Monday 8 October 2007

Futurology

So, what does the immediate future hold? By far the most straightforward way of answering this question is with a straightforward pessimism that goes something like this: our living is market-determined. Supply-and-demand means that if the supply of something exceeds demand its price goes down, where if demand exceeds supply the price goes up. There are, broadly speaking, three important quantities in the world; people, energy, raw materials. The supply of the latter two is diminishing and will continue to diminish; therefore raw materials and energy have been getting, and will continue to get, more expensive. On the other hand, human beings continue to breed, which is to say, the supply of people is increasing. Therefore the price of people (for instance, what we will be able to earn in wages) will continue to fall. In other words, the future will be more expensive to live in, whilst we, speaking generally, will have less money to pay for it.

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