Afternoon, folks. 💫
Behind my time today - hope you're exactly where you want to be with yours!
This week's first newsletter explores zero-sum and positive-sum thinking by diving into economic history and... Star Trek. Because why *do* we configure speculative fiction so narrowly?
Imagine how creatively we could dream, if we saw political theory as a kind of world-building too.
#BetterWorldsTheory #SFF #StarTrek #Economics
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/on-zero-sum-versus-positive-sum-thinking
Thanks for reading!
Your first point is bang-on: when it came to a standing army's superiority to a militia from a proficiency perspective, he was right - but he didn't anticipate that a standing army would become a "supply" looking for a "demand" if not put to equivalent peacetime use. Ergo the ruin of our military industrial complex.
As for "post-scarcity", it's already technically in reach, which illustrates your point: artificial barriers always crop up.
Thanks for this!
I take it you follow sustainable / green growth models, or the techno-utopia pathway, when you imagine insurmountable technical challenges?
When I say "technically in reach", a kind of post-scarcity is most certainly possible within degrowth parameters. But as you also noted, those who are very comfortable with the starkly unequal material benefits of a growth-oriented economy will never allow any degrowth model to come to pass - so it's technically possible, but politically moot!
@MLClark I'm sure you've written about this but I find it very difficult to imagine how we tread the techno-utopia path even in the absence of our current geopolitical and economic systems. I think we would still be inextricably bound by our biological imperatives and evolutionary history, our ids and superegos. Attempts to monkey with these *before* achieving post-scarcity would likely be ruinous. We've only had 20 years of social media manipulation and we're already headed that way.
@LSWellesley @MLClark well that looks like an interesting plot!
Oh, I'm not at all a techno-utopian. I have been very critical of the scams of longtermism and the hyperfixation on tech as a solution.
I'm on the degrowth side - I think what's being proposed with respect to returning democracy and direct agency to average citizens, and constructing hyperregional communities where people need less to feel connected & build rewarding lives, is a wonderful idea.
It's just not going to be permitted under neoliberalism either. So we're a bit stuck.
@MLClark how would you define "technically in reach"? If we drop all political barriers and unite the nations of the world to a common purpose there would still be extreme if not insurmountable technical challenges to feeding, clothing, and housing 10B+ people in the next 100 years.