Tag Archives: The Decline

Lightning Round – 2012/06/12

Welcome back to the Lightning Round, we’ve got a large one today.

The emotions and our genetic drives of red-pill nihilism are just as enslaving and meaningless as blue-pill delusions. In a somewhat related post, Roissy talks of how players lose the ability to find divine love in their quest for meaningless sex.

Feminism is the ideological justification for female childlessness. No matter how much utopian ideologies may ignore it; choices have consequences.

Apocalypse Nowish gives one of the clearest, most straightforward explanations of how the banking system and the government are colluding to rob you.

In surprising news, a study shows government size and economic growth are negatively correlated. The Captain had already pointed out what could have been.

In related news, it seems Americans lost 20 years of wealth  between 2007 and 2010, and everybody makes less except seniors. Related: We are becoming a rental generation and the government refuses to learn from past mistakes.

But, Fearsome Pirate has hope that progressivism can be smashed, while Zero Hedge calls us to have courage in the fight against the tyrants.

Some are not so hopeful. Noting that in fact, Canada is actively destroying itself.

Zero Hedge says bring it on, the solution to our problems is collapse.

The Captain asks “Is it me, or is there something wrong with everybody else?”, and concludes it’s everybody else. Red-pill thinking requires a certain amount of arrogance.

Wintery Knight points out that young Christians are abandoning the fight in an anti-intellectual compartmentalization of the faith. Will S comments. If Christians give up on changing the culture, what then do we have?

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Much has been written on Christian relationships in the manosphere in the last week:

Athol notes that the Bible was written for when men were all alphas under the law, so it recommends beta behaviour, but when culture betaized men, this created hardcore mode for Christian men.

Dalrock points out that the celibate boyfriend is non-biblical. All Christian relationships should be geared towards sex as soon as possible, within marriage.

UMan coins the phrase girligious and notes that Christian marriage has the advantage of a “a rule book written thousands of years ago” in our battle to preserve traditional marriage.

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I knew men committed more suicide, but I never knew it was quite this bad. One possible cause could be that boys are persecuted by the public schools.

Wintery Knight points out the lie that homosexual couples are as good for raising children as straight couples. Related: A homosexual Mormon enjoys a happy an fulfilling heterosexual marriage and family.

Some people still blindly defend the worthless university system and encourage the degree bubble.

Every time I doubt the Conservative Party (and voting in general), they do some small thing that encourages me.

Ummm… No. Chivalry is for ladies, and there are few ladies nowadays.

(h/t: Instapundit, SDA, Wintery Knight, Save Capitalism)

Lightning Round – 2012/06/05

Some sad news for the Manosphere: Ferd is shutting down In Mala Fide. I wrote on this already, but it bears repeating.

In other Manosphere news, the Captain is creating an intro guide with links.

INTJ’s seem overrepresented in the Manosphere. There must be something about analytical, socially awkward individuals that attracts them here.

CDM-N has some advice for Christian ladies looking to become marriageable.

Questions for budding patriarchs: do you practice and live what you preach? I haven’t, but I hope to create this.

The Captain finds a humorous video.

Interesting that this is coming from a mainstream magazine. Wonder if this will help change anything?

Waiting until her thirties can really reduce a women’s options.

Oh Spain. Too bad TNR doesn’t really connect their ideology with what’s happening there.

Only the government could lose money on a Timmies in Canada.

The social gospel types in the Catholic Church are reaping what they sowed.

(h/t Instapundit)

Lightning Round – 2012/05/29

Mentu writes one of the best posts I’ve read on Christian game, a must for budding patriarchs. Read it now. I think I’m going to start learning game now.

Also, for patriarchs: a great list of things to teach your son.

Increasingly worthless. Related. Related to the related.

The state as God produces some odd thinking.

As an example: the left goes into the vapours whenever someone thinks about even touching their internet privacy, but you’re crazy if you don’t want the government forcing you to reveal personal aspects of your life for the census.

They sold themselves to the state under the social gospel and are reaping the rewards.

I wonder how common this actually is. Am I a sock-puppet?

I’m sure someone on the manosphere will object to this. Assuming any Quebecers are actually part of the manosphere.

Men’s centres are not welcome; men are too irresponsible and not educated enough on gender issues to have them.

The punishment for false rape accusations should be brutal.

Hehe.

Mugabe as UN tourism ambassador. About what I’d expect.

Sometimes you worry about the next generation.

(h/t SDA, Althouse, Smallest Minority)

Patriarchy: Restraining Males

I came across this today, a discussion about patriarchy by a feminist (named Clarissa). She’s discussing a post from another feminist (named Soraya) at Alternet.

Soraya believes that nasty, old, religious men hate and fear young women for some unspecified reason and instill patriarchy because of this fear.

She’s wrong in that the patriarchy is designed to oppress women; any control occurring over women in patriarchy is only incidental to patriarchy’s primary purpose of controlling men.

Clarissa notes the obvious, that the non-religious and women are just as interested in maintaining  patriarchy as the religious. She notes that the patriarchy “oppresses people who can’t or won’t conform to traditional gender roles.”

She’s more right. In a later post she clarifies what she means by patriarchy.

The patriarchy is a system of social relations where… people accept and enforce strict gender roles in order to perpetuate the system where men castrate themselves emotionally and psychologically in order to be able to purchase women and women castrate themselves sexually and professionally in order to be able to sell themselves.

She believes this to be a bad thing.

She’s right, in that patriarchy is designed to psychologically and emotionally castrate men, she’s wrong in that this is necessarily a bad thing.

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Let’s start at the beginning.

The male human is the single most ruthless, deadly, and dangerous predator ever brought forth by nature. A single male human is capable of wreaking terrifying damage. A group of male humans can execute almost unfathomable levels of destruction.

In addition to being capable of mass destruction, the male human is naturally inclined towards violence.

The male human is the apex predator.

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In addition to being a predator, the human male is also a creator, capable of building wonders beyond imagination.

The human male is also capable of extreme laziness and hedonism.

The average male, is  generally neutral in his inclination to his choice between hedonism, destruction, and creation.

Hedonism is easiest and is enjoyable, but scarcity makes it impossible but for those living in abundance and safety. Hedonism also does nothing to benefits society; rather it simply consumes resources.

Creation requires the most effort and is the least enjoyable (at least in the short-term), but it creates value for society and meaning for the male human.

Destruction is enjoyable and is easier than creation, but it does not create value, it either value and/or takes value from someone else.

Society requires males humans to engage in creation to advance, but out of the three creation requires the most effort out of the male and is (often) the least enjoyable.

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So, how does society encourage a male human to create?

There are really only three ways: force, access to resources, and sex/family.

Force is problematic. It requires other male humans to threaten this, so you have to encourage them to do so (so it doesn’t really solve the problem, only transfers it). It is also only moderately effective: a human male will usually counter with his own force when threatened and will often die before submitting, especially if the male has nothing to lose. Even if force works, an enslaved man will generally only work the bare minimum necessary to keep the threat at bay. The incentive structure for slaves is not set to maximize their creative potential.

Access to resources works, but only to a point and can be unreliable. Human males don’t require much to be happy: food, shelter, some entertainment (ie. destruction), and sex. He will create to get these basics, but attempting to bribe more creation out of him will likely be fruitless, he will often prefer his leisure to more resources. Also, if resources are withheld, he may simply respond with destruction to gain the resources.

The third option is sex/family. A male human will willingly create and undergo hardships he wouldn’t otherwise for the benefit of his mate and his children, and their futures. He will try to create (or destroy) to attain more resources than he would normally need or want simply to give to his family.

The third option is the only stable and reliable option where the majority of males will willingly create rather than engage in leisure or destruction. It is also the only option for society where the male doesn’t have a decent chance of responding with destruction.

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The problem with the third option is a male human can not know if a child is his or not. The human female knows exactly which children are hers and can invest in them secure in that knowledge, the male does not and can not.

The male will rarely create for the sake of children not his own and will often attempt to destroy those children not his own.

For the male to create, he needs reassurance that his children are his own.

Also, if sex is freely available to a male, there is no need for him to create to access sex.

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Hence, patriarchy.

Under patriarchy sexual access is highly controlled by social mores and/or force.

Because sex occurs only in marriage, the married male human knows that the children of his wife are his and his alone. He will then be induced to create as much as he can to provide for them and ensure their future.

Because sex is restricted solely to marriage, the male can not go outside marriage for sexual access, so he needs to create to win and provide for a wife.

These restrictions on males force the male into creation to gain sexual access.

The patriarchy castrates his destructive impulses. His desire to rape, his desire to murder, his desire to burn, his desire to loot, his desire to laze about in leisure, they are all controlled, because if the male engages in this behaviour he loses his ability to engage in sex and reproduce. He loses his future.

Monogamous patriarchy goes further: by restricting sexual access for each male to a single female and ensuring that all but the greatest losers have sexual access, it decreases the likelihood of violent competition for sexual access by lowering the stakes and ensures that each male will have a family and children, ensuring he is invested in the future.

The patriarchy is essential to controlling male humans’ destructive impulses.

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Isn’t castrating a male’s natural impulses under patriarchy wrong?

No, it is a necessary element of civilization. Marriage is the basis of civilization.

Civilization can not come into being without it.

Without this castration, society will either be chaos (as male humans fight for sexual access) or very primitive (think lost tribe in the jungle).

Everybody suffers.

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Any controlling of female humans in a patriarchal society is incidental. The controlling of women’s sexuality, by having social mores limiting her from having sex outside marriage, is a necessity for controlling males, but it is not the purpose of patriarchy. It is a by-product of controlling the males.

People who condemn the patriarchy are missing the bigger picture.

They live in a culture where the patriarchal castration of humans males is the norm and has been for millenia. They do not think outside it, so they see only the bad (the control) not the good.

They see only the castrated males, those males who have been inculcated for generations to create, not to destroy.

They assume all males are naturally like this. They do not realize that the mass castration of males through patriarchal mores has throughout history been what has suppressed their natural predatory instincts.

They react in horror when males engage in the violence that is natural to them. They seem to believe that this is somehow abnormal.

They do not realize that rape, murder, burning, looting, war, and violence are the norm.

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The breakdown of the patriarchy can have will lead the male to either hedonism or destruction:

1) Male disengagement: As males’ desire for sex can be accessed outside of patriarchal marriage, they will contribute less to society. They will let laziness take over.

As our current patriarchy is breaking down, we can see this occurring in our society in two inter-related movements: the child-man and MGTOW. The child-man and MGTOW realizes that sex can be gotten outside the patriarchy (or forgoes sex altogether) and has no family to create for, so he creates only enough to sustain himself. He no longer creates what society needs to advance. If these movements become big enough, they could significantly impact the society’s production and continued health.

2) Violence: As males’ become less engaged they may engage in violence either in rage, to obtain resources, or for entertainment.

This is unlikely to occur on mass scale anytime soon, although it might. The destruction of the patriarchy in the black community has resulted in high criminal rates. The rest of society could follow.

The prevalence of porn and video games will leave most males too sated in relation to both sex and destruction, for a number of males to have enough inclination to engage in socially and legally proscribed violence, which should prevent a mass movement towards male violence.

Incidences of violence from individual males can be expected. Notice how among the examples of violence I posted, the perpetrators were single. Anytime you see a mass murder, a terrorist act, etc., check the relationship status of the male perpetrator; he will almost always be single. Patriarchal marriage reduces a male’s inclinations to violence.

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Neither outcome is good for females.

Male disengagement means less resources for women, less resources for their children, less resources and progress for society as a whole, and a lack of fatherly involvement in their children with the attendant social problems.

Being less inclined to violence and less physically capable women are at the mercy of males should males decide to engage in violence.

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The patriarchy exists to control males; control of females is incidental.

The patriarchy is good for both females and males and for society as a whole.

Lightning Round – 2012/05/15

Roosh shows an intro program to learning game. Bookmarking it for if/when I attempt to learn it in earnest.

Advice for learning social skills, for those of us who are not so socially. Combine with above.

Another good question to ask yourself. What do you want?

Uxuriousness is an awesome word I didn’t know before. Avoid it.

Worship: Jesus is King not Boyfriend.

An inspiration to us all.

Not sure what I think on it, but I’ve seen some convincing arguments for not voting recently.

I went to a nightclub/bar (I’m not sure which) once, but I didn’t care for it. Seems others don’t as well.

Good news on the oil front.

How much longer can the statist myth continue? (More)

More evils from the War on Drugs.

Free thought is only allowed if you think the proper thoughts. (More)

(h/t SDA, Private Man, InstaPundit)

Tuition Bubble

Here’s the New York Times running only a bit behind in reporting on the tuition bubble. I thought this would be a decent time to weigh in on the issue.

the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000

To be honest, this is not that bad. $23k is a lot, but livable, even 54k is not insurmountable, but for the 3%, $100k is a serious commitment. In some areas equivalent to a mortgage on a starter home.

The problem though, is that these are ok only if there is employment for those taking the loans. The NYT doesn’t cover this in this article, but the real problem is half of these people graduating are not going to have jobs or will be underemployed.

$23k in debt is doable if you make $40k a year, even $120k ($900/month according to the article) is doable if you make $60k a year coming out of university and live frugally for a few years.

But, if you are unemployed or working part-time as a barrista, there is no way to keep payments up on much more than a few thousand dollars worth of debt and still be able to advance in life.

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The NYT misses that the tuition bubble is not a bubble because tuition costs are high; an expensive degree can be an excellent investment for both the lender and borrower if it increases future earnings.

The whole article is off-base as high tuition costs are irrelevant if the economic benefits of the degree match or exceed the cost of the degree.

The tuition bubble is a bubble because a lot of these degrees are worthless.

So why are they worthless? Part of it is simply the transition to post-scarcity, even highly educated and skilled people may simply be replaced by machines. Some of it is because these degrees teach no useful skills, such as Master of Puppetry, an awesome album but a crappy degree. But there is another, even more fundamental, problem that the NYT ignores almost completely.

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The main problem is touched upon later on in the piece, but only very obliquely:

the main job of the admissions staff, after all, is to admit students

An off-hand reference in the second half of a sentence at the bottom of a paragraph is all the NYT devotes to the  crux of the tuition bubble.

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Huh? Isn’t admissions staff’s job to admit students?

No, the admissions staff’s job is to screen out students for whom university (or college) is not appropriate.

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Doesn’t admissions already do this?

No. It doesn’t. 68% of high school graduates go to college.

Thank about that for a second.

The average graduate is going to college

Remember back to your high school graduation; think about your average classmate.

The guy who wasn’t particularly bright or particularly stupid.

Do you think he would benefit from spending 4 years learning political theory or reading Rousseau?

Do you think it would benefit anyone else that he “learned” this?

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The evidence says he doesn’t.

One-third of those entering college drop-out.

They pay the expense of a couple years of college and do not even get the dubious benefits of a degree.

The college system is taking advantage of these people who shouldn’t be in college.

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One-third of college students are dropping out, at the same time, grade inflation is running rampant.

College is becoming increasingly easy, yet still a third of students still can’t hack it.

The admissions people are failing their job. One-third of people entering university are not capable of completing even the dumbed-down modern university curriculum.

Think about how many more would not be capable of completing college if standards were similar to those 50 years ago.

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Look at this post from Adacious Epigone on IQ by intended major from a few years ago.

Look at education, public admin, business, psychology, legal professions, health professionals, etc.

The average incoming student for all of these is only around average intelligence. About half of them are of below average intelligence.

This is why there is a tuition bubble.

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It used to be that a college degree meant you were a cut above the rest; that you were a competent, intelligent individual.

Now all a college degree shows is that you are able to stomach a university’s bullshit for a few years and are not a complete dullard.

That’s why your degree is worthless.

It doesn’t signal you’re a superior intellect with a strong knowledge of your specialty.

All it shows is that you’re not completely incompetent and are able to parrot BS back to the BS’ers. How much is not being completely incompetent worth to an employer?

Even a high GPA doesn’t mean much. With grade inflation everybody’s GPA is fairly high, how can an employer trust that you actually earned yours?

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As an aside, look at public admin and social services: 96.3.

Do you want to know one reason why your government doesn’t work very well? The people in public admin are being educated to run the government. Do not think that these are not going to be the front-line clerks at the DMV, or even their supervisors; these are actually the people who are going to university to learn how to create public policy. They are the ones who will be creating government policy and regulations that will control your life.

Most of them are of  below average intelligence.

Think about that for a minute. Please don’t weep.

Of course, the average business major is not much better, barely scraping by at 101. 2.

And we wonder why the US economy is stagnating?

Teachers are at 99.3. Half of all teachers are of below average intelligence. Here’s where you can start weeping for the future.

Your kid is likely being taught by someone of average or below average intelligence.

If you’re reading a post about the economics of post-secondary education on a blog for leisure (like say, this post you’re reading right now), it’s highly likely the large majority of these teachers, bureaucrats, and businessmen running things and teaching your children are much more stupid than you.

Aren’t you feeling comforted?

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Thankfully the drop-out rate is so high. I’d hate to think what the school system and government would be like if a third of these sup-par students didn’t fail to finish their degrees.

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So, after all that, you’re probably understanding why the tuition bubble exists.

It exists because too many people are getting a degree.

Everybody wants to enter the road to the professional, white-collar, middle-class, which is what university is thought of as now.

But not everybody is capable of being a white-collar professional.

Of course, modern liberal dogma can’t admit that some people are just not capable of being white-collar professionals, after all, we are all equal. The Bible (or Stephen Gould, depending on your religious beliefs) and the Constitution (or your sociology professor, depending on your political beliefs)  say so.

So those in charge, those who would read the NYT, can not and will not prevent those who shouldn’t be going to college from going to college.

Instead, they’ll encourage them to go. They’ll give these marginal students huge, government-backed loans they’ll never be able to pay back. They’ll lower academic standards as far as they can go, then lower a them a bit more, destroying any academic, economic, or signalling value of your degree in the process.

Doing otherwise would expose their ideology for the lie it is and their ideology takes precedence over the good of these marginal students, not to mention the other students whose degrees are made worthless.

So, as these marginal students flood colleges, demand for college education increases, so tuition goes up.

The academic value of the degree erodes, as grade inflation and lowered academic standards become necessary to keep these people in college, and maybe (hopefully) let them graduate.

The economic values of these degrees plummets. Your degree no longer signals competence, knowledge, and intelligence to an employer; all it signals is a lack of incompetence. Why should he pay well for that? Why should he hire the marginally competent at all?

Thus a bubble. Paying more and more for less and less.

One thing though, bubbles can’t last forever. Reality always wins in the end.

Eventually, the post-secondary education system will run into reality.

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Economists do not predict a collapse of the student loan system, which would, in essence, mean wholesale default.

NYT’s economists never fail to be amusing. I wonder if this was Krugman or Friedman, maybe both?

Those who are blinded by ideology will run full tilt into the wall of reality. They will then act surprised.

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With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country

$1 trillion, that’s almost 7% of GDP. If a large percentage of these loans default, this will be a major economic catastrophe. It may be possible for the US government to forgive them, but that will be a significant increase in national debt.

Students are likely stuck with this debt.

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So what can we do?

Short answer: nothing.

Long answer: That’s a question for another post.

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One last note:

Leaders of the for-profit industry defended themselves

I’m usually a staunch defender of the free market, but in this case, all I can say is:

Fuck them.

The for-profit college industry is a brood of blood-sucking parasites taking advantage of students who should never set foot near a college for their own benefit, and the student loans programs in a disgusting display of parasitic corporate welfare. May their whole industry rot.

Lightning Round – 2012/05/08

A good question to ask yourself.

Something else to keep in mind: nobody cares.

Since when did Frost start writing for the New York Times?

Be good, not nice. Good advice for the Christian man. A bit more on the same topic.

In Soviet America… (insert Yakov Smirnoff joke)

The internet needs the UN like a kulak needs stalinism.

Wonder how feminists will respond to this?

Maybe stagnant wages are caused by Americans nearing maximum productivity.

How to buy happiness.

Nothing we didn’t already know about environmentalism.

We can hope, but Hayekianism does not benefit the state, so I doubt it.

How to retire at 27 (and screw over the next generation).

You mean fighting climate change and overpopulation may hurt people?

Why our generation is screwed.

How true. One of the things I like most about Harper is how much all the wrong people hate him.

(h/t Instapundit, SDA)

The Malaise of Wealth: the Transition to Post-Scarcity

I probably don’t need to regale you about the economic troubles of our generation. Manufacturing work has been declining for decades hurting the economic prospects of the working class. Professional occupations are now suffering as well, enough so that even the mainstream media gets it. Unemployment is near 50% for new graduates and young people are being hammered by the recession. You all know the drill.

Everybody has a solution to the problem. Obama, Krugman, and the Keynesians say throw fiat money at the economy until it moves. Conservatives and libertarians decry excessive regulations and taxes. Economic nationalists say close the border, criminalize outsourcing, end free trade, and put up tariffs, while neo-liberals call for more free trade.

They blame the rich, they blame welfare bums, they blame bureaucrats, they blame capitalists, they blame the young, they blame the old.

The thing is, they’re all wrong.

There is no real solution to Western economic malaise, as the “malaise” is not actually an economic problem.

Our economic “problem” is that we are too wealthy.

Of course, this doesn’t seem to make sense. Unemployment is high, labour force participation is declining, and people can’t get jobs. How can I possibly say we are too wealthy?

If you look at GDP, it has increased steadily for decades. The “great recession” we blame for our economic woes caused the economy to fall to 2007 levels in 2009 (and we weren’t poor in 2007, at the height of the housing boom, were we?), which was promptly righted in 2010. In terms of what we produce, the goods that actually make our life better, the effects were minor.

Our economic malaise is one not of a lack of production, but of a lack of employment.

Or stated another way: as a society, we are continually producing more of the goods we want, but we have to do less work to get it.

It is the second part of that sentence that is the problem: we have to do less work to get it.

That is the cause of our economic problems. That is why there are no jobs, there is no work for people to do.

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The problem is that we are in the process of transferring from a capitalist economic system to a post-scarcity “economic system” and nobody is ready for it. It is something that is completely out of most people’s understanding.

Post-scarcity is a word that some of you may have heard of before, or you may not have. So I’ll explain: a post-scarcity economy is one where scarcity has been overcome, where all people have access to as many goods and services as they want, with minimal labour necessary to produce them. In a post-scarcity economy, people do not have what we would consider to be jobs; because most goods and services can be produced with negligible labour.

People will work, but it will be according to the old Marxist saw “[communism] makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Work will be something you engage in because you want to, not because you have to. You may choose to hunt, but you will do so because you enjoy it, not because you need to eat. You may choose to design a website, but it will be in leisure, not because the boss says to. You will be able to work at whatever you want, or at nothing, because it doesn’t matter to your material wealth, or anyone else’s for that matter.

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If you want to see post-scarcity today, the best place to look is at the music industry, or perhaps more accurately, it’s continuing collapse. Music can now be made cheaply: at most it costs a couple thousand dollars in instruments and a couple thousand in recording costs. With music creations software, all it costs is a computer you already own and some pirated software to create music. Once the original act of music creation is completed it costs absolutely nothing and requires almost no labour to create another digital copy.

And that’s the whole problem; that’s why the music industry is collapsing. Music executives are finding that it is very hard to justify charging people for what they can get for free. They are fighting free music tooth and nail under the guise of copyright to protect their profits, and they are losing, badly. The economic spin-offs of this are that everybody in the music industry is going to lose their jobs eventually. Why buy a CD when I can download it for free? Why sign with a label when I can distribute my own music on the internet? Why hire a producer when production software is so cheap? Why go to HMV when I can download music at home?

The producer loses his job, the CD manufacturer loses his, the marketing exec loses his, the sales clerk loses his. Thousands of jobs are lost.

Yet, are we poorer? No. Every person in the west now has functionally unlimited access to almost every piece of music ever created at negligible costs. My music library is functionally unlimited and it costs me nothing.

Bill Gates has no greater access to music than I do and I have more access to music than even the richest of men in existence prior to a couple decades ago.

That is post-scarcity.

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Now the problem with post-scarcity is that every economic system we have had to date has been based on scarcity; there was only a limited amount of resources to go around, so we need some way to distribute those resources. Goods required work, so we needed some way to encourage people to work. That’s why capitalism works, it distributes resources to an individual according to how others in society value the individual’s contributions to society.

But in post-scarcity, capitalism breaks down. With resources being unlimited, nobody can profit off the production of those resources.

Nobody knows how to handle post-scarcity.

The RIAA fights music pirating as post-scarcity means they can’t profit off of the goods.

Politicians back copyright law and fight pirating, not realizing that everybody is getting richer in actual terms as everybody now has unlimited music access, but because they aren’t paying for it it doesn’t register in GDP. In addition, the ability to create nigh unlimited music with negligible labour becomes “unemployment” according to economic measures.

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That’s all well and fine for music, but it’s not a material good, it’s easily digitized. Certainly the manufacturing of hard goods requires labour.

Does it really?

We can look at 3D printers.These printers can take raw materials (usually plastics or metals) and convert them into durable goods. Industrial printers are expensive and the technology’s still being developed. Simple home printers can now be purchased for less than a used car. Compare their development to that of computers; 30-40 years ago, home computers were a primitive luxury good for businessmen and geeks, large mainframes were commercial technologies, and the internet was a military project. Now, everybody owns a computer with internet access that easily dwarfs the power of those older commercial mainframes and that has hundreds of applications pre-installed.

Why wouldn’t 3D printers advance like this as well? They may be primitive toys for nerds right now, but a couple of decades from now?

Think about it. If your knife broke (or bowl, or computer, or phone, etc.), you just download plans (which was created for free by an online 3D printing design community) for a new knife  to your desktop 3D printer, feed in some metal and plastic, press the start button, and a minute later a new knife.

If you need a bigger object, say a car, you just go to the free neighborhood printer (why wouldn’t it be free, when another printer can print a printer for almost no cost?), stick in your old car to be broken down for raw materials, then have it print out a new car from plans you downloaded to a flash drive earlier.

Think it sound implausible? Why?

We have the basis for the technology, it’s simply a matter of refinement and scale. Remember what happened to computers.

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Also remember what happened to the music industry.

When this happens (and I believe it’s a when, not an if), why would you need to work, if you could print whatever you wanted? Why would someone pay you for your work if almost anything was free? Why would you pay anyone else for something?

The capitalist market would collapse. Scarcity would disappear.

According to official measures though, GDP would plummet and unemployment would skyrocket.

In addition to the printers, robotics will be used to cover some production.

(I will say this: even in post-scarcity, we will probably need a few people keeping an eye on things, but the prestige, trappings of power, and/or conspicuous altruism of such positions will likely be enough to get the requisite number of people to do this).

****

What about raw materials? The printers couldn’t create those.

At first, out-sourcing. We’d pay poor foreigners to mine or grow raw materials with easily duplicated goods. Robotics could also be used.

At some point, recycling would be enough. There is a limit to what you could possibly want.

If you already have three cars and want a new one, just break down the old one and have a new one reprinted. Same with anything else.

What if you want more than what you have? My question would be why?

Most goods are simply positional; they are used for showing off your wealth.

If anybody can print a Lamborghini for the same material cost as a Pontiac (free, except for the $100 of scrap metals and plastic), the Lamborghini would be worthless as a positional good.

Once you have what you need: food, transport, housing, recreation, positional goods made by someone else would  mostly meaningless. Any positional good that would bring you status would have be something deliberately created apart from the printers/crowd-sourced plans.

****

What about the services?

These would mostly be made unnecessary.

Amazon has made bookstores completely irrelevant. Steam is making video game stores irrelevant. In the future, 3D printing will make stores irrelevant.

Robotics and AI would replace some of the rest.

Communities of interested individuals would take care of the rest. If you had unlimited free time because work became unnecessary, you would pursue and master your favourite activities would you not? So would others. They would form communities and groups just as they do now. They would provide community members services and teaching, just as they do now.

****

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that these are not all going to happen together. Different occupations will be effected at different rates.

Manufacturing has already been dying a slow death for decades as robotics and off-shoring has replaced domestic labour. Unskilled blue-collar labour is already pushing towards post-scarcity conditions.

On the other hand, the trades are still doing well. Skilled blue-collar work is harder to replace.

Unskilled white-collar labour has been going there as well; filing replaced by digitization, clerks were replaced by Excel, etc.

Skilled white-collar labour is harder to replace with technology, but even so, we are approaching the tipping point.

In addition, different industries are effected at different rate. The music industry is in it’s death throes, book publishing will follow soon after.  On the other hand, health care still requires human workers and will for a while to come.

So, while the transition to post-scarcity is occurring, we need a way to incentivise those we need to work to continue working. At the same time, we need to keep those who society does not need to work from causing trouble.

****

As a society on the road to post-scarcity, we are already so productive that we already pay a large chunk of our surplus to those who aren’t contributing, and we have been doing this for decades. Social security and retirement, welfare, EI, disability, foreign aid, and the like are all us paying some of our surplus to the unproductive.

The problem is, as soon as we start paying people to be unproductive, then people have less incentive to be productive. If we start just distributing good income to the unproductive with no pretense, then we might not have the people we need producing, producing. So all the above usually have some conditions attached, so it is not a generally usable condition.

Yet, we have a lot more people who need employment, than we have work that actually needs doing, so we have to find ways beside just giving people money to keep them occupied.

****

We have created a number of strategies to keep unemployment low while post-scarcity works itself out.

First is the welfare state. Welfare and disability, properly stigmatized, can keep the unproductive lower classes from causing trouble, while the stigma keeps productive people from pursuing this option.

Second, jail. If we jail the unproductive that cause trouble, they stop causing trouble.

Third, government. I’m a government worker, but we have to face it, government is on the whole unproductive. Some parts of government are productive, such as infrastructure or health care (assuming a public health system), but the majority of it is not. Redistributive government programs do not produce anything, they just shuffle wealth around while destroying some of it in the process. The regulatory functions of government actively destroy wealth and hinder wealth creation. Not to mention that the taxes necessary to fund government discourage wealth creation. But the government keeps a lot of white-collar people employed.

Fourth, the military. The US has no real external threats and it’s military is vastly superior to anything else on the earth, but the military keeps a lot of people, particularly those people who may be inclined to organized violence, employed.

Fifth, the subsidized. the government subsidizes a lot of economic activity and organizations that would otherwise be unable to continue to exist.

I’m not saying that these were actively created because the people creating them knew we faced unemployment problems due to the transition to post-scarcity, but they do help keep the problem of unemployment in check.

****

So, what should I take from this?

It’s simple, the next few decades are going to be very painful economically. Our wealth will increase, so we’ll continually have more goods and services over time, but at the same time our unemployment will increase and GDP might not accurately reflect the increase in goods and services as post-scarcity resources (such as pirated music) will be outside official measures of wealth as they will not require economic transactions.

Economic inequality will likely continue to increase, as the productive capacity continues to rely on fewer people, while more people are replaced by technology and have less access to wealth.

As each industry faces it’s own movement into post-scarcity each will push it’s own form of blowback as they realize their profits and jobs are going to disappear as technology replaces them.

Together, these forces will create great societal tensions. Government redistribution will continue to grow to keep the lid on these tensions.

At some point though, we will reach the tipping point into post-scarcity. After this, work as we currently know it will no longer be a thing and society will rearrange itself to adapt to a totally new situation.

Lightning Round – 2012/05/01

Everybody enjoying May Day? I hope you are.

Did you know that the average person could be making $100,000 a year? The Captain does the math.

A great speech given to the Fed. Long, but read it.

“The president has a very difficult time with the business community. Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican that’s just a fact of life.” I wonder why?

The system is hungry; it must eat. Poor Sweden.

Marriage is fundamental to the church: when it declines, so to does the church decline.

Related: Why Evangelical Princesses are un-marriageable; a great post from CMDN.

We won! Yay!?!???

How you create a mass-murderer: Teach him to hate himself, then act surprised when he externalizes that hate.

Becoming as weak as your foes doesn’t help you or them.

Shame the beta month; it looks like it could be interesting.

(ht/ SDA, AMN, CC)

Sexbots

That probably got your attention.

Researchers are now claiming that sexbots will replace prostitutes in the future. Of course, they’re only a half decade behind Roissy (but thanks for coming out, anyway).

The wide-scale use of either sexbots or virtual reality sex seems inevitable. Males’ desire for more realistic pornography and masturbation aids is insatiable.

“The biggest part of the sex experience … is interaction with a woman,” he noted. “He wants to tell her stories, wants her to listen, wants her to act like she cares – a robot’s not going to do that.”

It’s not going to matter. While sex with a real woman will generally be preferable for most men, the people who will be driving the demand are likely those who do not have that option. Roissy more or less has the general trends down.

Omegas will flock to sexbots; the herbivores in Japan have already started to use dating sims, virtual girlfriends, hentai body pills (sorry, no link to that), and other such pre-sexbot aids in large numbers. North American omegas have started to pick up on RealDolls (sorry, again) and the Japanese stuff as well. Omegas have little hope of having sex anyway, so the lack of interaction with women is not going to effect their decisions in the slightest.

For betas, it will be a cost-benefit analysis. Is the expected marginal benefit of a real women over a sexbot worth the cost of putting up with all the crap of dating? For many, I don’t think it will be.

The demand for alphas will increase, but even then, alphas may demand sexbots. They also have a cost-benefit analysis; some alphas might use sexbots once their realistic enough simply because it will be easier than spending hours tolerating painfully stupid conversation in a nightclub.

What Roissy misses though is other major drivers of demand, those who can have the sex they desire with real women due to consent and legality issues.

About a third of men have rape fantasies, something that can not be legally acted upon. Up to 7% of males are clinical pedophiles, something which they can definitely not legally act upon. Then of course, there are the array of fetishists with fantasies that are biologically impossible, such as sadists, furries, or those interested in dickgirls (no links here).

I think that these groups will be some of the biggest customers for sexbots, so they can enact their fantasies which are either impossible or illegal in real life. There will demand for a sexbot that resists, cries, bleeds, and generally acts like it’s being raped and/or abused. There will be demand for sexbots that look eight-years old. There will be a demand for sexbots created in ways that are biologically impossible.

The demand for pornography is already nigh limitless. The demand for realistic sexbots is as well.

The technology will eventually get to the point this demand can be met. Realdolls have become increasingly realistic. Conversational AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Robots are becoming increasingly capable. Artificial sex organs are becoming increasingly widespread as masturbatory aids. At this point, it’s simply a matter of degree and putting it all together into an affordable package.

When this occurs, the introduction of sexbots into the marketplace is an inevitability.

Of course, Half-Sigma could be right, the state could ban them.

Social conservatives will also fight them tooth and nail, but will lose the fight as they’ve eventually lost on every fight they’ve fought.

Feminists will most assuredly fight sexbots, as they would greatly reduce females’ power in the sexual marketplace. Feminists have traditionally had great sway over policy, but in this case, I do not think they would realize their power was slipping away until it was too late. At first they will ignore them, as who really cares if a bunch of creepy nerds pleasure themselves with some fancy toys? Then it will slowly move up the sexual value chain from omegas to lesser betas to greater betas and finally to alphas. By the time it’s removed enough betas and alphas from the dating pool for feminists to notice that there are fewer men to date and that those men are demanding more, sexbots will likely already be a fait accompli.

What I think will be the most likely to lead to their restriction introduction will be this:

“And the robots can assume any identity virtually … though we just have 18-plus as the age that the robot behaves like.”

While this company might avoid it (at first), someone will eventually create a sex doll that looks and acts like a five-year-old (or worse, a child-like sex-bot designed to cry and act afraid and in pain); there is too much demand for them not to.

When a child-like sexbot is created, the disgust most people have for pedophiles will boil to the surface and create a general backlash against sexbots. This backlash may succeed in having them banned (barring, of course, the unlikely event of a general rise in acceptance of pedophiles similar to the acceptance of homosexuals, bdsm-types, and the like).

If they are banned though, this will simply create a black-market for the products, just like there is for child pornography and prostitution. The ability for men to be able to act out their most depraved fantasies without suffering the guilt of actually hurting a real person is something that the government will not be able to stifle.

Also, I expect some psychologists and the like to come forward defending deviant sexbots, as it will allow deviants to engage in their sexual activities without harming people, which will probably be good for their mental health,s reduce the likelihood of deviants actually hurting someone, and reduces the demand for prostitution. This could tip the balance towards the liberalization of sexbots.

With sexbots being inevitable, what will be the effects of their introduction? Well, generally not good. As the sexual costs of reclusiveness, unemployment, social awkwardness, etc. decrease, more men will go their own way, leave the marriage market, and contribute less to society economically. Marriage rates will further decrease.

On the other hand, the improved options for men will force women to increase their bids for men still in the market, so the problems of frivolous divorce and unjust family courts and laws may be ameliorated. On the other hand, improved options for men, might increase mens’  instigation of frivolous divorce and tip the scales in the other direction.