Must... not... answer... Must... read... graduate... admissions... files... Must... not... let... oneself... get... dragged... into... more... mailing... list... debates... however... interesting... the... question...
Must... resist...
Must...
AAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!
One place to start is with USC demographer and economic historian Richard Easterlin, who in his 1997 _Growth Triumphant: The Economic History of the Twenty-First Century_ argues that capitalism as we know it is very likely to continue indefinitely. Easterlin views the future--for the next century at least--as likely to bring a continuation of technological progress so that living standards in the industrial core double every fifty years or so. He sees the future as bringing convergence to first-world standards of living following two generations on the heels of an economy's attaining near-universal literacy.
Easterlin sees the population explosion is almost over. As he sees it, the population explosion was first of all the consequence of a public-health revolution largely independent of but parallel to the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution greatly amplified productivity in manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture. The public-health revolution greatly increased human life expectancy by giving governments and doctors easy-to-use tools to conquer many of the major causes of death. Both had their origins in modern science. But they proceeded by and large independently. The mortality decline of the public-health revolution set off the population explosion: fertility was still high and birth control scarce, hence populations grew rapidly. However, he believes that the population explosion is nearly over: Birth control is now cheap. The education requirements of modern economies have turned children from capital goods--assets to a household's production and insurance for the parents' old age--into consumption goods: sources of joy and of expense. The net result is a fall in the birth rate to match the fall in the death rate, and a worldwide human population that will approach stability over the next century.
This means that our global pollution problems are solvable without mass control of human fertility against the will of individual children-loving men and women.
Thus in Easterlin's view science and technology raise living standards, birth control lowers population growth, a century from now people in developing countries live better than people in developed countries today, and people in developed countries live better than kings live today. But he describes the future he sees, of steadily rising material prosperity and economic progress, as a "hollow victory". Economic growth is indeed triumphant, but to no point. For material prosperity does not make humans happier: the "triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity". For Easterlin believes that people are no happier today in their relative material abundance than they were three centuries ago in their relative material poverty. Indeed, he believes that people are not happier today in the U.S. than in India. Happiness is attained when you achieve your dreams and solve your problems. Material abundance helps you do so, but it also teaches you to dream bigger dreams and pose yourself more complicated problems. So people continue to act as they do today: they think that if only they work harder and earn more money and acquire the ability to purchase an expensive and high-quality set of game equipment so that they can play Centrifugal-Bumble-Puppy, they will be happy. Individually they are right, but collectively they are wrong. So our economy will continue to run as it has indefinitely, with wage labor, private property, entrepreneurship, enterprise, and profits--"capitalism" as we know and love it--but all this will be to no social purpose.
People used to think that material progress would lead to material satiation. Lenin looked forward to a time when commodities were distributed in the way that sugar is distributed in hotel restaurants: it's on the table, you take what you need, and you leave the rest. Keynes looked forward to: "the day...not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied... by our real problems---the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion." And on that day: "We shall...rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years.... We shall...assess...the love of money as a possession--as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life--for what it is... one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease..."
In Easterlin's belief, we are trapped: Keynes and Lenin were wrong. Material desires are never sated. They never lose importance in the relative scale of human concerns. And so a social system--"capitalism"--which is as if designed to play off of this weak point in human psychology can flourish indefinitely. The future of humanity is, if not pictured as "a boot stamping on a human face, forever," is pictured as a dysfunctional society, forever...
Now there are other ways to approach it--that the collapse of the implicit underpinnings of the Smithian paradigm to be brought about by the coming of the Information Age will carry us to another economic system, although whether that system will be better characterized as "Advanced Communism" or as the "Frequent-Flyer-or-Stay-Over-Saturday-Night" economy is anyone's guess. But I think Easterlin's take is an interesting one...
Brad DeLong
-- WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake,... [angels sing] ...her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery [censored] threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened [censored] had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up, will you? Shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!