| I didn't change my comment. The only edit I made was to separate a para for formatting. Maybe you were reading something else. From a market perspective the delta has nothing to do with supply/demand. Microeconomics and supply/demand theory doesn't really have any answers to the fact that wealth and power tends to acrete. The textbook answer will be along the lines of 'but then smaller more agile entities will arise that displace the incumbents' but the incumbents have long ago figured out strategoes such as rent seeking to prevent that. Capitalism is fundamentally broken in several clear ways: * It assumes that individuals are rational actors who are sufficiently informed to make generally optimal self-interest decisions * It assumes that there's a force or mechanism to modulate or prevent acretion of wealth. So far the only such mechanism historically has been bloody revolutions * It assumes that we know the 'true value' of things including externalities. The climate crisis is a huge example of how utterly wrong that is. If car and fossil fuel costs accounted for externalities, they'd cost somewhere in the vicinity of 10-100x more than they currently do. Would that have prevented the boom that led to current quality of life in the developed world? Probably. Would it also have prevented an existential threat to us? Certainly. The pursuit of continuous growth has become clearly a self-terminal strategy that not only failed multiple times in history before, but is threatening our entire species via anthropogenic climate change now. I'm advocating that we stop pursuing continuous growth and focus on collapsing the insane wealth disparity and dismantling the structures that have acreted unprecedented wealth and power into the hands of <100 people worldwide. Someone who acreted sufficient wealth to extract profit from your labour more effectively than you can alone, is not doing you favours, is not being charitable, but merely exploiting you to acrete more wealth to exploit more people ad infinitum. |
Once there is an off-planet colony i expect the resource pressure that is starting to show will ease up considerably. Capturing asteroid/mining other planets for resources - there are a lot of ways for things to course correct. Everything we're facing right now is coz of an artifical bottleneck in our species expansion
It will also render existential threats moot coz there will be off planet resources to rebuild a civilization in case things do go catastrophically wrong.