Grey Templar wrote:And where does that money come from?
I guarantee that you could not make it by taxing the few people who would still be working and making wages in this hypothetical situation. And since all your government functions would have to be funded by taxing the few working people, you'd have even less $$$ than you might have otherwise.
Of course you can make it by taxing the remaining workers. When productivity and wages shift to a smaller remaining workforce those workers command a greater income. So those workers can still be ahead of where they were before, and still ahead of those without a job.
Consider an economy of 10 workers, they produce $1,000 of stuff, and they all get an equal share, $100 each. Then tech changes mean only half as many hours are needed to produce as much stuff, and resource limits means the surplus labour can't go in to any new areas of work.
Option 1 - The remaining 5 workers each claim $200. The 5 unemployed workers starve to death.
Option 2 - The remaining five workers each claim $200, but each pays $80 in tax, leaving them with $120 each so they're better off than they were before. The 5 unemployed workers each get $80, so they're not as well off as before, but they're not starving.
Option 3 - All 10 workers agree to work half as many hours as they used to. Everyone gets $100 like they used to, but they work half as many hours.
It's the problem that Post-Scarcity has.
This isn't about post-scarcity. That's long distant, and possibly will never happen. But the actual problem being discussed here, permanent surplus labour, could be upon us within a generation, and early parts of it could have already happened.
What you're doing is walking up to the Wright Brothers and asking them why the Concorde failed.
It's self-defeating on multiple counts. 1st, it can never come into existence because the transitional system between a Capitalist system and a Post-Scarcity system will immediately, and without exception, fail. The social turmoil will simply result in a regression back to ordinary economic systems.
You're assuming that social and economic changes are built around conscious decisions to move from one structure to another. This is wrong-headed. Most major social and economic changes occur through unguided processes, mostly tech development that flows through the rest of the economy in unguided and often unpredictable ways, driving economic and social changes which drive further changes. No-one decided to have an industrial revolution. No-one decided to end the age of mercantilism. These things were the product of unguided forces.
The real way to look at this is to see what changes are coming, and try to answer as best as possible how we should react, and how we will react. We are approaching an age where the default form of capitalism - increase productivity, put surplus labour in to new forms of production by drawing in more natural resources, thereby increasing total production - is coming up against a hard barrier, because the resources are coming to a point of full exploitation. If that barrier is hit, which is more likely than not, then there will be changes
The 2nd pitfall is that, in a theoretical Post-Scarcity society which has somehow actually come into existence, this society requires a complex governing system to simply dole out the resources, but no individual person has any motivation to contribute to it's function. Nobody will want to do maintenance on the army of robots which actually do the manual labor, after all he doesn't get paid. Everybody gets the same "compensation". He has no motivation to do anything other than entertain himself. He'll always get fed and have the same luxuries as everybody else.
At no point was it ever said that everyone had to be paid the same. That's something you have invented out of nothing. Read what is actually being written.
I mean, it's just so frustrating that this complaint comes up every time this issue is raised. This idea that surplus labour can't be addressed because then everyone would be paid the same and there'd be no incentive to work. But right now we have transfer payments where government taxes workers and pays unemployed, parents, low income workers etc. This system maintains an incentive to work by having workers still have considerably more than people get on transfer payments.
So the problem of removing the work incentive not only has an obvious solution, but it's a solution we use right now in every modern economy. And yet this 'problem' is still guaranteed to come up every time this issue is mentioned. Why? What is going on to produce this baseless reflex response?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Grey Templar wrote:Sure, but just saying "society will reshape!" isn't some magic wand you can use here.
No, but accepting the reality that society will reshape is simple reality. The question is how it will change, and how much we can direct that change.
As such, the line you've attempted here, which seems to accept the predicted future economic conditions, but refused to accept that society will adapt to new economic realities is not a viable approach.
