Do we need infinity …
… for luxury space communism?
In a couple of previous posts [1,2,3], I speculated that a post-scarcity economy driven by superintelligence (and consequently society) is not that far anymore. While, we can all hope that is true and the time until then is rather shorter than longer, I decided to do a small though experiment analyzing what “luxury space communism” as some people like to label a post-scarcity society will provide to each person as “universal high income” per year.
Let’s jump to the extreme and say, that probably nobody needs more income per year to spend than Jeff Bezos (or any other person in the Forbes billionaires list). According to different sources, we could estimate his spending around $2 to $3 billion per year. As probably a significant part of the money is rather reinvested than used for purchase of consumer goods, let’s just say that an upper limit on most luxurious spending is around $1 billion per year.
Can we imagine producing enough goods and services that 10 billion people can spend $1billion per year? That would require a world economy of about $10q (quintillion) ($10^19). Today our economy is at about $100t (trillion) or maybe $300t ($3*10^14) if we also take into account all the work that is done but not accounted for as nobody pays for it (e.g. childcare, elderly care, house work, voluntary work etc.). So we are five orders of magnitude away – at the current average rate of worldwide GDP growth (about 4%), it would only take us about 200 years to get there (and about 100 years, if we reduce the annual spending per person to $1m).
Leaving aside issues of ensuring “equal” [4] distribution of growth gains, there are two more assumptions here to be addressed:
1) Innovation and newer tech allows us to sustain the current level of worldwide GDP growth by increasing productivity and not by increasing world’s economic output by having more people working.
2) Our planet in combination with the tech that we use to ensure our survival, provides sufficient resources to sustain this level of productivity.
Regarding point 1), my personal take is that productivity gains will rather accelerate, if not hyper-accelerate as we are building things that will self-improve themselves which spins this wheel even faster as I described it in a previous post [1].
Here, I would rather like to focus on point 2): Let’s start with an elegant and easy way out: If the universe is indeed infinite in practical terms, there should be no problem to “grow beyond all means” as our needs are still finite (I bounded them here to $1billion per year which is already a extraordinary high boundary) and universe is infinite. In this case we wouldn’t even need to bound the population to 10 billion. I guess this what it means to take the “idea of abundance” to its very extreme. Of course, the underlying assumption is that we have the necessary tech that allows for economically relevant space travel proportionally to the extra economical needs that are outside of the capacity of our planet.
What if such tech is not available? People like the German publicist Ulrike Herrmann would argue for “green shrinking”, i.e. to reduce global output instead of trying to grow it, in order to stay within the resource boundaries of our planet. It is an interesting debate to have whether this idea is ethically justifiable and politically reasonable. However, it assumes that we are bound to our current state-of-the-art in technology. I will take the exact opposite assumption here and propose, that at particular level of technological development, we will be able to produce any necessary resource, i.e. physical compound, from any other compound where only the necessary energy is a limiting factor.
Given the current energy cost of 0.30 €/kWh, each would consume about 3.000.000.000 kWh per year or 3*10^19 kWh for 10 billion people. Unfortunately, this value is even beyond what the sun can give us per year (which is around 10^18 kWh). So, staying on planet earth with super advanced, clean technology, would probably still require us to have a universal high income bound to about $10m per year per person in order to have a 10x safety margin and to about $1m per year per person in order to have a 100x safety margin;
But hey $4m per year for a family of 4 is still not too bad, even living in Zürich, Singapore, London or the Bay Area.
[1] https://www.hyper-exponential.com/p/hello-world
[2] https://www.hyper-exponential.com/p/the-biggest-deflationary-shock-of
[3] https://www.hyper-exponential.com/p/universal-basic-income
[4] I didn’t use the world “fair” here purposefully as I think that opinions might be very different what “fairness” means in an economic context.