Quote from: SpontaneousDisorder on September 16, 2012, 05:58:59 PM

1/It reduces or eliminates incentive to work
2/It diverts money from investment to consumption, reducing long term capital accumulation
3/There are no guarantees in nature, the subsistence of life does not produce itself. Man must adjust himself to the market not the other way around.

1/ It reduces the incentive to work for food, medical bills and what the bureaucracy deem the economy can already easily provide for all. It doesn't reduce the incentive to work to be better than one's peers, which is also a huge human motivator. There was a study somewhere that found that most of the people against minimum wage increases are those who are close to the minimum wage, where an increase would actually mean they're on the minimum wage themselves. Silly ideas of social status and position among peers.

2/ Yes it does, but this decision is made with the intention to raise the standard of living on the very bottom. It's a social decision, really, at the expense of utilizing important resources like food and healthcare now instead of saving them for later.

3/ Do you refer to the possibility of drought in this statement? That is, natural disasters might mean there isn't enough food to go around anyway, so no many how much money people are given for free, they'll never be able to buy it? I'm sure there could be clauses to cater for this (some national emergency storage or whatever)

Quote from: SpontaneousDisorder on September 16, 2012, 05:58:59 PM

My tought is you'll create a lazy nation with way too much free time on its hands and no incentive to move forward.
Most people will not go to school anymore and the nation will split in a learned upper class doing all the work and an unlearned lower class that will play computer games all day long.
It's a great way of ruining a perfectly good country.

Incentive to move forward where? Where are we "going" so adventurously as a species that it requires us to have no free time? If a society can completely feed, shelter, clothe, commune and entertain itself easily, as well as allow the opportunity for outstanding individual achievements and recognition, what more is there to ask for? Isn't that the win scenario for civilization?

What makes you think people won't go to school any more? Even if they don't, what does it matter? If there is no pressing need as a society to produce unnecessary farmers or doctors or manufacturers, why waste the energy?

The film Idiocracy was not about people not going to school, it was about smart people not having children and dumb people having them because the focus of society was on money, not silly things like going to Mars or Alpha Centauri.

Quote from: JoelKatz on September 17, 2012, 06:21:39 AM

Quote from: miln40 on September 16, 2012, 04:39:10 PM

1) People are producing more than they need, and with the further development of technology even less people will be needed to produce even more. Since less people will be working to produce, society as a whole would earn less, and therefore the population will not be able to afford to purchase all the goods being produced, eventually leading to bigger and bigger problems.

This makes no sense. If society produces more, why would society earn less?

By saying "Since less people will be working to produce, society as a whole would earn less", I think he meant "more people will be on zero income vs some income", not that the total amount earned by society is less.

To elaborate, if there are only 50 possible jobs to sustainably produce everything imaginable that 100 people need every year, what will the 50 unemployed people do to earn those things off the ones working? Innovation is really quite difficult, as is leadership in business, and people *like* working 5 days a week. If there's nothing that the 50 employed want from the unemployed, the unemployed will have a most common choice of taking by force or starving. He's proposing an agreement within society to force upon itself the total distribution of certain things, providing they are plentiful anyway. Getting everyone to work half the time would also do the job, if you can convince people already with the jobs to sit around and not work for more than half the week. If they insist on working more, then those people who aren't good at innovating or leading or stealing will starve, and each society can make it's own choices on whether they're fine with that or not.

As for the actual OP; We're doomed by the lack of phosphorus, as far I know, to continue this massive ramp up of population on easy food. If technology can keep it going, and population itself can be forced onto a globally sustainable level somehow (it will anyway, I suppose), I think this is easily achievable. Australia is actually pretty close to this right now. The only difference is here you can't get welfare unless you're actively seeking employment. It's barely enough to survive on, though, so either not enough is being produced (it is), or the culture's sentiment isn't enough to go the next step, which is huge barrier.