It appears that most of the points I was going to make have already been made by “TW Andrews” so apologies if I repeat some.

“Given that capitalism doesn’t work too well without inequality, it has also ensured that many hard working people are wage slaves or in poverty.”

Define “poverty” :-) I would argue that those we regard as living in poverty in the UK today are better off than the many of the richest people of 500 years ago. That is: in most Western countries, poverty is now a relative phenomenon rather than an absolute one. That’s not to downplay the unpleasantness of having less than your neighbour but it is to make the point that one needs to make a choice here: do you want everybody to get richer (but some to get richer than others) or for everybody to be equally poor?

“The wealthiest people in the world really can buy anything they want”

Not quite :-)

They can’t spend their money on things that don’t exist.

It doesn’t matter how wealthy a 19th century plutocrat was, he still couldn’t have an iPod. He *could*, however, pay for forty people to follow him around and play his favourite music on demand.

The difference is that, today, people of even modest means can afford to carry their entire music collection with them wherever they go.

I guess this plays to the point (above) about stasis: a lot of left-wing thinking completely neglects the observation that scientific, social and technological progress has not stopped.

“Only 553 years to go!” [until everybody’s stinking rich!]

Coming at it from another angle, this is, of course, the argument for doing nothing about climate change: had Stern used the model that assumed the world followed policies most likely to encourage economic growth, the outcome would have shown that the cost of doing something now will impoverish both us and the “future people” (through suppressing the GDP upon which the growth rate is applied) - and it will do so to a greater extent than doing nothing now and forcing the people of the future to pay the larger cost of amelioration then. In other words, doing nothing today is both better for us *and* those in the future.

The GDP per capita example is meant a little frivolously, lets think way ahead though. I’m not entirely certain the gold plated sinks are a good example, because that assumes scarcity of matter, and I allow for the possibility of there being no scarcity of matter or energy. In fact, that’s really the time I would like to predict, that I was hinting at with such outrageous GDP per head, the day when matter and energy are so available that there is no lack of any of it for anyone. Maybe it isn’t possible, but there is a lot of both in the universe and there are always radical possible futures, I’m thinking dyson spheres, matter from space, matter from energy, virtual reality. So I think that a future where everyone really can have as many gold plated sinks as they want is actually possible.

Your point about services though is a real problem. No matter how wealthy people are, it’ll always be difficult to get them to do things for you that they don’t want to. In fact, it’ll become completely impossible if you can’t give them anything they don’t already have. The only way you’ll be able to encourage others to do things for you is with reasons they agree with. This is a serious problem (but is it a bad thing?), the only way out of it, keeping the whole economic utopia idea is a world where nobody actually needs anyone else to provide them with any services. Will people ever feel comfortable giving their kids to robots to look after? Or will they simply have to learn to live with the fact that they can no longer economically coerce others, and look after their kid themselves if they can’t find someone else who would help them because they want to? I suppose that even in an economically utopic world, some services would still trade (only for other services though).

Whether or not it would be nice to live in is an entirely different matter that would surely depend on taste. Personally, it doesn’t seem like hell by a long way to me. You’re right that improving ones lot is an important motivation for many, but it’s one of the baser ones and less powerful than others. If I didn’t have to work for money to maintain my quality of life, I would have a lot more time to be creative and for relationships. It’s the striving to be better in creativity and relationships that really drives me to do things, not striving to have a better material quality of life (I’m pretty much done with that, I’d like a bit more sure, but I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done for years in order to achieve that). I think this is probably true for most people. People persue professions because they enjoy them and the challenges they bring, not because they couldn’t make doctor/lawyer/politician (or whatever career society is rewarding most at the moment) school.

Such a society would be in a kind of stasis, but I don’t believe it would not be advancing. In fact I believe that when peoples only aim is to cultivate their creativity and relationships, we would experience the most vibrant society imaginable, with amazing art, and continual new technological discoveries.

There are at base only three raw materials in the universe, energy, matter and thought. With these three you can make anything that can be made. The economically utopic society would have to be able to so manipulate matter and energy and have access to enough of both, that they could keep up with the only one of the three which was still scarce.

I think that there is no physical or behavioural reason that this could not happen. If it really is possible, and humanity survives long enough, then crazy as it seems, it may even be inevitable.

In the version of Marxist Utopia which you describe “[i]f there is anyone with the desire for more wealth than they have, the whole system breaks down.”

But a corollary of this statement is that “No one can produce anything new or improve on anything that already exists.” Doing so would upset the delicate balance of equality which exists in this Utopia. For instance, say your sister is suffering from a degenerative disease for which you eventually discover a cure–it’s a complicated and time-consuming procedure, which only you understand fully at the outset. But she’s cured! That’s fantastic right? Well, if lots of people are suffering from the same disease, it’s a problem for our equality situation, because your time is limited, and you can’t cure all the people with the disease, since only you understand how to do it. Maybe you can train some people to do it, but that takes time too. So now you have to decide whether you want to cure or train. And you have to decide who to cure and who to train. The point is that some of the people with the disease are going to get attention, and some aren’t. And that destroys our situation of perfect equality–all because we discovered the cure to a disease.

The larger point is that any society of equality is one of stasis. And given that one thing which drives people, as well as providing them with fulfillment, is working to improve their lives and those of others, a static society sounds more like hell than Utopia to me.

I understand that the point about equality this isn’t the main thrust of the article–it’s just sort of assumed that a society of equally distributed wealth is Utopia–but the illustration of the problem above provides the basis for a fundamental criticism of the idea that you’ve posited: There is some quantity of wealth where we can all spend as much as we’d like–even if that’s really a lot–and still not have to worry. At that point we don’t need capitalism to generate new wealth–there’s plenty to go around–and we can all live off the fat of our ancestor’s labor in a communist paradise.

The basic problem with this is that it could only be the case if the things we spend money on weren’t scare.

For some things that may get to the point of being true. Digital music, for instance. Once a song’s been recorded and digitized, the cost of each person getting a copy of it is small enough that we could imagine it going to zero over time. I would imagine that we’ll see a proliferation of items like this as time passes. People will be able to make, distribute and consume as much digital media as they desire, for a very nominal cost. If all items were like this, it wouldn’t require that our per capita GDP grow much, as the cost of items would fall to almost nothing.

However, most goods aren’t like this, most especially services provided by other people. They are scarce, and in such a way that it would be hard to imagine ever having enough for everyone, in which case, all our billions still wouldn’t be enough to make everyone happy.

To illustrate this let’s do a thought experiment: Let’s say, for instance, that gold plated sinks come into fashion. We’re all super-hyper-mega rich and we can all afford a gold sink, right? Well, no. There’s only so much gold. Let’s say, enough to make sinks for half the population. But everyone wants one, so how do we decide who gets them?

Well, we have a couple of alternatives. We could distribute them randomly, but what we’d find is that “random” would usually mean “to the distributors friends and family.” Or we could go with a first-come, first-served approach. That seems fair, other than you either have to waste time in a physical queue, or hope to be the first to enter an electronic one. But at least it gets the sinks to the people who want them the most (as measured by the amount of time someone is willing to exchange to buy a sink). Another way–a way used by multiple societies throughout history–is to use money. I mean, that’s what everyone has all these billions for, right?

So we decide that the people who will pay the most will get the sinks. There are various ways to determine the right price for a sink, too, but I don’t think we need to go into the precise market dynamics. Suffice to say that if everyone wants one, and there aren’t enough, the price will rise, and we’ll have people without sinks. What’s still more likely is that as prices rise, some of the people who initially bought sinks will see how much they could sell their sinks for and think “damn, I like my gold-plated sink, but not that much,” and sell their sink for a profit, thus enabling them to spend a bit more on the next fad. And they’ll probably think of themselves as generous, giving up their sink to someone who obviously wants it more. And one could make a pretty reasonable argument that they’re right.

Now you may be saying, “Sure some people are willing to spend more than others, but how much can a gold-plated sink cost? We’ll all still be super-mega-hyper rich after the gold-plated sink ordeal.” Not so. The price of the sink won’t be determined by how much it cost to make, but rather by how much people are willing to pay, and let’s say that some people are willing to give half their wealth for a gold plated sink. So now they are .5 * super-mega-hyper rich, and the people selling the sinks are super-mega-hyper rich + (a lot more money from the sink buyin’ crazies). Multiply this over many hundreds of goods and services, and what happens is that some people are effectively rich and some are effectively poor. It’s all just happening at an inflated level of wealth.

This points to another quality of wealth. For the most part, in the western world, poverty is more or less a relative phenomenon. There are certainly some people who are desperately poor, but most of the people we think of as poor are really what would be better called “low income.” That is to say, they have a place to live, enough to eat, probably a car and almost certainly a television, but are highly constrained in what they can buy. They are poor in comparison to the rest of society, but if they were compared to the average person of 50 years ago, might be considered well off. I personally think that unequal distribution of wealth is an inherent condition of humanity, but in any case, we’re not going to find out simply by raising per capita wealth, even to super-mega-hyper levels.