The later certainly have their place, driving efficiency and innovation, even if it's only between the robots, although they do require regulation and even intervention to keep them dynamic.
The former (individual ownership of the means of production, be it machinery, IP or branding, and therefore the profits generated by other people's labor) is already an anachronism IMHO. Only a single step up from feudalism, except instead of strict heredity etc, in theory anyone with the resources can do the equivalent of build a castle, raise an army, and own serfs.
It's demise wouldn't need to wait for the arrival of robots, in a fairer world.
Use capitalism (or variant) if a proper market exists. When a natural monopoly contraindicates market-dependent methods, use a cooperative or publicly managed service or whatever is more appropriate for that specific situation. A pragmatic approach should use all of the available tools. Pretending that one ideology is "better" without first considering the local context is the political equivalent of seeing every problem as a nail because you only use hammers.
Replacing capitalism with another system that has a different set of problems isn't the solution. The core problem starts with the consolidation of power and resources, amplified by the unbounded risk created by rapidly increasing complexity. In software we (try to) manage complexity with various types of modularity. Separating the problem into manageable pieces limits risk and prevents some forms of common mode failure.
Thus, a good "alternative to capitalism" is probably capitalism with a strict upper limit to the size of business and other organizations. if your business grows to more than N employees, it must be divided into pieces smaller than N.
A pitfall could be the legislation itself: How do you fight lobbying at the fringes of each system - although maybe it's not too bad that it exists, since there is a ceiling for how much a lobby can profit before it is basically disbanded.
There is no purpose in industrial production other than to serve human society. If capitalist industry gets rid of human employees to a large degree, it becomes detached from its very own purpose. So, a large company should contribute to BHI or hire people, otherwise how will people have money to buy products from corporations?
An idea would be to invent a human-centric currency, paid to each individual as a BHI. The state should require a part of the taxes be paid in this currency at a sustainable rate, thus forcing companies to subsidize BHI.
In the meantime, people need to organize in order to bootstrap a human-based economy, where automation could still play a role, with the crucial difference that it would be regular people who are the owners of the capital, and not just a select 1%.
Or someone could invent a self replicating factory that only uses common materials, thus becoming virtually free to multiply and serve humanity wherever it is needed. At this moment, the self replicating factory is economy on the whole. But we can do better, we might compress it to a small size and make it more independent of rare/expensive raw materials, and make it open source. Then it could bootstrap human population out of scarcity without work.
The best way to expose the problem of capitalism is with this joke "Give a man a fish, and he will eat for one day. Learn him to fish, and you destroy a market." Capitalism is also leading people to harm (health) and exploit other people.
Communism was clearly a false good idea. Liberalism and capitalism (with competition) clearly provide a motivationnal power for which owe most of the health, technical and scientifical progress.
However, it also come with its perversion like the war, junk food and entertainment business and human exploitation as producer or consumer.
Humanity is going through a continuous evolution process and capitalism is one stage of it. New models will emerge fixing the problems of previous models and preserving their good properties.
It's a long time that I think about this and try to find what could be the next evolution step.
My conclusion is that the working model used in science and more recently with open source could be a good candidate because it provides exponential growth which beats capitalism. Some kind of high level control will be needed so that humanity doesn't shoot itself in the foot as would happen soon or later with pure liberalism and capitalism. It already exist today but it is currently frequently corrupted by greeediness of capitalists.
The robot revolution will not suppress all human work. So I don't think that it might affect capitalism that much. I believe that it would make trade business more prevalent.
[1]: Like a Star Trek community, where you have an accessible machine that can create any material you like, from a glass of wine to a macbook pro.
Yes, it'd be difficult to implement and run. But it'd have the good parts of capitalism - incentive and free market. While without the big corporations that eventually seem to limit both incentive and free market. Yes, free market with a cap is not totally free. But big company capitalism as we see today is far from really free market too.
My impression is that something relating to the goal needs to be fixed. For many people capitalism boils down to make as much money as possible regardless of the impact on other humans and the world. This is what needs to be fixed. Otherwise capitalism allowing and providing incentive and reward for individual (or collective) initiative to make this world a better place is good.
Limitation and repression is the first idea that comes to mind to fix a problem. Education is underated because it needs more time to see the benefit. Considering the demonstration made by terrorists that it is possible to lead someone to commit suicide and mass murdering just for ideas induced by education, my conclusion is that there is a huge leverage in education that has been ignored and wasted. This is the track I would favor. However not as was done in China many decades ago.
Being from ex-ussr state I'm well aware of communism.. shortcomings. Communism was killing innovation at very low level. Small business? Fuck you. Self-employed? Fuck you. Artist who don't recite gov position? Fuck you. Work in BigCo and have some interesting ideas? Fuck you. Innovation did happen but it was very rare. Well, except military tech etc.
The problem with capitalism is that once someone grows big, it's too easy for them to limit innovation. They either buy any innovation that may threaten them (and likely kill and/or damage it like Google) or make sure they have very hard time growing. Education alone won't help there. It may create more attempts to innovate, but the BigCo ceiling would still be there.
It'd be great to aim for market where no single player have even double digits of market share. If there were 10 google searches, it'd be much easier to create new google search. Then educated people could push for innovation under their own banner rather than be forced to make their way through google ladder.
I've seen somewhat similar development in my country. For example, clothes retailers. Not exactly innovative thing, but hear me out. In 90s, there were a lot of small shops with great (especially after soviet times) variety. In 00s, most of the clothes retail was run by single holding. They have franchises of several well known brands and are biggest renters in most shopping centres. There's not much of variety and pricing is shitty though. Thank god H&M squeezed in. But new small retailers seem to have a hard time. Once some brand/style starts getting popular, the big holding fills that niche too. There seem to be a narrow line between staying afloat and getting bigco interested in your niche.
Here's were all your reasoning is flawed. You're advocating for a tyrant, or a central authority like, guess where/when: Venezuela or Soviet Russia. This has been attempted, and failed, several times before. We're not talking about Python, or the Linux kernel, in which their respective dictators don't even have that much say any more. We're talking about full societies here. And bunch of intelligent people, best case, can't direct full economies.
There's nothing more decentralized and self correcting than capitalist free markets. And, yes, with appropriate regulations. Quoting, don't faint, Hayek
The successful use of competition does not preclude some types of government interference. For instance, to limit working hours, to require certain sanitary arrangements, to provide an extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. There are, too, certain fields where the system of competition is impracticable. For example, the harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question. But the fact that we have to resort to direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Road%20to%20serfdom.pd... Page 46
Capitalism is not endangered by the robot revolution. Capitalism is bringing the robot revolution. And it's going to prune the least productive, challenging, and fulfilling jobs, and we'll be forced to take on the high value jobs that will make humanity advance.
It's been like this for millennia, an will be like this for a long time.
Perhaps your best bet to survive the robot apocalypse is to accumulate some savings so that you're one of the capitalists by the time competitive wages fall below the human subsistence level. Robin Hanson discusses this in http://ageofem.com/
If we presume the cost of good drops to near zero if robots are creating everything, and maintaining themselves, then there will be a race to the bottom for cost. For example, if a T-shirt costs US$0.001 to make (including raw materials), then anything above that is pure profit for the seller. Suddenly people need less money to buy things that were very expensive.
I think you need to look at the portion of cost that is associated with labour and defects, and assume this will be the cost of the good until raw materials are reduced in cost as well.
Personally, no. I don't think capitalism in it current form can survive robot revolution.
We are fully capable right now to recycle all our water, both in the home and on farms, it just cost a lot in materials and energy.
I don't see why energy will be scarce when we could cover the worlds oceans in solar panels (if we really had to)
Cheap labor will do amazing things, it's exponential.
Robots are cheap, solar panel installation is cheap, energy is cheaper, robots are cheaper, mining/materials is cheaper.....
At some point, water needs to be used for one thing, and not another. That necessary choice is what is meant by scarcity. Choices must be made, recycling water won't avoid the need to choose what to do with the water.
It is unfair to sell products to humans while not hiring humans and not contributing to BHI. It's a one way transaction where money accumulate to the capitalists while the population is depleted. Money should circulate, like water in nature. It should not be captured in some lake (offshore account) from where it goes no further.
Companies are ahead of a big choice: they need to take a loss (accepting to support BHI for population) in order to keep their economic cycle running, otherwise they will all suffer a huge drop in sales. But can they prioritize long term necessities over short term profits?
The result would be an economy with fewer and fewer people, and yet the economy is "healthy" in that both production and consumption continue to grow.
Now add in machines capable of a survival imperative, competing with each other to open up new resources to enhance their long term survival. Now an economy grows without any people.
This is the default we are heading toward.
I don't know what the best answer is for humans, except to view all humans as retirees, and give future machines the benefit of retiring in the future too, so that both humans and machines are aligned in the desire to subsidize themselves eventually as they become obsolete.
Well, that's what he have since Reaganomics, isn't it?
There's going to be a gradual, century long process of integration between humans and robotics, which will radically improve productivity while population growth turns steeply negative across most of the planet and for the better.
What will happen to all the truckers (standard example)? We'll stop making more of them, just as we did with farmers and radio DJs and newspaper delivery boys and phone network operators and gas pumpers; existing drivers will gradually be phased out. If I ask you what you think I mean, when I say: "robot helpers" - what would you answer? Robots that help people, right? No. There are going to be millions of people working as robot helpers in the next ~30 years just in the US - humans will help the robots work better; the robots will be far more productive at what they do than humans at the exact same tasks, but most of those robots will not be able to function fully autonomously in the next century (in fact, economically it'll never be desirable to build fully autonomous robots for all tasks, quite the opposite; as such, there's no scenario where millions of human robot helpers won't be necessary). The dramatic gain in productivity the robots will bring to said tasks, will more than offset the cost of continuing to have humans that act as robot assistants.
Absolutely nothing will be fundamentally altered in regards to market economies, when it comes to the rise of robotics / AI etc. The premise about mass unemployment is a fear based fraud and will be proven so only as the years drift by and the mass unemployment never materialize. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the fear angle will continue to draw clicks.
I assume you realize that lost of things have gone obsolete. We are talking about humans becoming obsolete. How can that not radically impact humans?
Your argument comes down to saying, the past didn't have this problem, therefore the future won't. But that is not a good argument.
(There will be bumps on the road, and, as technologists with increasing economic power, we should vote for politicians who support smoothing out those bumps.)
"There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied. In a modern exchange economy, the most work will be done when prices, costs, and wages are in the best relations to each other." (Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson)
You know the old illustration about the buggy-whip makers complaining that automobiles were destroying their jobs and putting them out of work, and how could anyone possibly survive that? Then, oh look, there were tons of new jobs created in automobile factories and everyone was better off than before.
Well, in that story, we're not the buggy-whip makers any more; we're the horses. Horses didn't move on to better and more productive forms of transportation employment. They simply became useless except in a few remaining highly-specialized working roles, or as pets. Or glue.
Since scarcity ceasing sounds improbable, and I expect people will continue preferring fair systems to unfair ones, I expect capitalism will survive.
The current distribution of resources and capital have arisen as a result of hundreds of years of human history and unfair practices, from feudalism to slavery, colonialism to imperialism, racism and casteism to sexism.
However, since we aren't able to structure all of society (genetics yet, physics maybe never), Rawls has to wait. Even ignoring historic wealth, things like IQ, new ideas/discoveries, etc aren't distributed fairly. This is to say we need a system which can be fair given that the starting point (at our current level of technology) isn't fair. This is a lower level of fairness than Rawlsian. Think of it like a group of people asking what the rules of poker should be after the hands are dealt -- hard but perhaps possible.
This is to say that having discarded the second part of Rawls' Theory of Social Justice, we still have the first part: "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others"
From this you get Aquinas' construction of free trade from natural moral law, followed by modern economics proofs for prices being the answer to an optimization problem over aggregate utility in the presence of scarce goods (you give the good you don't need to whomever can give you the most goods you do need. If everyone does this, society is the most well off it can be in aggregate).
This seems to me fair in the sense of after-the-cards-are-dealt poker rules, if we could control the laws of physics and change our genetic code I do agree we could do better.
You may argue that capitalism has increased the ‘unfairness’ of the distribution of resources, but capitalism can’t be solely blamed for the various geographical, religious and other reasons for the ‘unfair’/unequal distribution of resources.
Doesn't that go against the fundamental principle of capital accumulation? Those with the most capital are the ones who earn the most profit.
"[Capitalism] is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." - John Updike
The conspiracy is to extract excess capital from people, not make them happy. If someone has no or little excess capital, the capitalist doesn't want anything to do with him.
Moreover, speculation leads to capitalists hoarding productive and useful resources such as grain, land, water for their own benefit, and often to the detriment of society. A particularly chilling example of this would be the 1974 Bangladesh famine, when food production in Bangladesh was at a local peak, yet speculative hoarding of grain drove 1-1.5 million people to starvation. This region is not a stranger to famine, exacerbated by speculative hoarding. In 1943, due to a combination of Churchill's policies and hoarding, an estimated 4 million people starved to death.
This is to say that if you believe the 1974 famine in Bangladesh (which I also discuss below) is indeed a counter example to the optimality of markets for allocating scarce resources without violating natural law, I encourage you to examine the foundational assumptions and theorems in Economics to locate where the error is. That would be big news to a lot of people!
2. In response to: "Disneyland and Apple hardware has its target demographic as the top quartile of the population. The people who spend all their money on basic necessities such as rent, food, water, heat can't ever access these "awesome" services."
The result of capitalism is not that everyone gets the same outcome. The result is that everyone has a better outcome than they would have with a system other than capitalism. This is why I above mention that if we could modify the laws of physics, we could do better than capitalism. Put another way: you and I do not have private jets. But we also wouldn't in any other system, at least on average. That's not a fault with axioms of capitalism, that'a a fault with the laws of physics (if only metal and rocket fuel were plentiful enough!... :p)
3. In response to your examples I generally encourage you to google the benefits of allowing others to speculate ("speculation economic benefits" in google looks good to a first glance). The gist of it is that speculators add liquidity to a market by moving risk to themselves (who demonstrably are happier to hold the risk than the other market participants). My understanding is that most speculation ends in financial loss.
Re: "A particularly chilling example of this would be the 1974 Bangladesh famine, when food production in Bangladesh was at a local peak, yet speculative hoarding of grain drove 1-1.5 million people to starvation."
I'm not so familiar with this example, however looking at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974) there seems to have been a major flood following a war in Bangladesh at this time. These seem to be pretty large confounding factors, but let's assume they are not and play a little game:
--> Imagine you're in Bangladesh in 1974, and you are in possession of food enough to feed 100 people for 1 month. How do you decide what to do with this food? Remember that you do not know in advance when the food shortage will recover, and that if you don't save enough, you'll have to buy it at even higher prices or starve. Also, if you give all the food away, another famine may come along in the future, and you will have no capital left over to save those people.
(For a reasonable ethical framework you can use to build an answer, consider reading the material provided for free at https://80000hours.org)
Re: "In 1943, due to a combination of Churchill's policies and hoarding, an estimated 4 million people starved to death."
I've often wondered by people use famines which happen in freer markets as examples, while ignoring the tremendous numbers of famines and shortages that happen through government intervention. Thank you for listing one.
4. For an example of what happens when scarcity occurs and speculators / hoarders aren't allowed to operate, consider the current situation in Venezuela https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_in_Venezuela . You can also find the a tremendous number of (Godwin's law skirting) examples from Russia and China (countries which acted similarly to Venezuela). You can find good economic analyses of all of these btw, if you are curious about how they were caused on a mathematical/game-theoretic level, and how to minimize the chance of such shortages happening in the future.
Regarding economics as a science, it is widely accepted by economists that it is not a precise science, and has no inviolable axioms like math, or anywhere approaching the experimental accuracy of physics. It is a messy, complicated thing because humans are messy and complicated. In particular, it is well established through the works of people like Kahneman than people are not rational actors.
In addition, you seem to be resorting to a false dichotomy between capitalism as it exists today vs command economies. You don't have to choose one or the other. Markets are certainly an important and useful way of distributing resources, but they are dominated and controlled by a small, powerful, capitalist class, who are also able to abuse regulatory institutions for their own benefit. The problem is that this class appropriates wealth created by society at large. They have the power to set up rules and conditions in their own favor.
Any "just" and "fair" system could only begin by returning this wealth back to society.
Then, assuming he agrees with your above summary, I encourage both you and Amartya to locate the foundational assumption. It really would be big news to a lot of people.
> Regarding economics as a science, it is widely accepted by economists that it is not a precise science, and has no inviolable axioms like math
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_economics would be a good starting point if you are wondering at economic axioms, etc. The Austrian School generally did a good job building models worth thinking about, rather than devolving into econometric-style silliness.
> Any "just" and "fair" system could only begin by returning this wealth back to society.
A lot of us disagree.
Like I said, mathematical models of economics are a simplification, and this fact is widely accepted by most economists. This is not by any means a dismissal, as it provides valuable insight into the behavior of human society, but viewing it as the beginning and end of economics will place massive limitations on any analysis.
In particular, as I mentioned, the study of sociological conditions and human psychology provide valuable insights. Take a look at behavioral economics and the work of people like Daniel Kahneman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
> A lot of us disagree.
It is a simple conclusion that follows from three premises, the first of which you seemed to accept earlier, the second is self evident, and the third of which follows from simple economic principles
1. A lot of the wealth today has been created through illegitimate and unfair means.
2. Wealth gives its owner power over society and the direction it takes.
3. People who have power/wealth will do anything in their abilities to maintain and further increase it.
> This is not by any means a dismissal, as it provides valuable insight into the behavior of human society, but viewing it as the beginning and end of economics will place massive limitations on any analysis.
My personal interest in economics has roughly nothing to do with understanding human behavior -- I'm interested in incentive structures/mechanism design, mathematical fairness, agency, decision theory, optimal play, optimally exploitative play, cooperation/coordination/defection in partial information games, etc. This is to say that, for me, economics becomes uninteresting as soon as you worry if human behavior matches the model. Econs are so much cooler than humans! It's much more fun to ask what they would do, and what can be done to improve their outcomes.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
Yes, I am familiar, especially as it relates to faulty decision making in professional life (base rate neglect, availability bias, etc). I don't think he's considered to be part of the field, but I've also found George Polya's How to Solve it to be related here. He explicitly discusses heuristic search for math proofs, and how this can amount to a blind spot.
> It is a simple conclusion that follows from three premises
(This was what made me realize what had happened). My disagreement is with respect to the question of "can a fair game be created within an unfair game, even in a context where you can't correct historical unfairness?" -- to that I say yes (with my earlier caveats about physical limits of fairness in our world).
Perhaps now that I've explained more about my background and perspective, you can consider this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442034) again from the perspective of "Will capitalism survive the robot revolution?" -- the econs I love will (I hope/expect) finally be a reasonable model of economic behavior. Therefore I hope capitalism will survive, since that would ensure I got to live in a good/fair world. If you are aware of some way in which a capitalist system, when populated by robots/econs, could be improved with respect to fairness, I'm skeptical but quite interested.
Re: the political question you asked. If there were a way to say for sure if wealth was unearned I'd absolutely support confiscating it, if not I'm skittish and afraid of causing more harm than good.
How does capitalism solve those problems?
In 1980, the US was about 80% white demographically. Today it's about 63% white and falling rapidly. The difference between those two, is tens of millions of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. The US has absorbed 10 to 12 million immigrants from just Mexico since 1980.
Remove the immigration from Latin America + Asia and US population growth over the last 30 years in particular falls to barely a trickle; it'd likely be flat at this point.
Untrue; the US still has a positive rate of natural increase. Immigration is responsible for a hair more growth than natural increase, but isn't the sole source of increase.
Naturally increase in the non-native population isn't increase "due to immigration", either in the terms normally used in population dynamics, or, really, in any meaningful sense other than the way in which all population increase in a place where humanity didn't arise is attributable to some past migration.
That's entirely consistent; below replacement fertility doesn't imply a current negative rate of natural increase, though if maintained indefinitely it implies an eventual negative rate of natural increase. [1]
[0] examples: https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Dem... http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-population-... http://www.susps.org/overview/birthrates.html
[1] Assuming the replacement rate is accurate, but current replacement rates are based on projections into the future based on past mortality trends, and can be inaccurate in projecting what is needed for replacement for that reason.
The voluntary exchange of goods and services, at prices set by the competing producers of the goods and services, is the most efficient way of matching supply and demand, whether the supply is generated by man or machine is irrelevant.
That's like asking if gravity will still exist in 100 years.
No system has ever been more efficient than free markets, and robots will only help with efficiency. The only way to kill capitalism is by the state.
I don't think you are saying anything rational.
Yes, it's the most effective system we know for some goods. But some people seem to believe that it is somehow provable efficient in an absolute sense, which it clearly is not.
The only way capitalism in its current form exists is through the support and use of state power. Private and intellectual property are entirely dependent on state recognition and are propped up by the states monopoly on violence.
Capitalism fundamentally is the application of state power to protect a particular class through defense of a particular structure of property rights.
Here capitalism and free markets become evil as they are "watched" from the outside. Little do they know just how hard it is. Little do they know what degree of effort, dedication and tolerance for risk it requires.
They look at entrepreneurs and companies and eventually see evil from their flawed frame of reference while neglecting to notice all they have thanks to precisely the people they vilify. Nothing funnier than an anti-capitalist using a computer, and iphone, a car or enjoying the benefits of modern medicine. Even wearing a pair of socks manufactured through modern means while criticizing capitalism is nothing less than hypocritical.
Will capitalism survive the robot revolution?
Of course it will.
What will create the robot revolution in the first place? It certainly won't be people not chasing dreams or taking risks. It will be people willing to put it all on the line to chase their passions and ideas and, yes, to make a profit while doing so. Profit is the feedback that says you are doing something people want. It's the result of a voluntary relationship between producer and consumer. It's a good thing.
Capitalism doesn't require advanced technology. It has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Robots, horse-drawn carriages, cookies or light bulbs, it makes no difference.