Yes! No! What does “richer” actually mean to you? For that matter, what does “we” mean to you (since the existing set of humans is changing hour to hour as people are born, come of age, and die, and even in a given set there’s an extremely wide variance in what they have and in what’s considered rich).
To the extent that GDP is your measure of a nation’s richness, then it’s tautological that increasing GDP makes the nation richer. The weaker argument that it (often) correlates (not necessarily causes) with well-being (in some averages and aggregates) is more defensible, but makes it unsuitable for answering your question.
I think my intuition is that GDP is the wrong tool for measuring how “rich” or “overall satisfied” people are, and simple sum or average is probably the wrong aggregation function. So I fall back on more personal and individual measures of “well-being”. This, for most people I know, and as far as I can tell, the majority of neurotypical people, is about lack of worry for near- and medium-term future, access to pleasurable experiences, and social acceptance among accessible sub-groups (family, friends, neighbors, online communities small enough to care about, etc.).
For that kind of “general current human wants”, a usable and cheap shared-but-excludable VR space seems to improve things for a lot of people, regardless of what happens to GDP. In fact, if consumption of difficult-to-manufacture-and-deliver luxuries gets partially replaced by consumption of patterns of bits, that likely reduces GDP while increasing satisfaction.
There will always be needs for non-virtual goods and experiences—it’s not currently possible to virtualize food’s nutrition OR pleasure, and this is true for many things. Which means a mixed economy for a long long time. I don’t think anyone can tell you whether this makes those things cheaper or more expensive, relative to an hour spent working online or in the real world.
Yes! No! What does “richer” actually mean to you? For that matter, what does “we” mean to you (since the existing set of humans is changing hour to hour as people are born, come of age, and die, and even in a given set there’s an extremely wide variance in what they have and in what’s considered rich).
To the extent that GDP is your measure of a nation’s richness, then it’s tautological that increasing GDP makes the nation richer. The weaker argument that it (often) correlates (not necessarily causes) with well-being (in some averages and aggregates) is more defensible, but makes it unsuitable for answering your question.
I think my intuition is that GDP is the wrong tool for measuring how “rich” or “overall satisfied” people are, and simple sum or average is probably the wrong aggregation function. So I fall back on more personal and individual measures of “well-being”. This, for most people I know, and as far as I can tell, the majority of neurotypical people, is about lack of worry for near- and medium-term future, access to pleasurable experiences, and social acceptance among accessible sub-groups (family, friends, neighbors, online communities small enough to care about, etc.).
For that kind of “general current human wants”, a usable and cheap shared-but-excludable VR space seems to improve things for a lot of people, regardless of what happens to GDP. In fact, if consumption of difficult-to-manufacture-and-deliver luxuries gets partially replaced by consumption of patterns of bits, that likely reduces GDP while increasing satisfaction.
There will always be needs for non-virtual goods and experiences—it’s not currently possible to virtualize food’s nutrition OR pleasure, and this is true for many things. Which means a mixed economy for a long long time. I don’t think anyone can tell you whether this makes those things cheaper or more expensive, relative to an hour spent working online or in the real world.