Foundations of abundance

Abundance is closer than it appears, but it will not emerge without cultivation. This post explores the prerequisites for abundance to emerge in the world.

Abundance requires...

Abundance requires us to create more of everything. There's not enough quality food, housing, clothing, healthcare, etc produced every year for everyone on Earth to live an abundant lifestyle. So! Abundance requires us to...

Radically increases the supply of what people need, in turn that will radically decrease prices, making things more accessible to people.

These radical increases in supply will require unfathomable increases in productivity, most likely utilizing solar energy, digital intelligences, and robotics to do most of the work.

This will require a lot of natural resources (sunlight, water, land, minerals, topsoil, etc) as well as the means to utilize them.

But more productivity will mean more access to resources, which will increase the amount of energy, intelligence, and labor we can create, which increases productivity, and on and on it goes. The side effect is increases in the supply of what people need and want.

If we are able to do all that, we need a system that's designed to help keep that cycle going in perpetuity. Even as prices decline so much that profit margins are so minuscule you'll hard pressed not to trip over the line of profitability constantly.

This system will also need to help all citizens participate in the prosperity that abundant goods and services affords, or the effort is meaningless. This means people need to have enough income to benefit from price collapse.

Underneath it all, this will require a culture with an iron will and a desire to build.

The system to create and preserve low prices

The economy under Capitalism is the best system we know of that will drag humanity into this future. Capitalism harnesses human nature to keep productivity increasing and prices going down, but it requires thoughtful maintenance.

Capitalism requires

1. Highly competitive, free markets
2. Negative externalities to be priced in to goods and services

Practically this means:

1. Separation of currency and state (hard money standard, no Federal Reserve)
2. No subsidies
3. Low taxes (meaning low government spending)
4. Active, thoughtful regulation (monopoly busting, putting liability where it belongs, etc)
5. Deep and speedy capital markets
6. A robust, transparent, trustworthy set of organizations that measure things and publish data (economic data, weather history and forecasts, labor safety statistics, etc), so everyone can jump on opportunities and see progress.

When well maintained, Capitalism will lead to the needed persistent productivity-induced deflation.

The system to help people share in the bounty

If people don’t feel like they’re getting a part of the bounty of abundance then unrest will force political actions that will stall or reverse abundance. E.g. many are already calling for bans or taxes on robotic labor.

On the other hand, if only elites benefit from the increases in productivity, then the world doesn't change all that much, definitely not for the better.

There are two things that will need to happen to keep citizens involved in the economy and benefitting from it.

1. The Craft Economy: let the robots do all the hard work and transition humans to cultivating crafts where they can sell the fruits of their labor to other people (carpentry, chess, content, entrepreneurship, teaching, etc). There will always be a market for things that people want done by other people.
2. Universal Basic Asset (UBA): this is an alternative to UBI that isn't vulnerable to tyranny and doesn't make people dependent on their government for survival.

The will to build

If a culture has no will to build and advance and strive for the stars, they won’t do the hard work that abundance requires.

We’ll have to push past pessimists, idiots, the elites who want to maintain control, and the base level of difficulty just getting anything physical done.

It will also require deep convictions to stay the course because deflation has victims. Most people will be fine with banks and governments suffering, but when people whose wealth is tied up in their home see their home prices approach zero, that will require some deep conviction to stay the course.

So where will this happen?

It'll happen in a place (not the whole of humanity at once), probably in a smaller place that has everything it needs internally (a medium-sized country or province within a country).

Otherwise there's jurisdiction risk: being dependent on other places to provide some critical good or service, while that jurisdiction preventing the conditions for prices to collapse for that good or service.

That means a place with a lot of natural resources, a robust capitalistic economy, a governance structure that prioritizes power of the people, and a culture of building. So....

It'll probably happen in Texas.