Comment Are you sure you pray to the right god? (Score 1) 120
Rejoice, believers, we are heading into a productivity boom! Preach the prosperity gospel of how more productivity means we're better off!
Are we?
What good is a good that I cannot have?
The irony here is that we're working hard on failing for the exact opposite reason of why communism failed eventually: We will have the goods that people crave. But people will not have the means to buy them. Our economy will not collapse because of a lack of supply, we will break down under a lack of demand. Because if you concentrate the means to consume in a few grubby, greedy hands, you will notice that this will not produce a demand that a strong economy needs to prosper.
Back in the good old days of kings and queens and an aristocracy that pointed to god instead of their bank account when asked who died and made them king, it was no problem that they alone could live in splendor while the plebs plodded along somehow (or just died of dysentery) because the economy was based on subsistence. There wasn't any relevant "surplus", in general you could consider yourself lucky if you managed to produce what was needed. There was no need for a strong demand side. If anything, that would have caused a situation similar to what happened in the East Bloc in the late 1980s: A lot of people who have money and then realize that this money is no good because they don't get jack for it.
We don't live in a subsistence economy, though. Our economy depends on a strong demand to survive. We already produce a surplus of goods that we cannot sell, not because the products wouldn't satisfy the wants of the consumers (again, one of the reasons the communist systems failed, they produced crap nobody wanted) but because too few of these consumers would have the means to satisfy that want and create the demand our economy needs.
So don't rejoice over a productivity boom. If anything, it will create a very pissed population that sees how things will go to waste that they'd need and cannot have. Imagine a starving person watching you dump food (or dump bleach on the food you trash to spite them), just instead of three hobos gritting their teeth in front of your local megastore, you're looking at 30+% of your population.
Which is armed.