Malazan Empire: Grief - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Is the problem really our ability to produce things?

We have already become massively more efficient at producing things since the industrial revolution. We can already produce enough food to feed people, enough houses to home people, and so on.

I struggle to see why getting even more efficient at producing things should necessarily solve the problems we still have meeting people's needs and giving them decent lives.

Edit: Notice we're getting a bit off topic for the UK politics thread which I take my part of the blame for! Best we take the future-of-humanity discussion to a more suitable thread or make a new one.

the broken, on 25 July 2026 - 01:03 AM, said:

I generally try to keep a positive outlook in my day to day life because too much doom-and-gloom isn't really helpful or mentally healthy. But I do think the most realistic scenario is going to be catastrophic at least for large parts of the world and at least for some amount of time.

I also think our economic system is not really designed for moderate declines. It's a system that constantly searches for growth and panics if growth slows down. There are powerful negative feedback loops in the system once declines start which tend to turn them into crashes. Investors pull out money, companies slough jobs, and so on.

We've never really managed to get away from boom and bust and core parts of our financial system - like the vast amount of debt that banking is built to create - seem to make it practically inevitable.

the broken, on 25 July 2026 - 01:03 AM, said:

I'm not sure. We've seen in pockets that there's support for a different kind of politics but it feels like there's a big inertia against change, whether from within traditional parties or in the media or elsewhere. It's also momentum that can be co-opted. When Macron came up he fit the mould for populist-but-not-far-right and even brought a new party into the mainstream. Obama as well I think captured people's growing desire for change away from the establishment. Both are competent, even technically very skilled, politicians. But it feels like that turned out to be form more than function in the end.

I think the design of our political systems, especially the way parties work, causes a lot of these problems. I suspect change will come from outside rather than inside the party system. Or, if it comes from inside the party system, it will take too long to mitigate the worst harms. (I've always quite liked the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does").

A lot of this discussion depends on how you see the timing and reversibility of these problems.

If you think that these problems have a long-term horizon and can be fixed by good political choices in the future, it's easier to be optimistic.

The pessimistic view is that these problems have short-term horizons and tipping points that make them very hard to reverse in the future.

At least for climate change, the possibility that we're facing short-term tipping points that will make future fixes harder feels reasonably settled. The worse the situation gets the more you have to spend on mitigation rather than prevention. And then you have things like the ice sheets and permafrost. That's probably the easiest one since it's a scientific question rather than a political one.

But I suspect there may also be tipping points for at least a couple of the other factors as well. You can only let in so many anti-democratic parties before you stop getting to have elections, for example. I suspect there might be a similar tipping point around technology development (and who controls it) but that's a lot more speculative.

the broken, on 25 July 2026 - 01:03 AM, said:

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, yep. That's by number of conflicts, but we're also living in a period with significant military and civilian casualties considering the likes of Ukraine, Sudan, and the Middle East.

War is not something inevitable and I obviously hope we return to more peaceful times, but I won't be surprised if underlying trends - shifts in the global order and climate-driven scarcity - result in higher baseline levels of conflict than we saw in the post-WW2 era.

the broken, on 25 July 2026 - 01:03 AM, said:

Absolutely, I agree it's a very complex topic to assess as a whole. I genuinely think it does not take that much to make people happy, and that we could have a happier society with less total economic production for example. The problem is that our system is geared around people needing to work a lot to meet their basic needs, and that people (I think) do want jobs to feel like they are contributing to society on some level.

the broken, on 24 July 2026 - 12:25 AM, said:

the broken, on 24 July 2026 - 12:54 PM, said:

A huge amount of that progress has been driven by improving conditions in the global south. Broadly speaking, there is less of that "catch up" effect to be had from our current position. That's obviously a generalization but if you look at things like infant mortality you'll find there used to be a much clearer distinction between high-income and low-income economies.

On the other hand, trends I think will drive the standard of living down include:

1. Climate change. We've not globally done enough about prevention nor about preparing for the consequences. We're already seeing persistent droughts in the Middle East and Africa, heightened excess deaths from the weather in Europe, unprecedented wildfires in North America, and so on. These will continue to get worse and will eat up resources that could otherwise be used to improve living standards. There are also possible direct health effects for example linked to micro-plastics.

2. Demographics. Previous generations in high-income countries especially benefitted from a combination of high life expectancy and low retirement age. Retirement ages have been creeping upwards. This comes down to the distribution between workers and non-workers and bleeds into policy choices related to immigration and taxation. It's not an impossible problem to manage but politicians have struggled to manage it.

3. Working conditions. As well as working for longer, people in advanced economies take longer to find steady work and arrive with more debt. They take longer to buy houses. They are significantly less likely to have a traditional pension. Old-age poverty rates already started to increase across OECD countries over the last decade, reversing the previous trend. In regions like Europe, governments have large unfunded pension liabilities. This links to the point above. Since it's a UK threat it's worth noting the triple-lock is basically untouchable politically.

4. Sedentary, anti-social, and sleepless lifestyles. The WHO estimates that 31% of adults globally do not meet recommended activity levels and the number is increasing. Between office jobs, home computers, and social media, people live less healthy lifestyles (nevermind sugar). We have essentially - amazingly - managed to cancel out out major positive changes including the rapid decline of smoking in many countries. For example, life expectancy in the UK has "only" stalled but the number of healthy years you can expect to live has actually declined. As far as I'm aware the global trend is that life expectancy has gone up, driven by things like disease prevention, without similar gains in healthy aging. Life expectancy in the US has actually slipped downwards compared with the 90s. Mental health and youth wellbeing trends in advanced economies are alarming, although I take it with some pinch of salt that we are probably capturing them more too since culture is more open. Some of this lifestyle stuff is down to people's choices but some is the nature of work and entertainment options.

5. Political instability. Democracy indexes show continuing declines, political participation has generally dropped in a lot of the world, and armed conflict is at its highest levels since WW2. This stems from various factors. Some are external to countries like climate, resource competition, and the rise of alternative powers to the US. Others are internal to countries like decline of unions, outsourcing political choices to markets, and media concentration. That is, I think this is a symptom driven by other points I mention but it's also happening independently from them.

6. Inequality. Wealth inequality is spiralling and only looks set to get worse between the next cycle of technology development and the next cycle of generational inheritance (or not). I don't necessarily see that directly driving poor quality of life outcomes in the day-to-day sense. It's not that extreme wealth makes people happy, for example. But I do think it contributes to global instability and will continue to drive tension, as well as concretely sapping resources away from say communal infrastructure projects and towards personal vanity projects.

7. Technology. I have mixed feelings about this one, but I generally think technology advances tend to have a centralizing rather than de-centralizing function in society. They require capital and can be controlled by small in-groups rather than requiring the consent of the population. Surveillance technology has spread rapidly across societies inside the West and outside of it, protests are increasingly managed or restricted, and even technologies like the internet which in principle could be decentralized are increasingly centralized around a very small number of platforms. Things like autonomous drones are more a question of the politics of deploying them moreso than the technological possibility of developing them at this point in time.

I don't personally think that perpetual growth of the whole economy is necessary to maintain high living standards. However, it seems to be baked in to the political order almost everywhere whether it is sustainable or not. I have very little faith that politicians will be able to chart a more sustainable path without first incurring major human costs.

This isn't to say we'll go back to all being hunter gatherers. But there is a wide range of possibilities between "continue to build higher quality of life in line with past decades" and "hunter gatherers" and that gap is made up of human suffering.

Systemic change first requires getting the British population to accept realities that most of the country simply do not seem willing to stomach for example regarding their retirements, communities, and ways of living.

British politics is starting to look to me like Italian politics before Meloni. It feels practically impossible for politicians to get elected except by making promises they know they will fail to keep. That's a breeding ground for constant discontent and turnover.

Not saying Starmer was any good but I doubt others will fare better. At best the hope seems to be the Meloni model whereby you keep people happy in performative ways without changing the fundamentals, but there is a limit to that especially when people have had so many years of austerity. People want to feel like their lives are improving. The immediate heuristic being that something is being done about the people or things they blame for being so badly-off in the first place, which typically is not an actual solution at all.

I don't only blame the electorate since politicians obviously bear their share of the blame too. Neoliberal ideology has ran out of steam but no one has really articulated a winning alternative except the far-right. Traditional politicians seem content to let elections devolve into centrism vs far-right populism contests in the hope of winning short-term "vote against them" victories, despite the fact that will obviously allow the far-right into governments in the longer-term (where many may pursue anti-democratic ends).

This is not just the UK but the same thing that has happened with Macron in France, the same thing that seems to be gradually shaping up in Germany. I am not optimistic about that dynamic at all. I suspect a large amount of the world will face this problem in the next decade or two, especially as climate change really gets into swing, and it becomes even more obvious that people will not have anything like the living standard of previous generations.

Moving over to the right thread.

Macros, on 04 June 2026 - 05:05 AM, said:

I feel like this is chiefly a problem with capitalism and our insistence on constantly accelerating growth. Anything that gets too wrapped up in that is going to have roughly the same problem.

I have similar feelings about it making people stupider. That's mostly a problem with systems that care about the wrong things, like schools that care about you producing essays to get a grade rather than about learning.

QuickTidal, on 04 June 2026 - 11:39 AM, said:

I think it's been known for ages reddit is a massive source for LLM data. I vaguely remember years ago you could prompt weird errors in early versions of ChatGPT using obscure reddit usernames. It's not a particularly a bad thing when you're just trying to train a model for "what does human writing sound like" which is the what LLMs have been built to do. Obviously no guarantee of factual accuracy but that's not what they're built for.