Europe

And all the productivity gains are based on the abundance of cheap fossil energy.

And cheap Chinese components that workers in the West just have to stick together.

uranium...will be available forever

I'm not trying to argue the broader point, but as to uranium...there's a lot of uranium out there.

First of all, you only go hunting for uranium when you need more. There's probably quite a bit more than is in known reserves. But let's even set that aside.

There is a lot of uranium dissolved in seawater. We don't currently extract it from seawater, because it's cheaper to mine it. But we could. And the estimates I've seen are that if we did so, we could probably get the cost to about twice that of mining it. That's an increase, but it's not a big deal, because the fuel cost isn't very significant when it comes to nuclear power.

And there are tens of thousand years of uranium, at current electricity use levels, in seawater. As you extract it, the cost of extraction in the (now more dilute) seawater is going to rise, but I can't imagine that it'd be any higher than a linear increase at most. So once we've extracted half of it, our costs maybe at most double. That's a long ways down the road.

With nuclear power, the constraint isn't really availability of uranium. It's the cost of constructing the plant (which, because nuclear plants last a long time, depends a lot on the finance cost, what interest rates a lender would currently demand to lend to someone at the moment).

I mean, it's both. The productivity gain in farming comes from the inventions of modern tractors, tractor equipment, chemicals, etc. So there's def ingenuity involved as it's not trivial to invent those. But of course that steel they're made of doesn't come from thin air, neither does the diesel to run them. That's your basic truth that all commodities come from natural resources transformed by human labour. In it most basic form productivity enhancing tech can increase our ability to transform more natural resources with less labour. I think that's what your getting at. But that's not the limit of it. It can and has increased the efficiency of what we get from the same resources. Coal plants today are much more efficient than they used to be a century ago. Typical solar panels today are in the 20-30% efficiency range. They used to be less than half that two decades ago. Neither of those mean we can make unlimited solar or burn infinite coal. But we're talking a factor of 2 in energy production from the same resourcea that make up a solar panel. If productivity can give us these kinds of natural resource savings in additon to labour savings, I think it's worth asking where are those savings going. Do they go to children, pensioners, or the 1%. And if it turns out that most of those gains aren't with with the 99%, we ought to change that, before throwing children or pensioners under the bus. When we get those gains shared between both those classes, if there still isn't enough, and if we're stil hurling towards environmental extinction, then we should consider who gets thrown under the bus. And the final crucial bit - if we throw the pensioners under bus today, while leaving the 1% holding the power to overconsume what we produce, there's little guarantee that what we took from the pensioners would reach the children. Looking at history, the most likely outcome is the 1% is gonna scoop that up too. That's my thoughts on the matter. 😊