For example, suggesting that there are too many people on the planet because there aren't enough jobs for all of them seems to mean that "jobs" are the real inhabitants of Earth and "people" exist to serve them.

But it really starts with people. It always has.

The first question has to do with the carrying capacity of the Earth -- how many people can it feed and clothe without being degraded. You start from there.

The second question is how many of those people it takes to provide for all the rest. In hunter-gatherer times, everybody had to be out there hunting and gathering. Agriculture mean that 95% worked their asses off to support a small leisure and creative class. Now it takes only 5% to raise food for everyone else -- and pretty soon the rest of the maintenance chores aren't going to demand much more.

But that doesn't mean you need to beat the population down to 300 million -- all of whom will somehow find work producing the food, clothing, and housing that would be need by six billion. It means that you have to radically rethink the nature of human life.

There are a lot of delicate philosophic issues there -- but the most immediate question is a practical one. We've used "jobs" as a rough and ready distribution mechanism for getting food and shelter and such from the people who produce them to the people who consume them. You work, you earn money, you buy stuff, that gives work to other people, and so on.

This is a pretty crude system -- which is why it creates endlessly unsolvable problems with unemployment, welfare, and so forth. But we've not only accepted it as being the system we're stuck with for the moment but have tended to exalt it as both inevitable and morally freighted. If you don't work, you're a bad person -- and even such traditional demands as charity to the poor come to be looked on with suspicion.

That's what we've got to get out from under -- but it isn't going to be easy. Marx's simple dictum of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" has been demonized as it is -- but we're not only going to have to go with that, but with a hyper-version of it.

At the same time, we're going to have to recognize that the "from each" part doesn't just mean sweat-of-the-brow stuff. It also means everything from folk crafts to emotional support to loving parenting in a world where greater longevity plus population controls may mean a lot more "parents" dedicated to nurturing other people's children.

In short, it will be something we can't even imagine at this point -- but despite that, we've got to get from here to there, and do it virtually overnight.

Looks like fun.