It is estimated that during the Roman Empire 20% to 30% of Italy's population were slaves. For the empire as a whole that share was between 10% and 15%.
In these times, even modest Roman households might expect to own two or three slaves.
Today our global economy does not depend on slavery (albeit it has not been completely eradicated), but has a different, and more invisible, dependence.
Buckminster Fuller called it "energy slaves", to describe a dependence on mostly fossil energy, expressed in energy equivalent of work done by a human worker.
Another example: a single round-trip transatlantic flight requires more energy per passenger than the passenger can generate with their own muscles over their entire life.
We take these energy slaves for granted in our daily lives. They carry us around, heat our meals, pump water to our homes, clothe us, do the cleaning and washing, delivering our messages (including this one), and so on.
Humans always used exogenous energy, i.e. energy from outside of their body. Warming near a campfire or using oxen to pull a plow are all examples of that.
What's different today is that we tapped into ancient sunlight energy in the form of coal, oil and gas.
This energy was captured and condensed over millions of years, and we're burning through it in a span of just a few hundred years.
@jackofalltrades@nyrath I seem to recall that "The Mote in God's Eye" had some discussion of repeated crashes of Motie civilization and how after fossil fuels were depleted they had to advance from wood-burning to nuclear fission after particularly bad "crashes" ..
@acsawdey@jackofalltrades@nyrath Fission is fun after you run out of Yellowcake and gotta figure out how to build a thorium reactor that isn't jump started with uranium.
What does it mean for our understanding of the world economy?
Acknowledging everything mentioned above would mean coming to terms with the fact that we have only a miniscule impact on production. For all our ingenuity, when it comes down to it, all our amazing machines are just sculptures without energy. Energy is the currency of life and is a crucial input to all economic activities.
This can also frame our understanding of politics.
In feudal times energy came mostly in the form of food and wood, and both of these required land. Those that controlled land controlled these energy sources and that translated to political power.
Today energy is in the form of fossil fuels and minerals. Conversely, those that control them have power over those that don't.
This moment in history is unprecedented not only due to the sheer amount of energy available to us, but also due the fact that available energy is constantly going up.
That, combined with our unique knack for finding ever new uses for energy (looking at you AI) is what drives the economic growth.
Now, the main question we need to answer as a society is how to navigate the inevitable energy descent, when the amount of energy available to us will start shrinking, instead of growing.
The economic paradigm predicated on growth is going away. The social imaginary of constant progress can't survive this and will need a replacement as well.
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