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Sure. He has not yet actually assented to the empirical evidence that people can mostly be self-sufficient. I did not claim that he assented to this, and if he would like to disagree with this, he is still able to (so are you). I pointed out that he did claim that self-sufficiency was a lower bound for purposes of comparative advantage. I then also addressed his stated concern that a small class of people cannot attain self-sufficiency (e.g., severely disabled folks). But for all of the other folks, who I pointed out empirically can attain self-sufficiency, his lower bound holds that comparative advantage will still make them better off. Which would contradict his conclusion that a vast majority of folks will end up at sub-subsistence levels.
Now that we've cleared up that I have not claimed any assent to the empirical evidence and clarified further how the argument goes, do you have any objection to the logical portion of the argument? Or are you just happy that we've agreed that we're still waiting to see if he assents/objects to the empirical evidence?
No, I claimed attempting self-sufficiency as lower bound. As the disabled illustrate, it doesn't mean one can succeed. And I'd dispute that most modern people could achieve self-sufficiency if they stopped specializing in their comparative advantage. After all, we're pretty much all "specialists," even the farmers. And there are the necessary resource inputs — try being self-sufficient without any land, for example.
No, for most of those millennia, many were specializing and trading (even if just within family/household/tribe). And, per Karl Smith, they held certain then-scarce factors of production, the value of which automation will drastically reduce.
Irrelevant.
Humans have — had — value because human brains were a scarce factor of production, there being no substitute. But now a cheap, plentiful substitute is coming. When supply goes up, price goes down. What steam and fossil fuel did to the muscle power of horses, automation will do to the brain power of humans.
And sure, the transition to mostly-automated luxury would be nice… were human beings uniform and perfectly fungible. The problem is in the middle, when large fractions of the population have become parasites upon the fraction that's still productive.
Many material resources will remain scarce even as the value of human labor declines, which limits how cheap the machines can become.
What capability do most modern people lack in comparison to ye ancients? I'm not asking about current habits/practices or individual skills. Those things can be learned and adopted. And we're certainly not lacking in access to knowledge that can be leveraged to get there. So, what capability are modern people lacking that would prevent them from becoming self-sufficient?
Good news! We have gobs of land. It's going to be pretty much abandoned by all those farmers who are currently specialized in growing crops for trade. I mean, it's not going to be worth anything to them if they can't sell in trade. We'll basically have new frontiers for a new homesteading era.
Sounds perfectly fine, then. Since you're predicting that their family/household/tribe is also going to shunned by TPTB, then those folks might want to trade with you in your little group. Everything is just like it was! Proven capability!
ROFL. If you just deny it without even bothering to engage with it, I'm mostly going to just laugh at you. Because it's hilariously bad.
I mean, at least try. Try to tell me why it's irrelevant. To do so, you have to say something about what it is and how it works. You can't just declare it irrelevant and then talk about something else entirely.
That sounds pretty nice, then. How much will this cheap, plentiful substitute cost? Is it like, $10 to replace a gigahuman worth of labor/knowledge/etc.?
This is a complete distraction. You had specifically predicted that humans will be unable to maintain subsistence. I argue that we do not lack any capability to maintain subsistence, that we have gobs of empirical evidence that it is, in fact, possible, that even if you think small group trade was important to this process, your own predictions imply that we will have plenty of similarly-situated humans who would like to engage in precisely the same small group trade that you think is critical, that humans are in fact different from horses in part because we can understand opportunity cost (at least well enough to realize that if the opportunity cost of just sitting there doing nothing and hoping for a handout is sufficiently large to jump the gap between 'starve to death' and 'not starve to death', we can make the choice to use our capabilities at the very least to sustain ourselves), and that if we're getting magical super cheap everything anyway, you have significant explaining to do in terms of a model for what this price point is, what it gets you, etc.
We can't even get to discussions about transitory whatever until you even have a basic model that has even the most elementary components in it. Like, no, we're not going to jump to questions about dynamics if we don't have any sense of even partial equilibrium, much less general equilibrium.
So they're going to be expensive? How expensive? What are the limiting factors? Don't we have magic automated mining equipment? That stuff is going to have to be cheaper than it is now, resulting in lower costs of materials, otherwise folks might consider employing humans again. Unless you're positing a paperclip-maximizing-scale increase in use of resources, but that doesn't make sense, because in reality, technological advances that are increasing efficiency have actually resulted in us using less resources than we did in the past.
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