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.
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.
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.
How does capitalism solve those problems?