From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 17:54:28 MDT
--- Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu> wrote:
> It seems to me that you are the most conservative
> investor there is; you
> invest all of your income in immediate consumption.
> You want your returns
> so immediate that there is not time to invest them
> at all. And then you
> criticize other investors, who actually take a
> chance by putting their
> income into ventures that may or may not be
> successful, saying they should
> take even more chances than they do. Ever hear of
> the mote in another's eye?
I believe he said he had too little to invest. In his
defense, there is a demonstrated minimum amount of
financial resources, which most people are presently
unfortunately below, where one can achieve meaningful
progress in various technologies with just that
amount.
In theory, if one could produce sudden and rapid
prosperity for many people, such that various costs of
living do not get a chance to slowly rise to consume
most of this prosperity before it is around long
enough for the people are secure in its existance,
then one could generate a large investor class from
the significant percentage of these people who would
see nothing better to do with their newfound wealth
than to make more of it, achieving some non-financial
gains along the way. (Put shortly: give a lot of
people $1 billion each, and you could talk a lot of
'em into investing in technologically progressive
companies, or even charities.)
In theory, this is what most US presidential elections
boil down to for most voters (concerned more about
their own economy than about anything else), though
there has yet to be a candidate who has successfully
tapped into the "Make Money Fast: Vote For Me" meme
(at least without paying voters directly, which is
widely perceived as an unsustainable wealth generation
mechanism among other negative qualities, and was thus
made illegal). I wonder if it would be possible, once
space access has been made much cheaper by certain
processes already underway, to propose federal backing
for space mining initiatives to achieve this effect.
Say, charge NASA, under credible threat of dissolution
if they do not perform fast (if they have not already
been reformed), with nudging some M-type asteroids
into Earth orbit within one or two years. Meanwhile,
make sure American companies can extract anything of
value Earth-side (platinum-group metals, say) for
cheap before any effective international competition
can come around (say, put some guards up there, then
let the international legal challenges play out for
the year or two that mining takes). Let the market
start bottoming out for said valuables - it doesn't
matter, the voters have their bucks and you've got
re-election. Want an encore so your veep can sit in
your chair? The not-so-valuable metals left behind
can be converted into a vast horde of solar power
satellites: a jobs program funded by the above wealth.
Or maybe a crash program into practical helium-3
fusion, if that seems viable, and set up American
helium-3 mining companies. And that's just space
access; severely reducing food and synthetic gasoline
costs via biotech is another path, albeit perhaps not
quite as easy to do fast enough.
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