I’m creating an imaginary society to make a point.
The only requirement in my economy is food
Trawlers take little wooden spoons and sift though soil preparing it for planting seeds that will grow into plants.
trawlers
50% (half of all people)
other farming
50% (half of all people)
employed
100% (everyone)
output from farming relative to the population
80% (so 20% go hungry but 80% get enough food)
hungry people
20%
The plough is invented, ploughing is more efficient than trawling so less ploughers are needed to get the same result.
trawlers
0%
ploughers
10%
other farming
50%
employed
60% (40% now unemployed)
output from farming relative to the population
80% (exactly the same, only now there are spare people to do other stuff)
However, hungry people
40% (double)
The relative difference in hungry people creates the illusion that things are going really badly where as actually things are 40% better (40% of people are now unemployed and the output from farming is the same, so we should be 40% worth of effort better off)
The 40% better difference is real and the 20% worse difference is only economic, to do with how we don’t share resources very well.
This leads to the argument that there should be more jobs, people rarely argue the case for more efficiency therefore by it’s very nature less jobs even though this will eventually improve things for everyone.
This sometimes is even worse than just putting a damper of progress as it can lead to pointless bureaucratic jobs being created.
A big problem is that most people work because they want money, not because they want to help make the world better or expand there own knowledge. One of many problems with communism is that nobody can be bothered to work very hard if they can get paid anyway but a good thing about it is that there is no resistance at all to making things easier, more efficient or automating them.
I dislike the way we pass money around between ourselves as if the action of doing it makes things better, Money is not like water or food, it is just a points system to motervate everyone wanting to work more. It doesn’t really motervate people in the right ways though and it results in some poor people who work hard, It doesn’t work.
Also advertising seems to be the rute of all evil today, It nearly always fails for the good of humanity when compared to other methods like directory’s (yellow pages, wiki, etc…)
And lastly IP rights, copywrite, patients etc… All in all we are better without them. For example where someone creates something and someone else improves on it and to allow everyone assess to all avalible media.
Are any of these observation unique to me or have there been people noticing in the past?