Believe it or not, this is the best time to be alive

[whatthehey]

30. I think we are talking different time scales

Is human mastery of the earth going to last until the death of the planet? Not a goddamn clue but highly likely it won't, at least unless you think what we have now is the mastery of our tree-shrew like ancestors. You're right that's not doomerism. That's a combination of biology, geology astronomy and climatology. But is capitalism likely to collapse in ruins in a few years? The improbability is staggering. The entirety of human economic world history has trended towards open global trade and regulated private enterprise. Sure there will be slowly shifting core, peripheral and external individual economies, but any attampt to choose sustained externalism has been doomed to utter failure within a century or so if not faster, from the Japanese shogunate to the Soviets. Meanwhile capitalism and free trade has lasted millennia of slowly expanding and strengthening progress, lifting billions out of abject poverty and spreading every single improvement that makes modern life so much more comfortable than that suffered by our forebears.

The economic future? Utter guesses is all anyone has, but my guesses tend towards more global standardization and mobility. Our descendents centuries hence will wonder about differing currencies the way we wonder about wampum, and marvel that imaginary lines on an an imaginary map decided whether you lived comfortably or in desperation given an equal amount of labor or knowledge. We'll eventually get closer to equality as the neo-Marxists hope, but it won't be at the command of an earnest committee of fellow comrades with a twee acronym. It will be because everybody eventually works out that it doesn't matter if an Afghan assembles your car or a Pole programs your CRM software you use to sell soda to Spaniards.