The other day, Elon Musk said something along the lines of don't bother saving for retirement because in five years from now, we will be irrelevant as workers and have to live on government handouts to survive. First of all, the economics of it in terms of money as we know it, just doesn't work. But let's assume for a moment that it will play out that way, where does that leave governments?
Asked last night for a favour, I took a two-hour drive down to the Helsinki Airport to pick up a friend and his family as they returned from the US. on the way back, as we usually do, we talked lots of random stuff and one of the things I brought up was that the Finnish government shouldn't be saving money, they should be spending it to create jobs - any jobs. Sounds wasteful, right?
Well, preferably I would want them to create wellbeing jobs, where tens of thousands of positions are created to support people being their best selves and increasing wellbeing dramatically, but the idea is essentially the same. If there is no need for people to save for retirement, then there is also no need for governments to save money. Instead, the governments should all take an extreme version of the US debt-based system to make as many improvements as possible, because once money becomes irrelevant for people, debt becomes irrelevant too, right? This must be the way it is, because a government can't service debt if people aren't earning, paying tax, and the only way they can get money back is to give handouts and charge consumer tax.
As said, the economics doesn't add up.
So if people shouldn't save money, nothing need save money, because AI and automation is going to provide everything we need. The problem is of course that corporations will still expect to be paid something for what they create, yet if no one is earning, there is no way for a customer to pay them. So what is in it for the corporations? Well, nothing - because there single goal is to generate shareholder wealth, but with no customers, there is no need for shareholders either. And also, since there is no reason to save, even if shareholder wealth does increase, what is really in it for the shareholder, since they have everything provided also.
The system is broken and unfixable.
The traditional capitalist system of profit-driven activity fundamentally breaks, especially because the same system has manipulated activity away from something physical and with utility, to something theoretical with very little point. They can do this and make monetary profits because money has been repositioned from a mark of trade, to the meaning for trade, but once that meaning collapses, so does the concept of monetary wealth. And without monetary wealth, governments as we know them today, collapse also.
A bit of a conundrum?
Not really.
The fix is pretty simple, but in order for it to happen, we would have to change our entire outlook on the value of everything, and the value of life itself. We would have to work out what is actually meaningful and what actions are required for us to achieve that meaning, which would hopefully be a shift from increasing shareholder wealth, to increasing stakeholder health.
We are all stakeholders in that.
But whatever happens, the world as we know it is getting rearranged and while the rules of supply and demand will remain the same, the mechanisms of trade will have to fundamentally change. Finance as we understand it today will have to be wholesale replaced, because wealth generation, storage and transfer will no longer be viable.
Perhaps this is a good thing, where wealth can no longer be stored and the currency we are looking to accumulate is health instead. Health cannot be stored either and has no utility, unless used. So maybe the new currency we will be trading in is daily activity and our ability to improve ourselves, others, and the world around us. We won't get paid for it, but it might just be the most rewarding career we could ever dream.
Yet, what corporation or government will support wellbeing of people, over control of people?
Dystopia incoming.
Taraz
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