Let us, employing all of the Red Queen's wisdom, begin at the beginning. People get hungry so they pick berries and gather nuts, an ancient construct that has stood the test of time. That's the baseline economy, the fountainhead. From that all behaviors and objects properly monetized and relatively valued in a market, subject to alienation, the economic milieu, proceeds, from the dawn of time until today. How do you get from there to here?
Productivity. If one rationalizes picking berries, essentially taking the linguistic perception of the behavior from picking to harvesting, improves the practice by cultivation, and reduces the opportunity cost per berry, the amount of time one cannot be doing something else, one increases the productivity of a whole economy defined by its market valuation in a specific currency, its opportunity capital, its wealth. Taking liberties, if one defines an economy as a vehicle for going from appetite to satiety, increasing productivity means one is doing more in less time, the vehicle is going faster and is harder to control. Ask any Grand Prix driver. The system is going from extremely robust to increasing fragility. Probabilities of success diminish. It gets dicey but capital is created and concentrated in the form of surplus opportunity exploitation capability. As an observation, capitalism does not require capitalists. AI could concentrate and allocate capital. However, motivation and vision would then be scarce and valuable and unequally rewarded. It would work out the same way. There would be capitalists. Markets allocate resources, including money, to talent on a basis, not of abstract merit, but what is useful in the moment and significantly scarce. Now what is the process by which productivity increases are brought into being?
Coincident with picking berries is a psychological space, a surround of object and idea, however characterized, that corresponds with, is the precursor of, that authored context we call civilization. While both meadows and parks have trees, a tree to a meadow is reality and a tree to a park is a useful, and pleasant, fiction. Discontent with meadows is essential motivation for building parks, for moving society from a primitive relationship with a parochial given reality to a more complex relationship with a sophisticated general authored context, civilization, which is a well motivated pattern of distancing on this pathological nightmare of a planet which describes an orbit too far from God; too close to Nature. Such a move, involving rationalizations or narratives, amplifies simple improvements of process into significant productivity increases. The economic vehicle with its value calculus, money, and its bazaars or markets comes into being and becomes subject to acceleration. The pleasant useful fiction of a park becomes a more noxious and inhumane manufactory. Useful fiction, the narrative function, grand and petite, by the necessity of obsessing through trauma, becomes transformed into necessary delusion. That delusional state, the state of a Grand Prix driver, that one has control over one's destiny, that probability is the wind at one's back, that the vehicle will do what it's supposed to do safely, is the defining aspect of economic transformation and the psychology of the process of extending and maintaining civilizations which is a risky business.
The moment of truth, the risk to civilization, as the writer of Ford v Ferrari noted, is Jung's moment of reality asking you who you are and, if you don't know, it tells you. Those moments are inherent in and critical to the process of civilization and its economic behavior. It is the function of the necessary delusion to ignore the possibility of such a moment, to assume the mantle of infallibility and immortality, until one has either been told who they are or is at loose ends and ensconced, knowing who they are, in a pleasant useful fiction again, the return to Paradise. This is the dynamic of the Anthropocene Era. Gratification is immediate and general, the entire world is incomprehensibly wealthier. Consequences are deferred and possibly catastrophic, global warming.
Everyone witnessing market economic behavior and progress, especially boom/bust and creative/destruction, has ventured the opinion that there must be a better way, even those who are gratified that it's done at all. We don't know what that better way is. Equilibrium Economics? Possibly. Until we do find a better way suited to both humans and machines we are stuck with it, at least until robots making robots take productivity to infinity which will be an incomprehensible Jungian moment. We cannot afford to be delusional in the face of that.
Do Well and Be Well.
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