Bastani looks at AI, robotics, renewable energy, bio-tech, high-tech food production and, er, mining asteroids. Don’t expect too much caution here. He very much accentuates the positive – in support of his contention that we are moving towards an economic situation of “extreme supply” across a range of resources.[...]
By “communism” Bastani doesn’t mean the communist regimes of the past (and present), but “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labour and leisure blend into one another”. The excuse of the latter-day Marxist that ‘real communism hasn’t been tried yet’ has become something of a cliche. But going by Bastani’s definition, it’s clear that real communism hasn’t been possible so far and won’t be possible until work has been largely automated and shortages of key resources rendered a thing of the past. [...]
But when you look for the root cause of the corruption, it strikes me that the essential problem isn’t extreme supply at all – it’s that businesses are protected from disruption or allowed to exploit monopoly control over resources that remain scarce in an otherwise abundant economy (above all, land.) These are the twin evils of crony capitalism and rentier capitalism. They are real, they are powerful and they must be defeated. But what this requires is for government to take back control of naturally scarce resources, not the increasingly abundant ones.
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