Then demonstrate it for heaven's sake.Blind groper wrote:Actually, Seth, I do have a reasonable understanding of basic economics.
The average person has been getting wealthier and wealthier in most respects over the past 100 odd years.
In other words, capitalism has caused the standard of living, particularly in the United States, to steadily increase. I agree.
Well, I don't think that's a particularly valid argument. They had the peak of technology available at the time, just as is true in every generation. Certainly our lives today are better because of technology, there's no disputing that. Even the poorest people in the US have television sets, running water, toilets and other amenities of advanced culture, unlike, by way of example, the poor in Ethiopia, who have pretty much what they are wearing, if that.The richest people of the 19th century, like J.P. Morgan, Rockefellar etc., could not get what we have at our fingertips. Like the computer I use to post this message, or the internet it is going on, or a car that travels 200 kph, or a flight on a jet plane to another country etc., etc.
But that's not a valid comparison, it's a Wayback Machine fallacy. To assess wealth one can only assess it in relation to the present standards of living in the cultures under examination. A man with 40 cows in Uganda is "rich" by comparison to one with zero cows. But we'd both agree that both are poor compared to either one of us.Wealth is relative. Compared to the 19th century, we are already all rich.
The only thing the average person today cannot afford, which the rich of the 19th century could, is human labour.
That's simply not the case. Every time we buy anything we are buying the product of human labor.
Not really. Economies don't run on cheap labor alone, they depend on other factors to operate, specifically including the ability of the very labor force that creates products to be able to afford at least the basic necessities of life. When that balance is disrupted, as it was in the Great Depression, it wouldn't have mattered how many goods there were, and in point of historical fact most of the food shortages during the Great Depression were deliberately and intentionally caused by FDR and his idiotic meddling with the free markets.But with cheap, abundant, and sophisticated robots being available, even that barrier is breached - well, robot labour rather than human, but the end result is the same.
The worst decision of the Supreme Court besides Dredd Scott was handed down during that era, and that case is Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Court ruled that FDR's system of controlling the amount of wheat (and other commodities) produced (The Agricultural Adjustment Act) could lawfully prevent Filburn from growing wheat on his own land that would never leave his land but would be used to feed his own family and livestock under the asinine idea that because Filburn would then not be compelled to buy wheat on the government-controlled market, it would "affect interstate commerce" and frustrate FDR's desire to artificially restrict wheat crops (and other foods) in order to keep the prices of those commodities artificially high.
That ruling has been slowly destroying the American markets ever since.
The thing to note is that during the Great Depression there was dirt-cheap labor available, as people would work for a crust of bread at the end of the day. The Great Depression was a GREAT time to be wealthy because anything and everything you could possibly want was likewise cheap as dirt.
Did this result in your version of universal wealth? Hardly.
And the social and economic stratification will continue to exist nonetheless, because the wealthy will have something else that's bigger and better and harder to get that the lower classes will covet and squabble over.Relatively speaking, in a few decades the average person will have goods and services available to him/her that only millionaires get today, plus all the new technologies not available today.
They already are, and yet we have accountants.You also, Seth, underestimate some of the advances that are coming. Robots and advanced computers will not just be making things. They will be providing services also. It is very likely, for example, that accountants will find themselves out of a job.
Perhaps it'll be the scanner they use in "Elysium." What makes you think that all this wonderful technology will be any more available to the ever-growing dependent class than it is now?What of doctors? There is already under way a program to design and build a 'tricorder' similar to that shown on Star Trek and used by Dr. McCoy. The tricorder will analyse instantly the state of health of any person and report it over the internet. The first tricorder will be limited, of course. But later versions will be immensely sophisticated. There is even a research group designing a robot that can perform cataract eye surgery. Given a few decades, and most doctors will not be needed any more.
You need to look into the lawsuits being filed over the first surgical robots.
The primary problem with that theory is that, if you knew anything about human nature and psychology, you'd understand that the vast majority of people NEED to work, and if they don't they become very self-destructive and unhappy. People find fulfillment, validation and all sorts of psychological benefits in working, which is why people work harder than they actually have to...in a capitalist society...so that they can advance economically and have more stuff and time to themselves. But take that too far, like winning the lottery, and the leisure and wealth become a burden and a negative influence, which is why so many lottery winners will tell you that winning ruined their lives.The Japanese already have robots in old age rest homes, helping to care for elderly people. What will a couple more decades mean to their sophistication?
Police will find many of their duties taken over by mini robots that survey criminal activity. Imagine a robot the size and shape of a house fly that can enter a drug den and report directly to a central computer what is going on.
The end result is that most people will not need to work. This is not a tragedy, since it will free everyone up for a life of excitement and leisure instead of drudgery.
Does Donald Trump sit on his laurels and do nothing but recreate? Nope. He works very hard even though he doesn't have to because he enjoys the work. The same is true of almost all of the very, very rich, even that evil motherfucker George Soros.
Just look what happened to Paris Hilton. She nearly killed herself with opulent overindulgence, and no small number of wealthy persons who didn't understand the value of work actually have done so, many of them by suicide.
The public simply will not tolerate being idled like that. They will rebel, just like the Luddites did at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they will demand that technology SERVE their needs, which happens to include the need to work and be productive.
If you've never been in the position of being able to just comfortably lie about and do nothing it's very hard for you to understand the corrosive nature of indolence, particularly wealthy indolence, on the human psyche. A good look at the "Roaring 20's" might give you a clue. Why, do you suppose, did all those Wall Street moguls dive out of windows in 1929? Because they had no money? Hardly. It was because they FAILED, catastrophically, in their attempts to engender self-worth through the acquisition of wealth, and when their ability to work ended, so did their reason for living. They weren't poor, they just couldn't stand the prospect of being poor and having nothing to do.
How many tens of millions of ordinary workers DIDN'T jump out of a window when the Crash came? Why not? Because they understood that enduring hard times is a substitute for productive work and that eventually that endurance would be rewarded with productive work again. So they got up on their hind legs, took what they could carry and started walking to where the work was...like California. They came in droves so large that California tried to enact vagrancy laws to keep them from coming...which were fortunately overruled by the Supreme Court as a violation of the right to freedom of travel and assembly.
You really think that people actually want a life of indolent, hedonistic pleasure-seeking? Go look at humanity. You will discover that some of the most unhappy people on earth are the ones who are wealthy and indolent and without direction or purpose in life, and some of the happiest people on earth have next to nothing...but they work very, very hard every day.
No, actually, they won't.With billions of robots providing both goods and services, the end result will be the average person living a life we cannot imagine today, with amazing resources available, and opportunities for adventure, learning, socialising and so on. Some people will not take advantage, and will do something stupid like drink themselves to death. But most people will enjoy the expanded life.
You need some more social studies my man. What you're suggesting has been written about in science fiction for decades and it always (correctly) ends up in a dystopian culture where there are still haves and have nots, and things don't go well at all in the end.The idea of communism being successful was a bit tongue in cheek, but there is, in theory, no reason why not. Communism and central planning does not lead to high economic productivity, but with robots as the basis for the economy, all working with perfect efficiency 24/7, that will not matter terribly much.
People LIKE to work, for the most part. So they aren't going to allow themselves to be idled by robots. That's exactly what Detroit found out when it tried to replace auto workers with robots. They ended up employing the workers AND having to pay for robots.
Japan is the same. It's in economic doldrums right now because it demands "efficiency" at the expense of psychosocial understanding.
What you're hoping for would be a horror of the highest order very soon, as bored-out-of-their-minds jobless people look at all the "stuff" they have and find it's not nearly enough or nearly satisfying enough to their egos and turn to more atavistic thrills to give them a sense of self-worth.
Sociologists know all this. Go consult with one sometime.
