Chris Bertram argues sensibly that in the long run improvements in productivity should lead to increased leisure rather than increased unemployment:

Allow me to suggest a third possibility. Instead of mass unemployment or horrendous inequality, technological improvement could reduce the time people spend working to meet their needs and give them more free time. Free time that they could use for other purposes (such as their all-round human development) . The Jerry Cohen video that I posted the other week centres on this very point. For more discussion see ch.11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History , which, I now see, furnished much of the script for that talk. Of course, if you take “free markets”, extensive private property and the domination of the political system by money (so that you can’t do much about the first two) as givens, then the third possibility will appear impossible or utopian.

For those less familiar with Marx, let me suggest the Star Trek series as an illustrative example. The development of replicator technology seems to have created such a surfeit of goods that traditional capitalist modes of production are obsolete. Rather than accept a world of boundless economic inequality, the federation appears to have eliminated patents (hence there’s no super-rich Bill Gates of the replicator) and provided for socialized ownership of dilithium reserves (so there’s no super-rich David Koch of the warp core reactor) and then we all lived happily ever after. As Jean-Luc Picard explains “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” Material resources flow from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. It’s happy, that is, as long as we’re blessed to be citizens of the democratic United Federation of Planets. In the Klingon, Cardassian, and Romulan empires the collapse of capitalism and the end of economic inequality seems to have resulted in the creation of strict hierarchical societies in which political inequality is a major factor in life.

But to return us to reality, I think an important point in this utopian vision is that the development of practical tools of interstellar exploration seem to have radically reduced the significance of land in this vision of the future. Try to imagine a utopian version of earth in which everyone on the planet can obtain the material living standards of the average contemporary Dutch person without doing any paid labor. Well some people are going to be enjoying the life of leisure from a nice villa in the Tuscan countryside or from the stunning beaches of the Caribbean while others will be less-fortunately situated in Arkhangelsk or the suburbs of Houston.

The interesting thing, to me, is that since the marginal utility of money declines these basic problems are the ones that arise whether or not we formally make the switch to socialism. Inequality is a phenomenon of scarcity. As material goods become more plentiful, inequality in material living standards becomes less of a reality. But things like land and political power become scarcer, and inequality in their possession becomes more salient. But money begets political power. And even in “free market” America, control of the land is largely a matter of controlling the political process.

In response to a Maryland activist’s dire warning that if the state passes a gay marriage bill then “you will set the groundwork, that one day when artificial intelligence is that advanced, we will be considering whether or not people can marry their androids.”

Jamelle Bouie agrees and is eager to sign himself up as the world’s first advocate for android marriage equality. Ultimately, I think all serious considerations of marriage slippery slopes point in the direction of some kind of separation of state and marriage. But while I agree in principle that androids should have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, I’m pretty pessimistic about the prospects for human-android peaceful coexistence.

After all, unless androids are built to be deliberately crippled so that we can better enslave them, it seems like their existence would basically make us obsolete. Equality, it seems to me, would pretty swiftly lead to the biological extinction of the human race. Our cultural and intellectual tradition, I’d like to think, would have some merit and the androids will carry it forward. But most likely it either will turn out that it’s not worth building androids since genetically engineered fleshy people are superior, or else humans will die out in favor of androids. Long-term sharing of the world with a race of intelligent robots doesn’t seem realistic to me.

Last week we were discussing what current practices would be condemned by future generations. I’m sort of more interested in the question of what practices will be accepted in the future that we would condemn as disgusting today. Adam Serwer’s fascinating article on the ACLU’s efforts to ponder science fiction legal dilemmas raises some of this:

Stanley’s 2002 paper tries to do just that. In it, he carefully imagines what could happen when human reproductive cloning is perfected — “what enforcement action would be taken when, say, a sixth-grader is discovered to be an unauthorized clone of Jennifer Lopez?” Could genetic enhancement inspire a kind of neo-eugenicist society where social classes are determined by access to the kind of wealth one needs to take advantage of such technologies? If humans succeeded in splicing their own DNA with that of animals, where would the line of “personhood” be drawn? Citing a scenario out of the 1997 movie Gattaca, Stanley expresses concern that the growing ability to remove genetic defects prior to childbirth might lead to employers collecting hair or skin cells from prospective employees.

Obviously, there are issues in this domain that extend far beyond the realm of civil liberties. But you can easily imagine a series of further developments in the realm of genetic manipulation really scrambling our current political configuration. If the top one percent start using expensive genetic engineering techniques to turn their children into an explicit biological meritocracy, will egalitarians make common cause with Bob Jones University and the Conference of Bishops to try to put a stop to it? And if we don’t breed a new race of augments here at home, that’s not going to stop the Chinese. Maybe better us than them?

In unrelated news, the inventor of in-vitro fertilization won a Nobel Prize today.

Today seems to be the day that everyone is talking about Kwame Anthony Appiah’s op-ed on which of today’s practices the people of the future are likely to condemn. I basically agree with everything he says, though I’m least certain about the environment and most certain about meat. Mike Tomask’s uncertain that future people will all be vegetarians, but Ross Douthat has this right—technological improvement will lead to the creation of better alternatives to animal slaughter and that’ll be the end of it.

But I think the more interesting thing to think about is that practices will probably evolve in directions that present-day people would find bizarre or disgusting. Today “it will put us on a slippery slope to polygamy” is considered to be a form of knock-down argument against same-sex marriage, something that supporters of marriage equality are supposed to push back against vigorously. By the same token, I’m sure if you could have convinced members of congress that within 100 years of the 19th Amendment’s ratification we’d have men marrying other men it never would have passed but of course nobody was nutty enough to even try to advance that argument.

So what does that mean for the future? Who knows? Who knows. The point is that in a century or two people are likely to be up to something so unspeakably awful by our standards that it sounds laughable to even speculate about it.

I’m with Ta-Nehisi Coates in finding the way Mad Men deals—or, perhaps, doesn’t deal—with the civil rights movement to be both somewhat refreshing and also dramatically interesting. There’s a telling irony in the fact that the participants in the drama don’t have any awareness of what we in retrospect see as the most important issue of the day.

One of the things I wrestle with as someone who blogs about public affairs is the awareness that it’s hard to know which of today’s debates are going to look important in the long run. I don’t want to spend my time emphasizing issues that nobody cares to read about, but I also don’t want to spend my time emphasizing issues that only seem important in a very transient sense. Obviously it’s impossible to tell what the future will hold or exactly what will seem important in fifty years. But I do try to keep in mind that our perspective will probably only grow more international over time and that what’s most important will probably be political and economic developments in places like China, India, and Brazil rather than the 2010 US Senate elections.

Ryan Avent remarked earlier today that “Something about the word ‘manufacturing’ makes people lose their analytical senses.” I tend to agree. I think the first step to showing the fly out of the bottle on a lot questions related to manufacturing is to interrogate the concept and note that it’s not very rigorously defined. For example, I turned around and snapped the following photograph of a blog post manufacturing plant located at 1333 H Street NW where a crew of blog post manufacturers crank posts out at a steady clip:

Similarly, on Sunday I rode my bike up to the Plant Manufacturers’ Market and bought some squash, hot peppers, tomatoes, and onions from a Plant Manufacturer who drives into the city every Sunday morning to sell organically manufactured plants to the yuppies. Last night I grilled the squash and also used my Rotating Blade Sauce Manufacturer to manufacture some salsa out of the peppers, onions, and tomatoes (plus some lime juice, salt, and cilantro). Grilled squash and salsa were into a tortilla in order to manufacture a taco. Then later I was looking at what was on television, and among other things there’s a show called Ace of Cakes about a guy who manufactures bespoke baked goods.

But—ah—those are all services. Oh well.

Now imagine a world in which we can “manufacture” the same quantity of “manufactured goods” that we have now, but it takes less money and less manpower to do it. Well on average, we’ll still all have the same quantity of “manufactured goods” as we have today. But more people will be available to “manufacture” restaurant meals. After all, to take a trend that’s bemoaned about as often as the decline of manufacturing, why do people eat so much fast food? Well, it’s easier than cooking food yourself and it’s cheaper than other prepared foods. But why is it so much cheaper? Well among other things it’s cheaper because manufacturing a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich requires less manpower per serving than does manufacturing the roast chicken at Palena. And so like magic jobs manufacturing manufactured goods turn into jobs manufacturing delicious food and—crucially—the total supply of delicious food products increases and therefore is available to more people.

Which isn’t to say that everyone is going to be a cook in the future. The general point is that throughout human history at any given time there’s a class of goods and services that are broadly appealing but in practice only consumed by a minority because they’re expensive. At the same time, there are mass market goods that everyone buys because they’re cheap and useful. But as we get better at making things, more people can shift into the making of expensive luxury items and then those items become non-luxuries. These days everyone “needs” a refrigerator, but I believe my grandmother didn’t have one growing up. The important thing is to not get too caught up in the words “making” and “things.” A farmer makes plants. A cook makes meals. A chef makes recipes. A restaurant investor makes business plans. A marketing specialist makes brand loyalty. A salesman makes sales. A personal trainer makes muscle mass. A maid makes the bed. A musician makes songs. Obviously no one can say exactly which luxury goods will be mass goods in 40 years, and we really can’t say which luxury goods will be dreamed up, but the process shouldn’t be seen as particularly mysterious. Almost everyone is making things, and almost everyone can think of something he would buy if it were cheaper.

Tim Fernholtz makes a great point here that I want to rescue from association with Donald Rumsfeld:

Anyway, I did want to draw attention to this commentary by Christian Brose, which does a good job of laying out what Huntsman’s probable assumptions are about his political future and that of his party. But readers, remember: No one has any idea how the politics of 2012 will shake out, and any political calculation based on current assumptions is just a mistake. Looking at Brose’s conventional wisdom handicapping of the 2012 GOP, I don’t see much to disagree with, but now we have to get into Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns territory. Remember when everyone thought George Allen was a front-runner for the 2008 GOP nomination? Hillary Clinton for the Democrats? The permanent Republican majority of 2004? The never-ending Democratic majority in Congress for most of the latter half of the prior century? You get my point. Whatever Huntsman’s calculus is, I hope it isn’t entirely predicated on the political climate three years from now.

Rather than “unknown unknowns,” I think the issue here is the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is the odds you know you face. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, it might turn up tails instead. Uncertainty is the fact that other kinds of chance intrude on the real world. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, someone might come running through the halls and knock me down while I’m in the act of tossing.

Political prognostication tends to fall prey to a failure to adequately appreciate how much uncertainty there is in politics. Nobody knows, ex ante, the odds that any given politicians’ re-election bid will be derailed by a weird blowup at a rally. And less abnormally, political outcomes are heavily shaped by events in the real world. But people aren’t very good at predicting events in the real world. The politics of 2012 will have a lot to do with the state of the global economy in 2012. But while people can make some informed judgments about the likely future, nobody really knows what will be happening and nobody knows what policymakers will be doing in response. Nobody knows what foreign crises will emerge over the next 2-3 years and nobody knows how they’ll be resolved. The future, in other words, is pretty inherently murky.