I would love to be involved with an organization that works to bring *healthy* food to poor and homeless people, whether through collaboration with farmers and farmers' markets, nutrition and cooking education or lobbying for real grocery stores in poor urban neighborhoods. Does anyone know of such a group?

I bet your local food bank has something in place already. I know here in Vancouver (BC, Can.) the food bank has multiple programs to help bring healthy, fresh food to people, including the Fruit Tree Project, Plant-A-Row, and Community Kitchens. I believe these programs are fairly common. (www.foodbank.bc.ca)

The big problem is, society is still structured so that everyone is required to work in order to survive, despite the fact that with constant increases in efficiency and automation, the point will eventually come, if it hasn't already, when significantly less than the whole of humanity will be needed to do enough work to support all of it

I'm pretty sure it hasn't come already, whilst we've made a lot of progress on automation there are a lot of things that we just can't automate well and which have to be done by humans. Although eventually we will develop the technology we need to automate almost everything so that only a few humans will have to do work.

Of course if you want a low standard of living then our technology is sufficient to allow for it with very few people working, just that pretty much no one actually wants a low standard of living (though plenty of people support policies that would give us that (including some people involved in 'helping' with poverty) but that's due to ignorance).

Tom:

what, then, is to be done about those who aren't needed to produce enough resources to support everyone but need to be able to claim a share?

A sufficiently wealthy society could provide everyone with the basic needs (food, water, shelter, health care, etc) or enough money to buy them and if there's still work to be done then those who do that work would get extra money to buy luxuries (this may actually be something that could be implemented now, not when work dies).

Tom:

Makework? Go the way of the luddites and deliberately stall or even reverse trends in efficiency and automation?

I would say no, the failure of the Luddites whilst bad for them was good for the rest of society as it resulted in a very big downward trend in the price of clothes making them more affordable and thereby allowing people to spend some of the money they saved on other needs.

Though it should be noted that the Luddites along with most other anti-technology movements (including the big ones of this day) had economic motivations (i.e. didn't want to lose their jobs), the violence of the Luddites was largely due to there being no social welfare back then so that those who lost their job to the frame and the new mode of production it made available would likely have trouble affording food.

The good news is that so far anti-technology groups have tended to lose out in the end (even if they get a temporary victory in some places).

Tom:

but I reckon we're talking tens of thousands more years at least via mindless evolution alone,

Cultural evolution happens must faster than biological evolution.

If corporate welfare were nto so widespread, the results might not necessarily be much better than what we have now, but they woudl certianly be different. I do, however, strongly suspect that many companies that have landed us in the current hot water would have reformed or died off long ago if not for the unfair support from their political cronies.

Considering WarResisters.org claims that 36% of our annual income tax is spent on military (other than veterans benefits and services), this seems like a small penance each American owes its fellow humans. But what do I know?

I'm just a godless, anti-war, wealth redistribution advocate. I should be at Gitmo.

The big problem is, society is still structured so that everyone is required to work in order to survive, despite the fact that with constant increases in efficiency and automation, the point will eventually come, if it hasn't already, when significantly less than the whole of humanity will be needed to do enough work to support all of it - what, then, is to be done about those who aren't needed to produce enough resources to support everyone but need to be able to claim a share? Makework? Go the way of the luddites and deliberately stall or even reverse trends in efficiency and automation? You almost certainly can't just have the current system of handouts, welfare and shelters for those potential workers who are superfluous to requirements; it fosters such resentment and opposition among so many of the employed who support it with taxes that, even today, it constantly struggles against cutbacks or the prospect of being shut down altogether - as the problem gets more acute, more and more unemployed being fed by fewer and fewer workers, increases in this sentiment will very likely make it collapse. What does that leave? Staggered shifts of workers, perhaps, several people assigned to the same post and working only a couple of days a week each, yet all on enough pay to make a living? It sounds workable in the long term, and after a few centuries of inequality and hardship society might eventually evolve towards that equilibrium point, but you'd never persuade any employer to accept such a scheme any sooner than when ponderous social change ushers it in gradually enough to be unnoticed, and avoid all that suffering and dysfuntionality in the meantime.

If humanity doesn't actually self-destruct, I'm quite confident our societies will eventually evolve towards something approaching a utopia, where sufficient resources can be made for so little work that money itself may become obsolete, but I reckon we're talking tens of thousands more years at least via mindless evolution alone, and the mechanism of that evolution would require constant weakening and collapse of many societies and systems as they are superseded, with all the human suffering that would entail - the crucial question, then, is is there any way to speed that process up, or make it less painful?

Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as "community service"-- as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.

Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?

This reminds me of an argument I had with a classmate who was under the impression that 1) Obama's healthcare plan would in context mean a net tax increase for him, 2) that a stable society and a healthy, well-educated workforce were not a significant benefit to the rich that said rich should be okay with paying for in a manner proportional to the benefit they derived from these resources as measured in dollars, 3) that old canard about the rich "giving" everyone else jobs, 4) that jobs are easy to get and find and that people who are on welfare "just don't want to do the kinds of work that they can get" (as opposed to him, who worked as a janitor and was grateful for it, uphill both ways in the snow, blah blah blah), and 5) that "every job offers benefits" (speaking of health insurance and the like).

In my view, the second most problematic category of people are those whose ideas are formed by reasoning correctly from very, very wrong premises, and who have internalized the idea that subjecting one's fundamental assumptions to serious critical examination is a betrayal of one's ideals/upbringing/self, or otherwise Just Not Done. (The most problematic are the subset of these who are violent).

As a side note, anti-social welfare bias is incredibly insidious. I remember my American Government textbook characterizing the major argument for progressive taxation as "the wealthy can afford to pay more" and social justice policies like Affirmative Action as "promoting 'equality of outcome' rather than 'equality of opportunity'" (quotes approximate) in spite of the absence of overt right-wing sentiment in most of its sections.

And the kinds of food that are cheapest tend to be highly processed, high-calorie, low-nutrition - the kind that nourishes only at the cost of causing other kinds of long-term damage. It's no coincidence that obesity and diabetes are most common among the poor, as well as hunger.

This is absolutely a key point. And in a society that views obesity, as well as poverty, as a moral failing, the poor who rely on cheap low-nutrition high-calorie food to survive are doubly cursed.

I would love to be involved with an organization that works to bring *healthy* food to poor and homeless people, whether through collaboration with farmers and farmers' markets, nutrition and cooking education or lobbying for real grocery stores in poor urban neighborhoods. Does anyone know of such a group?

Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as "community service"-- as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.

Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?