Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Um, yes? That's easy to say with no resource scarcity.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
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Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
You can't eat money though. If they (the 6 most wealthy people) cashed in all their stock and re-distributed their wealth as best they could, the value of money would plummet since so much more is in circulation. It would crash the global economy and cause even more poverty.
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
You can't eat money though. If they (the 6 most wealthy people) cashed in all their stock and re-distributed their wealth as best they could, the value of money would plummet since so much more is in circulation. It would crash the global economy and cause even more poverty.
The global economy is tens of trillions of dollars. Drop a couple trillion in there and it just gets consumed.
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming that this is a rising tide that will lift all boats. What I'm afraid of is that the world will be split into capital owners who own all the robots, and the perpetually poor, who can't get jobs because they've all been automated and the only jobs remaining are minimum wage "service" jobs. And that's assuming there will be enough service jobs to go around. We're already seeing this split occur in USA. T…
What's wrong with service jobs? If the problem is not the nature of the work but rather the pay, then that seems solvable by various forms of wealth redistribution. Universal basic income can be a good component in that.
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Um, yes? That's easy to say with no resource scarcity.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
6 men owning as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the planet doesn't actually mean much while ever they aren't keeping their money under the bed away from everyone else - it's still in distribution.
They still go to sleep at night, get up in a morning, have a shower and grab a cup of coffee then go to the bathroom, eat dinner, watch a movie and go to bed I would imagine.
The wealth that they have is an illusion even for themselves.
Now on the other hand, that six individuals have the power to control how their money is distributed is a very real problem, but the wealth itself isn't.
I haven't really been a fan of macroeconomics since the nineties when the whole thing was proved to be an illusion and then confirmed yet again in 2008.
It is a crisis for sure.
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um, yes? Being born makes you worthy of survival. Where is the ethical dilemma? Otherwise I agree with your post.
It's meant to be rhetorical; of course being born makes you worthy of survival! But what if working doesn't provide you enough sustenance? And what if you don't even have the opportunity in the first place, once the demand for human labor is low enough?
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#27You don't really have to speculate. Automation is going to do to the service industry what globalization did to manufacturing. Manufacturing got "automated" away by sending work to places where labor costs next to nothing. Did the offshoring of manufacture jobs create joblessness? Actually I'm not sure what the answer to that is. According to statistics the US is running at full employment. According to pretty much e…
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Um, yes? That's easy to say with no resource scarcity.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
No, but they control the economy. They decide what projects to start, and since they are so rich they only think in hundreds of millions at least. So we get less local control - which are all small projects - and more mega-projects/corporations. Which are better at producing at scale, but are (much) worse at providing a satisfying work environment. So we end up producing more than enough stuff, but much of it not actually needed - here you need clever marketing to convince people to consume stuff they don't need, from drugs to insurance to a new shiny car.
I think much of the discussion and the picture a lot of people have in their heads about "the 0.1%" is Scrooge McDuck, with all the money right there only for himself to even see. But in reality capitalist ownership is more a matter of control of what, where, how.
Apart from the means of production, the "body" of the economy, they also control a large share of the "blood" of the economy, the money. Wherever that flow is directed things grow, where it doesn't go lights go out.
While the rest of the population still has quite a bit of money taken together, there is another problem of psychology: Money is no problem for a rich capitalist. They can easily finance billions. But for the people who don't have such easy access to the streams of finance money is much more static, money is much more valuable for the majority of people. Also, "credit" has different meanings for someone investing in a small venture and a billionaire: The latter has financial instruments so that he ends up carrying little to none of the risk.
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but it isn't quite so black and white. 6 men owning as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the planet doesn't actually mean much while ever they aren't keeping their money under the bed away from everyone else - it's still in distribution. They still go to sleep at night, get up in a morning, have a shower and grab a cup of coffee then go to the bathroom, eat dinner, watch a mov…
I wouldn't say the wealth is the problem, but wealth inequality is. Our current system allows for a few people to make millions of dollars a day while others can't even get jobs or afford a house. A certain amount of inequality is required to incentivize high performers to create more, but the current amount of inequality is obscene.
Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's meant to be rhetorical; of course being born makes you worthy of survival! But what if working doesn't provide you enough sustenance? And what if you don't even have the opportunity in the first place, once the demand for human labor is low enough?
We have more than enough resources. If working does not provide enough sustenance then we need to replace the government. These are political issues not economic ones. We can solve the problem of production with automation, however the problem of distribution remains and if the government is not distributing resources to you then you need to take that government down and replace it with one that does. That ultimatum…
One problem with this that springs to mind is that historically, relative numbers of young, bored, jobless men and crime rates are tightly correlated.