What can we do? There is no stopping the train of automation.
Soon truck driving will be automated. This will eliminate millions of jobs. We need to figure out a system that supports people regardless of employment. We need to figure it out by yesterday.
I'm a firm believer that basic income is that system and that automation should fund it.
Moreover, a lot of those people we're automating away are our friends and family members. Who do you think will they turn to for support? I'm already preparing myself for the possibility of supporting some tech-illiterates in my family in the future.
Removing the incentive gradient of capitalism doesn't create paradise, it just creates a new incentive gradient that can be even more perverse and horrifying than the last.
http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/
Power and money are largely interchangeable in a free market world where there's always a way to get what you want. At least money can be measured, and that makes it honest, sort of.
I don't think there's a coherent "ideology" that would be better (nor do I generally think accepting ideologies wholesale is a good idea), but UBI feels like a part of the right solution.
Why capitalism is cited is that it exacerbates the problem. If you look at Switzerland or Sweden, you don't have the same issues that you're having in the US. There are protections. Health care is provided, universities are free.
Of course, there'll always be room for islands of capitalism (imagine New York or San Francisco as a free city), and a modern neo-feudal system will allow social mobility more readily than the original; but still.
I'm not trolling, by the way. The usual assumption is "if not capitalism then communism," but there are older, more interesting systems out there.
(There are also younger, scarier systems out there. The far right is getting disconcertingly strong in Europe, and indeed in the US; I think that if we don't explicitly choose some sort of neo-feudalism, we're going to get neo-fascism instead, or possibly just the original kind of fascism.)
(Disclaimer: neo-feudalism does not mean the revival of torture and oppression. One, "revival" implies that they aren't currently with us. Two, I think that a king, who answers only to God, assassins, his own conscience, and his hopes for his heirs, is less likely to turn lawless or pander to bloodthirsty mobs than a president is.)
Hearing this is both heartening and depressing: heartening because a neo-feudal system already exists; depressing because it's precisely the neo-feudal part of the world that has a neo-fascism problem...
Here's what should concern you more: the 20th century was the age of strong states, from the active citizenry of the imperial United States, to the Communist dominance of society in the equally imperial Soviet Union.
The 21st century is the age of the corporation. This forum salivates at a man whose goal in life is to retire on Mars, presumably in a society of his own creation and ownership. Everything in this age is available at a price, even control of society.
My instinctive rejoinder to "the age of the corporation" is to ask how many bayonets the corporation has, but the answer is increasingly "not zero."
This also causes me to notice something else: what if neo-fascism and its Asian counterparts are becoming popular precisely as a way to coerce corporations -- because nothing less than that can bring them under control?
This sounds very plausible, and it's not a pleasant thought. You'd think that the international business class would know what _noblesse oblige_ means, and would realize that they need to not antagonize the planet, but that would be giving them more credit than they deserve; I've read books that casually, in passing, praise the merits of tax havens and condemn all social-welfare programs...
Think about it: we can spend our lives at home, work, and the grocery store. Except they deliver. And so do restaurants. And so does Amazon, so that's everything. Can't deliver love but you can download and swipe, good luck.
When do we interact with government? For the most part, when we: pay taxes; get a ticket; go to the DMV. Some of us even vote.
Then again Australians have to vote and they get proportional voting so their desires scale with support, and it all seems to work out rather well.
That's not a problem with democracy and capitalism. That's how people learn. We learn something and form an opinion about it.
The opposite is censorship, and we know that doesn't make people happy
In a democracy, society chooses where they're comfortable making sacrifices. We have free speech and also decided that libel and impersonation are punishable.
Even corporations have checks and balances that aren't codified. Every year, corporations find that the public cares about some new transgression that wasn't a problem the previous year. Bad press isn't good for oil companies, Apple, Goldman Sachs, etc, and the populace seeks to elect people who will be tougher on these businesses going forward. Failing that, the companies themselves realize they aren't all powerful.
The system is not perfect and was never supposed to be. Things are always changing. The trick is to give everyone their due attention despite their racial or economic background. I think the US does a good job of it compared to other nations. We can do better, and we may learn during this election cycle that we haven't paid enough attention to a widening wealth gap.
This post is a good reminder that capitalists are the radical liberal utopians of an earlier age, and what the realistic alternative is: social engineering and control of ordinary people by elites who think they know better, in the best case.
Count me out. I'll die fighting before I become a serf.
(edit: Also, it's just not true that the elite in capitalism are mostly permanent and hereditary. There are over two million Cuban-Americans who either came to this country with nothing to their name, or are the descendants of those who did. Today, they've found their way to the middle and upper classes in about the same proportions as non-hispanic white people who have been here for much longer.)
As for semi-permanent elites, I think I've been reading too many books on old money lately. You're right: people who start poor easily become rich, and people who start rich easily become poor. "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" is a human universal...
And, now that I think of it, "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" was just as true under feudalism as in any other system: the average noble house was extinct in three generations.
Shrugs.
So much for that...
Traditionally feudal lords have aimed mostly spend the minimal amount possible on welfare for their serfs - staving off social unrest but keeping for themselves as much as possible of the GDP subject to that constraint. Are you suggesting that neofeudalism will somehow do better in this respect? Or simply that that would be better than what we have now?
> is less likely to turn lawless
What's meant by this? It might true in the tautological sense that the despot acts within the law by definition, whatever he does. But I sense that's not what you mean.
I think that what I'm groping towards by saying "neo-feudalism" is the existing European social model with the optional addition of ermine capes, as someone else commented below... This discussion has actually taught me a few things, and I don't have a pre-existing opinion here.
> Kings and lawlessness
A president's timeframe is likely to be "until the end of my term in office," at least if the behaviors of the last few presidents are any indication; a king's timeframe is, at least, "until the end of my life", more likely "forever" since he's handing off the kingdom to his children. (Or she to her children in a queen's case.) This should make it easier to resist panic and opinion polls, and make decisions that pay off in the long term -- like remaining a good country to surrender to.
On the other hand, when a king goes wrong it's hard to stop him -- especially in a context where the king has most of the country's military power. (And decentralized military power creates its own problems; the French religious wars, for example, lasted 80 years and ended in autocracy.)
A tyrannical elected leader (like Hitler) could secure power just as solidly as a tyrannical king could, so elections are no protection there, but what about an incompetent king versus an incompetent elected leader? Get a president with bad judgement, it'll be over in four or eight years; get a king with bad judgement and your country might be permanently wrecked.
So, I'll revise my previous statement: the world needs the European social model, but should probably stay about as democratic as Europe probably is now.
But I stand my position that "capitalism is the problem" means that there are multiple other choices that can be looked at, not just communism. Problems with communism don't mean that capitalism is flawless; and problems with capitalism don't mean that we should abolish private property.
Or maybe what I'm groping towards is this: if people behave responsibly, things will probably be all right, but if they don't, things will go badly. But that's what Confucius said, and his system ended up as a cloak for autocracy...
Someone on HN previously pointed me towards this: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
"Elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare."
Going forward in history, that's why the Carlists in 19th-century Spain were both pro-autocracy and fighting for their liberties: they preferred a king who was the absolute monarch of a half-dozen countries (Castile, Leon, Navarre, Galicia, Aragon, and Andalusia), instead of a centralized federal government in which none of the kingdoms had special privileges (note that Carlism was strongest in the northern parts of Spain) and all kingdoms' subjects were administered impartially from Madrid.
(Even back in the Middle Ages, though, serfs had property rights; they were sharecroppers, legally bound to their land but entitled to keep a proportion of their harvests. In the late Middle Ages, the obligation to give their lords a portion of their harvests was turned into the obligation to pay a certain amount of money -- which was not indexed for inflation, with interesting long-term consequences.)
The point is that OP's belief that criticizing capitalism is somehow taboo in the US is factually wrong.
Sanders indisputably roundly and frequently criticizes capitalism to anyone who will listen, and he's quite popular as a presidential candidate for exactly that reason.
A lot of leftists, particularly non-American leftists, seem to imagine the US is some sort of Ayn Randian fantasyland where everyone is rabidly pro-capitalist and any views to the contrary are self-censored as a taboo. Sanders' candidacy (among many other data points) amply falsifies this misconception.
Part of the problem with socialism is that every particular faction thinks their own pet definition of "socialism" is the One True Correct Socialism, and all others are merely ignorant heretics.
My definition of "socialist" derives from original usage, is concise, and distinct from any definition of capitalist economy (regulated or otherwise). It's the right usage because of its historical correctness and its current utility.
Sure, you can redefine "socialism". You can redefine any word you want. But if you then apply that term in its historical context, e.g. "criticism of capitalism is now mainstream", then you're committing a fallacy of false equivalency.
It may "derive" from the original usage, but it both more restrictive than the original usage and more restrictive than the term has been used by large bodies of self-described socialists since the 19th Century.
> and distinct from any definition of capitalist economy (regulated or otherwise).
Your use of "regulated capitalism" to refer to the modern mixed economy is, BTW, inconsistent with original definition of the term.
> It's the right usage because of its historical correctness and its current utility.
No, its the wrong use, because of its historical incorrectness, and then fact that, insofar as there is utility in having a label for the category you want to apply the label to, there is already are broadly accepted terms for that group that don't require your ahistoric narrowing of "socialism" ("state socialism", "planned economy").
> Sure, you can redefine "socialism". But if you then apply that term in its historical context, e.g. "criticism of capitalism is now mainstream", then you're committing a fallacy of false equivalency.
Using terms in their correct, historical way (which your use of "socialism" doesn't, though that's somewhat tangential to the example you offer here, which doesn't even use "socialism", "criticism of capitalism" is decidedly mainstream in the US today, where the status quo is a mixed economy, and both social democracy as a stepping stone to socialism (on the left) and a return to capitalism (on the right) are among the alternatives with some mainstream traction (along with other tweaks to the mixed economy that neither move substantially to social democracy nor substantially back to capitalism.)
Socialism favors social ownership of the means of production; different branches of socialism prefer different mechanisms for this. These can broadly be split into top-down models (planned economy/state ownership models) and bottom-up models (council communism, etc.) It also includes models which are somewhere in between, like economic democracy (which tends to include elements of top-down ownership by the public through the state, by recognizing broader class of public stakeholders in firms whose interests must be served in addition to private shareholders, as well as elements of bottom-up socialism in empowering employees as represented stakeholders in firms as well.)
The latter seems to be the dominant (though not exclusive -- the group is diverse) focus of modern democratic socialists; Sanders seems to fit in this group as a reformist rather than revolutionary [0] proponent of democratic socialism pursuing (as is common among reformist democratic socialism) social democracy as a incremental step on the road to socialism in the economic democracy form.
> Americans (and pretty much all Westerners) are generally uniformly pro-capitalist.
Americans and most Westerners are generally supporters of the modern mixed economy, which is as much a reaction against the 19th century system for which the term "capitalism" was coined as anything else. That said, its a reaction which superficially retains the large-scale structures of capitalist relations while greatly altering the scope and nature of the property rights which are the defining feature of capitalism.
There are proponents of capitalism in America and the West; they are economic reactionaries.
> Regulated capitalism is a fait accompli and no one is challenging it because it works.
Plenty of people are, in fact, challenging the modern mixed economy (what you call "regulated capitalism") -- from both the laissez-faire capitalist perspective and a variety of different socialist perspectives, among others.
[0] in economic structure terms, if not necessarily in terms of the structure of electoral politics and their relation to private business, the latter of which is the focus of the "political revolution" Sanders often refers to.
Yes. But the point of this whole discussion is limited to whether or not Sanders is misusing the term. Even though there are all of these different socialisms that all satisfy the "social ownership" requirement, is Sanders advocating even a single one of them? I do not think that he is.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
Of course, if we really cared about reducing poverty and inequality, we'd just skip the EITC and open our borders - but obviously the massive amounts of inequality between an American and an Indian are far less important than the relatively small amounts of inequality between two Americans.
Another solution is a basic job - basically a basic income, but you need to work for it (e.g., fixing our crumbling infrastructure and providing free child care for working mothers).
So you want to nationalize the construction and child care industries?
This is radically more communist than any basic income scheme i've ever heard of.
All I propose is putting people on welfare to work on all the left wing's favorite projects. This will save money (we can reuse the existing pool of welfare money rather than finding new money to pay Davis-Bacon wages) and reduce work disincentives (either do a sucky government job or go be a maid).
Thats nationalization of an industry
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Everyone is homeless?
Could you fill in step 2 for me? I'm not following your logic.
(Work provides a way to fill the time, have social interactions, and a sense of purpose and accomplishment, in addition to the financial aspect.)
(And keep the borders closed - poor brown people don't even count for 3/5.)
Also, you seem to be imagining that if landlords of poor people would rather get $0/month in rent (with houses going vacant) than reduce rents. When did landlords become so non-greedy?
Monks choose to live that way. Most people need more than money to survive. They need challenge and creativity, too.
> Some country is going to implement basic income and force us to talk about these ideas that successful people feel we can keep pushing away because it doesn't affect us yet.
Scandinavian countries have had better social programs for years. It's why the wealthy in the US fear discussion of things like basic income. They don't want to pay the tax rates of those countries.
In my opinion, some people want to work. They want to contribute to society and receive validation in the form of a variable salary that can go up or down according to their contribution. Others don't. Both are fine.
Calling people "useless" is not a great selling point for basic income. It strikes a nerve with some people [1], and while I think the post I just cited went over the top, I see what they're getting at.
Useless is subjective. I wouldn't call monks or anyone else useless. Yet, this is one of Altman's reasons for supporting basic income [2]. I don't think he intended his statement to be interpreted that way. It is what it is.
[1] https://medium.com/the-development-set/silicon-valley-s-unch...
[2] http://www.techinsider.io/sam-altman-praises-basic-income-on...
I once worked on a product that did a guy's 40-hour-a-week job completely. He had spent every working hour compiling a series of reports by hand. Then he spent none, because we did it for him. He was our happiest customer.
Spend a year or two teaching people to program. It'll give your brain a nice rest
It won't solve the world's problems but that's something you can do as an individual.
Or you can read about your local politicians and start a Facebook page to support the ones whose views you share.
Job functions have been changing since the cracking of coconuts with rocks. There is no need to stop this train. Teaching helps society advance. If we spend some time teaching programming, whether formally or informally, I think that counts for a lot.