Creativity-based Economy

Buckminster Fuller liked to do calculations like this: He summed the total money in the world, and divided it by the number of people. Back then (1970's) that made everyone a millionaire. These sorts of thoughts are good mind exercises, and points of contemplation.

However, in fact, money and resources are divided they way they are, which is not only uneven among people, but among groups, like governments and companies. And the rights to use these resources is decided by a complex mix of capitalism (in pure form, those who provide the most value get the most rights to use and produce more stuff), and government (in pure form, elected, or otherwise acknowledged, representatives redistributing wealth and/or managing laws, in order to promote the greatest value, to constituents.)

Also, for most people, we have a highly complex way of working with resources...we don't necessarily own everything we use. We are very inter-related with each other and all the products and services which are part of our lives. (To make one of innumerable examples, take the internet: not only do most people not even know all the elements that are part of the very computer they use, but the internet is woven across a complex platform of technology, which partakes or many resources...ultimately, arguably, all of them.)

As complex as wealth control may be, broadly speaking, the tendency of technology to do more with less is the way we will raise standards of living. This will happen both naturally, as an evolutionary epi-phenomena of technology, and consciously, as people work on technology that directly apply to things like food and energy production, with the intention to help people live better.

Ray Kurzweil has the term "the law of accelerating returns." This is extrapolating the speeding-up tendency of technology to do more with less. The result will be that soon, most of what we need to live, and more, will be practically free. Nano technology even holds out the promise that we will not even need any resource in particular (such as metals, oil or mine-able, non-renewable stuff)...since theoretically everything could be built from the atoms up. Basically, all you need is one resource, stuff (carbon, at first)...and it's all the same. Assemblers make it in to whatever you can imagine.

In recognition of that point we are coming to, I suggest that the future will be an imagination (creativity) based economy. I have built backwards from that point, and am laying the ground-work, the path, that leads from here to there.