From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2003 - 16:35:08 MST
On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 02:48:44PM -0500, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> Nobody can say how societies will be organised in 2503. But I doubt the
> exotica of modern capitalism - frenetic trading on stock markets, macho chief
> executives, shopping mall consumerism, asset price bubbles - will survive in
> their present form. In another half millennium, these social phenomena - and
> the enormous economic inequalities they help underwrite - will seem as
> archaic as the master-serf relationships of feudalism. School children in the
> 25th century will titter at our market follies.
Yes, we will certainly have another way of doing economy. Economy itself
is needed as long as there are allocation issues, i.e. anything is
scarce - be it gold, energy or attention.
But the inequality part might very well be irreducible due to Zipf's
law-like phenomena. If popularity of things tends to distribute
themselves like power laws then we will always have a few super-populars
and a vast majority of not very popular things, even when this
distribution is due to totally free choices. And if popularity is linked
with value of some kind, then you get economic inequality.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html
Of course, the exact form of the power law and its consequences might
still be amenable to modification due to culture and technology.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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