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Originally Posted by lagavulin16  I agree with you. Dean seems to think that if there is no financial incentive, there would be no innovation. But I think without scarcity we'd live in a wonderful world where people would pursue their interests, including creating new products or improving existing ones.
It's an interesting question because although we aren't there with physical products, we are there with virtual ones. Dean and others seem to think if this continues we'll find a world with no music, no movies, and no books. I think people will still create all three regardless. |
It's got nothing to do with whether people will innovate or not. The problem is that innovation becomes more and more expensive as we go. You can't just set in your bedroom and create a new cancer drug, or design a new aircraft. These things require massive amounts of investment to do. You cannot raise that amount of invsetment if it can't be made back.
Just because you can create i-beams they aren't going to automatically put themselves into a building. That requires people doing work, and they aren't going to do that for fun, because it's hard work.
Some types of intellectual property are of the sort that you can create in your bedroom, but some of it is just like buildings and airplanes. Those types of IP will go away because no one can afford to do them without the financial incentives to get people to invest in those efforts. You cannot create LOTRs in a world where it's impossible to make a big return on investment. You cannot create large scale software and support it.
I mean, have you guys just never read ANY history at all? Have you not looked at what happened in the communist countries of the previous century? They failed, and they failed because communism is not practical, for the same reasons that your theories are not practical. People will work hard when they are incentivized to work hard. The western world completely out innovated and out produced the communist world.