2000 a month.
Turns out there is.
Well - by a 'back of an envelope' sort of calculation here is how a UBI would compare with various GDPs .
UBI as percentage of GDP
| Earth | 16% |
| USA | 3% |
| China | 14% |
| India | 28% |
| Canada | 4% |
| Britain | 4% |
I hasten to emphasize that this is a very simplistic calculation.
For one thing, the whole idea of a GDP is a bit ridiculous.
One thought I had was about how not all the product that is produced in a year is consumed that year.
I live in a city full of buildings and cars and other people; I know that a lot of what we produce sticks around and is useful for extended periods.
I think humanity is stuck with one sort of civilization or another. It's implied by our numbers and psychology. But does it have to be a bad civilization?
Or could we flip to a good one?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.