An abundance with no address

The interview Elon Musk gave in late July to Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, has been widely circulated since. What people have taken from it is mostly the second half: the set-to over Europe, the mutual loathing. I watched the whole thing, an hour and twenty minutes. What stayed with me appears in none of the clips doing the rounds.

Across eighty minutes devoted to the complete reorganisation of the world economy, Musk names jurisdictions: the United States, China, Europe, the United Kingdom. He names infrastructure, factories, data centres in orbit, a lunar base. He never names a place where anyone lives. Not a town to live in, not a valley, not a neighbourhood. The abundance he announces has no address.

The thesis deserves an honest hearing, because it holds together better than the tone suggests. An economy produces goods and provides services. If intelligence becomes superabundant and acquires, by way of robots, the means to act upon matter, production ceases to be bounded by the labour available, and the price of everything that can be reproduced collapses. Musk takes the monetary reasoning all the way: in such a world the risk would go by the name of deflation, not inflation. The date of 2036 is open to argument, and his record on such forecasts rather invites it. I leave the timetable to the commentators. The question that concerns a territory does not depend on it.

The most instructive moment of the interview is not, as it happens, a prediction. It is an admission about governance. Asked about the concentration of his voting rights, Musk explains that he keeps control of his companies in order to think five or ten years ahead without being subject to the pressure of the quarter. So the man announcing the end of money is determined to hold on to one thing, one only: the capacity to decide. His interviewer spots the flaw. She puts to him the Iain M. Banks novels he claims as inspiration, in which humans live in comfort and no longer decide anything at all, and asks what is left of agency, for want of a better word, in his world of abundance: who still decides, who still does anything. He does not really answer.

The scarce good of that future is therefore neither land, nor the painting, nor the view, even though all of them will rise. It is the position from which the use of things is decided.

Seen from here, none of this is abstract. Valais holds in quantity what cannot be reproduced: slope, altitude, light, names the whole world knows. In an economy where the industrial no longer counts for much, these assets rise as a matter of course. I know people who will read that as good news, and I understand them.

I am wary of it all the same. A scarcity that goes unadministered turns into a rent, and a rent can be captured from a distance. There is nothing forward-looking about the mechanism: it is already at work. Prices come loose from local wages, housing slips away from the people who keep it running, employment falls back on seasonal services, the young who have trained leave and come back as visitors. Residents end up employed by their own landscape. You need only drive through certain resorts on a Tuesday in November, shutters closed across four storeys, to grasp that this point of equilibrium is no longer a hypothesis. Abundance would not correct it; it would multiply, the world over, the number of people able to pay.

See also · Chapter 8 — Tourism

One detail of the interview touches the canton more closely than Musk can imagine. To convey what work will become once it is optional, he chooses the image of the vegetable patch: we will no longer grow vegetables out of necessity, we will do it for the gesture of it, and garden tomatoes, less perfect than the ones in the shop, will have something touching about them when served to friends. It is a pretty image. Here, it lands wide. A meadow that stops being mown shows within two seasons; an abandoned hillside vineyard, within three. What California files under after-work leisure is here the upkeep of the asset itself, because the landscape the world will put a value on stands up only through these gestures. The same gestures do not mean the same thing according to where they are made. A discourse that situates nothing cannot see this.

Valaisan history offers, moreover, a precedent exactly contrary to the logic of rent. Water has never been abundant here; the Rhône valley is among the driest regions of Switzerland, and the slope sends down to the valley floor what the heights lack. The response of the hillside communities was not to sell access to the scarce resource to the highest bidder. It was to build the works that made it distributable and to write the rules of the turn. Capture the resource where it is abundant, channel it to where it is lacking, share it out according to rules anyone can verify. Scarcity did not disappear for all that. It changed hands. It passed from nature to the community that lives off it.

See also · Chapter 4 — Bisses, Bourgeoisies, Consortages

The lesson of the bisse is therefore not that scarcity can be abolished. It is that it can be governed. The decisive resource of a territory is not only what it possesses: it is the capacity of those who live there to decide how it is used.

That capacity rests on qualified people who choose to stay, on those one manages to bring in, on those to whom something is passed on: a resident stock of qualified human capital, without which the power to decide remains a word. And on this point the abundance thesis, even if only partly borne out, would work in our favour. What people went looking for in the big conurbations, in Zurich as much as in Lausanne or Geneva, came down to one word: density. Rare skills gathered within a radius of a few kilometres. Yet a growing share of those skills now runs through generalist models and tools that can be operated elsewhere, including in a mountain commune. Distance costs less than it used to. That is the competitive shift: a window is opening, and it will not stay open indefinitely.

But a territory with nothing to offer beyond its non-reproducible character recruits no one. It sells. The whole question lies in the gap between those two verbs. You recruit people who will produce here and whose children will go to school here. You sell to people who have made their money elsewhere and come to spend it three weeks a year. Both enrich the territory. Only one makes a project.

A Valais that administers its scarcity remains an actor. A Valais that turns it into cash becomes a shop window.

There remains the difficulty Musk sees and does not deal with. Distributing an income, he says, will pose no problem at all; it will be enough to issue currency. Distributing opportunities to do something is another matter, and that one he leaves wholly untouched. Yet opportunities to do something do not float in the air. They are lodged in companies, practices, laboratories, farms, and every one of those places has an address.

Abundance, if it comes, will not spread uniformly across space. It will have an address. Which one remains to be seen — and who will have chosen it.