Survival of the fittest, or combined utopia?

[Ghost of Cutten]

Quote from nitro:

Break down your paycheck. Let's say you make $50k (adjusted for inflation) a year over the course of your life. Ok:

After taxes, that is more like $35k.

Here are your bills.

1) Rent, $1000 a month.
2) Electricity, $75 a month.
3) Car insurance, $100 a month.
4) Fuel costs and total transportation costs, $200 a month.
5) Water bill, $15 a month.
6) Car lease or finance costs, $220 a month.
7) Entertainment costs, $100 a month.
8) Incidental repairs, $50 a month.
9) Cable, $75 a month.
9) Miscellaneous purchases (books, computer, tv, etc) $50 a month
10) Repay education, $200 a month for a few years.
11) Cell phone, $50 a month.
12) Groceries, $200 a month

This comes to about $27,000 a year. So that leaves $8,000 a year that you can invest, save or whatever. So if you don't have kids, and you save every nickel and dime for say fifty years of working and no bad health isssues happens to you, at the end you have $400,000 saved to retire on. Then you die.

Nice.

This is why you will never see utopia. For a pampered 1st world citizen like yourself, at the very apex of material prosperity in human history, to think like this, is just ridiculous. You are better off materially than the kings and emperors of Rome, yet you are whining about it. To moan about running a surplus of 8k a year - far higher than the total annual income of most of the world's population - is extremely silly. 8k a year saved and invested for 30-40 years will make you more like 1-2 million, by the way - not 400k. Only an American could bitch about a system of society which lets him earn an average salary and retire a millionaire with no special skills or effort.

I also love the fact that you think simple wealth accumulation is the goal of life. Nothing about enjoying the journey, its all about the destination. It's like those tourists who fly to a resort somewhere in the 3rd world, stay in a 5 star hotel all week, then fly back to tell their friends they "did" India (or wherever). You do realize, don't you, that 99.9% of the human race never even got close to the standards of living and opportunities that you sneer at? Thus by your standards, the lives of almost everyone in the past and present are just worthless. If utopia is ever achieved, it won't be reached so long as attitudes like this remain widespread.

You would benefit from changing your perspective. Consider the things you have which you can be rightfully thankful for (if they apply): good health, friends, family, relative freedom compared to most of the world, a reasonable level of security, some intelligence and education. Instead of all these, you could be a dumb uneducated HIV-positive 12 year old sex slave getting butt-fucked daily in a 3rd world brothel; or a man with no legs; or rotting in some 3rd world dungeon because you published a negative story about the president. Then you might actually have something to complain about.

The things that make life worth living are not based around money. Besides, you cannot control your fate. Any one of us could go bankrupt or be crippled or killed tomorrow. Happiness is a state of mind, a mental outlook, not a consumer good you can purchase at Wal-Mart (or Saks). You need to be able to handle the worst of times just as well as the best of them - failure to do so is a weakness, and will undermine you regardless of your material and financial status.

Instead of bitching and moaning on a capitalist message board, why don't you try getting off your lazy ass and actually study some of the philosophers' writings on this subject? People were discussing this 2000, 3000 years ago and already covered everything you are talking about. It's obvious you are in distressed by your station in life, and I put it to you that trying to do something about it will help a lot more than wallowing in self-pity.

 

[nitro]

Quote from Ghost of Cutten:
If people had basic survival needs met for free, then they would put their efforts into desirable but unnecessary things like status, power, luxury, freedom, sex etc. Note that all of these are by definition going to be limited in supply - status, power, and luxury are all defined relatively, not in absolute terms; freedom is in conflict with other people's status, power, luxury and freedom etc; and sex is to some extent limited and exclusive.

Bizarre. This sounds almost verbatim what people do now. Notice the poll that I created for this thread considers not some random utopia, but a Star Trek like utopia. In this fiction, people are no longer in need of money to pay for things, so they don't need to work. Resources are essentially free. Education is free. Shelter is free. Needs like food and water can be replicated by uttering into a computer console. What then are people supposed to do with themselves?

My hope when I suggested this particular utopia is that people would become explorers, seek both internal and external knowledge, would be sexually attracted to each other based on physical and intellectual attraction, instead of compromising who they love and have sex with because they could find themselves and their kids on the street homeless. To challenge themselves through conversation, to seek the truly mysterious in the universe. In this utopia, there would even be a world where if you were bored with this life of perfection, you could go and live on "Earth - 2010" with kindred spirits that wished for the old life, and you would have to go to work to produce diet coke, or watch Jerry Springer on TV, or to seek fame power or whatever. You see, the utopia I seek isn't we all wear white robes and talk philosophy all day. No, this utopia I seek would be, you can choose to have "Earth - 2010" or "Earth - 2540 - Star Trek Next Generation", or worlds I can't even imagine. Freedom, choice over your own destiny, people you wish to associate with, etc. This is the true utopia, a menu of choices, one of which is to live in "Earth - 2010". And if you get bored with your current utopia, just change utopia destinations without the fear of landing in a mental institution because you can't afford food or shelter.

Thus the day to day struggle of life would still exist, it would just be over these things instead. Back in the stone age the struggle was over food and water to survive, shelter to survive, other humans/tribes to survive, dangerous animals to survive. All basic survival needs were scarce and difficult. Nowadays in the 1st world, most basic survival needs are actually free due to the welfare state. The day to day struggle for the unenlightened (99% of society) is thus not over actual necessities, but over BS luxuries like status, power, material goods, recreational sex and so on.

The overall trend of history is to free humans of the daily toil of simply surviving and evading danger at every turn, real or perceived. Where people get confused is that they think that life is something that required you to go to work and buy things. We get caught up in the fads of the time. All I seek is ultimate choice for everyone. Unfortunately, Earth is too small and we don't have the systems in place to allow for these choices, and as far as we know, it is the only planet capable of sustaining life as we know it. The ultimate goal of my utopia is total and complete freedom to choose the kind of life you want to live, even if your choice is to get up at 5:30 AM five days a week for twelve hours to go to work for some corporation so they can continue to increase their earnings per share. Live to work, instead of work to live.

In other words, neither of your outcomes are remotely likely, it will just be more of the usual. The goals will change but the game remains the same.

Capitalism is the answer to the question "how do we most efficiently produce things to meet economic demand". Free capitalism with a limited but robust state is the answer to "how do we best preserve liberty whilst also achieving prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors?" - at least so far it's the best answer anyone has found so far, that has proven to work to some extent (perhaps you could name an alternative?).

It takes a snails pace to achieve because the majority of society aren't intellectually curious, and thus don't study let alone understand human progress and its causes.

I think the problem is that most people don't have the vision themselves to see how different lives can have joyful meaning. They have to be shown. We have even institutionalized this in the form of movies. We sell our children this culture without offering any choices or alternatives. Society in its part, makes 99% of other choice extremely expensive and dangerous. Just try being 65 years old in the US without a job and medical insurance and a pension. You are in grave danger, and society reminds you of it every day. This is the wisdom of our current society - work your youth away so you can be safe to die. I recently asked my sister-in-law if she would like to live to be one thousand years old, and she said "no way, and have to work for that long?" I realized that her answer is probably the answer of 99% of the people in the world.

We are at least five hundred years from the menu of choices that I call utopia.

 

[loza]

if you spend money on cable you are a fool....
http://www.livecablefreenow.com

Quote from nitro:

Break down your paycheck. Let's say you make $50k (adjusted for inflation) a year over the course of your life. Ok:

After taxes, that is more like $35k.

Here are your bills.

1) Rent, $1000 a month.
2) Electricity, $75 a month.
3) Car insurance, $100 a month.
4) Fuel costs and total transportation costs, $200 a month.
5) Water bill, $15 a month.
6) Car lease or finance costs, $220 a month.
7) Entertainment costs, $100 a month.
8) Incidental repairs, $50 a month.
9) Cable, $75 a month.
9) Miscellaneous purchases (books, computer, tv, etc) $50 a month
10) Repay education, $200 a month for a few years.
11) Cell phone, $50 a month.
12) Groceries, $200 a month

This comes to about $27,000 a year. So that leaves $8,000 a year that you can invest, save or whatever. So if you don't have kids, and you save every nickel and dime for say fifty years of working and no bad health isssues happens to you, at the end you have $400,000 saved to retire on. Then you die.

Nice.

 

[nitro]

Quote from Martinghoul:

Answer isn't Capitalism, it's 42. Everyone knows that...

Speaking of which, the questions you ask are subject of much speculation by science fiction writers. They are much better at these things than economists. Some are even downright brilliant...

Right.

My hope is that we are a Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale far faster than most people predict:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

We are not even a Type I civilization yet on this scale. There is no chance that even my daughters children will see a Type I civilization

Isaac Asimov, in his Foundation Series, imagines a world in a Type III civilization!!!

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_s...ac+asimov+foundation&x=0&y=0&sprefix=Isaac+As

Type IV and Type V civilizations are beyond our imagination. That would be for "Q" type beings.

 

[nitro]

"The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents " [Hardcover]
~ Alex Butterworth (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/World-That-Ne...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277061915&sr=8-1

Are terrorists Utopian at heart? There is a very fine line between anarchists, terrorists and totalitarians, as this book proposes. Is it possible to achieve utopia without terrorism or some deep catastrophe? Talk in the form of Philosophy, ideas, etc, appeal only to the intellect of man. I have yet to see a man act out of reason. Fear, love, hate, greed, revenge, boredom - in other words, emotion, these are what move men to action.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. ~ George Bernard Shaw

 

[nitro]

"Is the Four-Year, Liberal-Arts Education Model Dead?"

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41626661

Looks like our children will be drones in corporations, with endless "education" (euphemism for training in trade schools ) and reeducation to keep up with the global Joneses.

Specialization is a theorem of efficiency in Capitalism. Even entire countries are specializing. In the future, mankind will be so dull he won't be worth talking to.

 

[nitro]

The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html?_r=0

I didn't know where to put this link, but since this is one of my own favorite threads, I thought this as good a place as any.

 

[nutmeg]

I'd read this last week, forgot about this thread. You posted just in the nick of time. I dug the paper out of the recycling bin. Fwiw.

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IMAGINE, as 19th-century utopians often did, a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work — a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more people have left the work force altogether.

If such a utopia were possible, one might expect that it would be achieved first among the upper classes, and then gradually spread down the social ladder. First the wealthy would work shorter hours, then the middle class, and finally even high school dropouts would be able to sleep late and take four-day weekends and choose their own adventures — “to hunt in the morning,” as Karl Marx once prophesied, “fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner ...”

Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.

Of course, nobody is hailing this trend as the sign of civilizational progress. Instead, the decline in blue-collar work is often portrayed in near-apocalyptic terms — on the left as the economy’s failure to supply good-paying jobs, and on the right as a depressing sign that government dependency is killing the American work ethic.

But it’s worth linking today’s trends to the older dream of a post-work utopia, because there are ways in which the decline in work-force participation is actually being made possible by material progress.

That progress can be hard to appreciate at the moment, but America’s immense wealth is still our era’s most important economic fact. “When a nation is as rich as ours,” Scott Winship points out in an essay for Breakthrough Journal, “it can realize larger absolute gains than it did in the past ... even if it has lower growth rates.” Our economy may look stagnant compared to the acceleration after World War II, but even disappointing growth rates are likely to leave the America of 2050 much richer than today.

Those riches mean that we can probably find ways to subsidize — through public means and private — a continuing decline in blue-collar work. Many of the Americans dropping out of the work force are not destitute: they’re receiving disability payments and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a low-wage job. By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to admits. (Medicare may bankrupt us, but food stamps probably will not.)

There is a certain air of irresponsibility to giving up on employment altogether, of course. But while pundits who tap on keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of labor, we aren’t the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than our last one did. One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

The answer is yes — but mostly because the decline of work carries social costs as well as an economic price tag. Even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents.

Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship. Like many of these trends, it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. (A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people’s private lives and inner worlds even when they don’t show up in the nation’s G.D.P.

In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before.

But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/douthat-a-world-without-work.html?_r=0

 

[morganist]

Quote from nitro:

Break down your paycheck. Let's say you make $50k (adjusted for inflation) a year over the course of your life. Ok:

After taxes, that is more like $35k.

Here are your bills.

1) Rent, $1000 a month.
2) Electricity, $75 a month.
3) Car insurance, $100 a month.
4) Fuel costs and total transportation costs, $200 a month.
5) Water bill, $15 a month.
6) Car lease or finance costs, $220 a month.
7) Entertainment costs, $100 a month.
8) Incidental repairs, $50 a month.
9) Cable, $75 a month.
9) Miscellaneous purchases (books, computer, tv, etc) $50 a month
10) Repay education, $200 a month for a few years.
11) Cell phone, $50 a month.
12) Groceries, $200 a month

This comes to about $27,000 a year. So that leaves $8,000 a year that you can invest, save or whatever. So if you don't have kids, and you save every nickel and dime for say fifty years of working and no bad health isssues happens to you, at the end you have $400,000 saved to retire on. Then you die.

Nice.

I don't think I know anyone who only pays $1,000 a month rent or mortgate. In the UK housing is more than half your income even if you earn £50,000 plus. It is just ridiculus.

 

[nutmeg]

Class size — Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25.

higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.
------------------------------------------------



Students are widgets in the education factory? Dang you'd think parents have nothing to do with education. Then by all means we need more teachers and mo money smaller class sizes.

Teacher evaluations are forefront in the news, Obama wants more money for early education. These are Federal projects with Federal money at stake with Harvard studies to back it up (How convenient for Obama).