[extropy-chat] Seven cents an hour?

[Lifespan Pharma Inc/ MFJ-CTO]

However, a clever society should then produce higher value goods on its 
freed up productive capacity.

This is my argument when I tell people that 700 acres of hemp when 
harvested and processed
for nutraceuticals has the same 5 million dollar plus  value as 23,000 
acres of lentils, one of the higher value agricultural commodities.

Which is better.... to expand and compete with a high value to start 
from or claw for the last dollar to spend to
make a marginal return from repeating past patterns.

In an ever more wealthy society the value of the basic goods should 
continue to reduce in value in order for
money to be available for new high value goods.

How are you going to pay for a life-long body regeneration plan  if you 
spend 70% of you disposable income on
food, clothes and shelter. If the technology is perfected to create the 
life-extension industry I would say that
perhaps 40-95 % of the average  annual income might initially be 
required to pay for it.  My first 8 digit calculator in 1970
was 125$ and not 2$ as it is now.  someone has to re-arrange societal 
economics to pay for the technology to
be developed.

These nanotech/infotech based "santa claus" machines we talk about are 
going to render most productive capacity
of the ordinary kind obselete, but those people and resources are going 
to have to move up the food
chain to create and service the new technology.

But I do like to see a need to  level out the value for service globally 
so that all citizens can afford the newest
technological wonders.  You can't buy distance education and internet 
access to your computer and blackberry
on 7 cents/day of income.  You can't travel from your hovel in ethiopia  
to anywhere new and  interesting on 7 cents/day
and so forth.  I know someone will point to China and say.. not so... 
but there is a realistic limit to that argument.

MFJ


> See: Executive Intelligence Review
>
>> <><http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3045walmart_iowa.html>
>>
>> Wal-Mart both reflects, and is, a major driving force for America's
>> deadly implementation of the Imperial Rome model. Unable to produce
>> physical goods to sustain its own existence, the United States, like
>> Rome, sucks in imported goods from around the world, using, in this
>> case, a dollar that is over-valued by 50-60%. America has been
>> transformed from a producer to a consumer society. From the 1940s
>> through the early 1960s, through its technologically-advanced
>> manufacturing-agricultural economy, America produced new value that
>> contributed to mankind's advancement. Through a "post-industrial
>> society" policy, the bankers have pushed Wal-Mart to the top of the
>> heap, so that it is now the world's largest corporation, with $245.5
>> billion in sales last year. Wal-Mart, which produces no value-added
>> whatsoever, dominates the geometry that governs the U.S. consumer
>> society. America consumes goods that others produce, which Wal-Mart
>> markets. Wal-Mart dictates, through its demand for low prices, that
>> its suppliers outsource their production to foreign nations, further
>> ripping down America's battered domestic manufacturing and
>> agricultural capability, in a self-feeding process.
>> <snip>
>
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