LOL
You specifically didn't do much. Your workers did. If they make you rich and lose their jobs in the process, you pay them back.
Almost all workers are significantly more productive but wages have remained flat for a long time.
You can tell this is true because labor's share of income (vs capital's share) has remained fairly constant. It's the distribution of this share between different workers that has changed.
Labor's share of income vs capital's has not remained constant. Not even close.
Sure it has:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
Every time I engage with a libertarian (always a pointless endeavor) I feel like I have to take a shower after. Just.. ugh.
Did you? If the workers bought the factory, how are you involved? Didn't you enable them too?
System works now because some of the money goes to middle and lower classes, not all is accumulated on the top. If you accumulate all the wealth in the top without any mechanism of distributing it in lower classes then whole system will collapse and you (as someone on top) will probably end up like in other revolutions in human history, hanging up from the tree.
This is why Republican/Libertarian efforts to eliminate or reduce Government is so fucking scary. Of course there are legitimate reasons to be concerned with limiting govt. overreach. But the Govt. is a required political social entity and we've gotta keep going. Whats baffling to me is that so many wealthy people don't get this. If the Government goes away, their wealth is gonna get torched/taken.
Anyways to answer your question: I don't know what the proportion would be, but likely indicators would be... unemployment level and uninsured rates. People with no healthcare and no jobs/money === desperate people whose survival instincts will kick in.
And if it were, you wouldn't need anyone to buy anything - whatever you might want can be made by your factories.
And which physical goods production can't be automated? Probably 99% can. There are first farms that are already fully automated, so whole chain along with transportation can be automated in future. You have any examples of whole industries that can't be automated? Because I can't think of any that can't, it's only matter of getting cheap technology to do that.
> And if it were, you wouldn't need anyone to buy anything - whatever you might want can be made by your factories
This is false, you don't have infinite amount of resources and for sure you don't have enough money and space to build factories for "whatever you might want".
But in any case - A hand-made item? Which apparently adds worth..
> have any examples of whole industries that can't be automated?
depends what you mean - at what technology level?
Can modelling be automated? maybe. Can barista-ing be automated? Maybe. Can programming? To some degree..
> you don't have infinite amount of resources
luckily, most needs are finite.
> you don't have enough money and space to build factories
The premise is everything you want being automated. If space/land is not automated, that breaks the premise. So there is something you'd pay people to obtain - land rights. A short transfer of all land to the elites later, and you have enough space for anything.
This is just a marketing gimmick (in case of products that we have technology to produce also by machines) in the times we live in to make you pay more for a product.
> Why just physical goods?
Because you can automate production of almost all physical goods. A lot of services also, but to certain degree, simple tasks only, state space is just too big in case of more complex services for today technology.
> depends what you mean - at what technology level? Can modelling be automated? maybe. Can barista-ing be automated? Maybe. Can programming? To some degree..
That's why I was not writing about services but physical goods because in case of services it hugely depends, some can't be automated with our current understanding of the world around us.
> luckily, most needs are finite.
This is false.
'The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.' - Gandhi
You need to take humans into the equation. Make everything for free because it's automated and you will see 7 billion orders for Ferrari, Lamborghini etc. You have enough factories to make those in 10 years? 20 years? 100 years? Take physics into equation and amount of factories/transportation for all the resources and parts to make those products, just those products, what about other things? This will not scale on earth.
> So there is something you'd pay people to obtain - land rights.
Most people on earth do not own any land at all.
> A short transfer of all land to the elites later, and you have enough space for anything.
Read history, this would end like it always do, elites that would try that would be eliminated and replaced with new elites from proletariat. Remember that elites are protected by police and law only because other people allow that, not because this is something written in stone. Earth was already ruled by kings, they owned most of the lands, look how it ended.
as are entire industries. Human life is ultimately meaningless, so all human pursuits are too. Restricting this argument to utilitarian good begs the question - to what aim? Aesthetic good exist at the top of any manufacturing chain.
> Because you can automate production of almost all physical goods
But, wasn't the argument a "what if" scenario in which no-one could get jobs? So physical goods are all automated - just means jobs exist in other areas now.
> - Gandhi
I don't rate the guy, but it sounds like he's talking about the worlds current resources, not future resources.
> You have enough factories to make those in 10 years?
everything is automated, remember? So the factories are made by factory-factories...
> Read history
I don't buy this kind of prediction based on historical analysis.
> elites are protected by police
police have always been human - will this be true in the future?
> Earth was already ruled by kings, they owned most of the lands, look how it ended.
How?
As a very simple example, imagine that you were able to fully automate, such that you required zero workers. Imagine further that all other businesses did the same.
Well, that assumption is pretty general and doesn't account for natural resources/raw materials, energy inputs required for production, or other factors. It would also vary per sector, such that the statement is far from universally true.
>The poorest member of that society would live like a king from our present day world
But, regardless, there would be some cost for goods. How do you propose the now 100% unemployed population pay for anything, let alone "live like kings"?
The answer is that you would need to devise a method of wealth distribution that is orthogonal to capitalism. Say, for instance, a tax that subsidizes everyone else. That, of course, would not be capitalism.
The point is that wage labor is fundamental to capitalism. Somewhere between our present state and 100% automation, a capitalist system requires so much intervention that it breaks down.
If you had robots making everything you could possibly want, why would you bother selling any of it to people who don't have any land, natural resources, or rare skills? They wouldn't have anything you want.
The idea that you could do something like that is even more outlandish than having robots that could automate everything a human could.
But I didn't say this.
Certain materials can be substituted for another, but for high energy costs in making them.
You forget things such as: meaningful work, respect from society, crime, cultural differences between the poor and the rich, interclass upward mobility (see any sociology textbook), intellectual stimulation.
Actually, I like the idea of work. But, at some point, we will have to "artificially" employ people or, of course, implement a UBI. But, even with the latter, we'll have to re-imagine our relationship to work and its role as a source of self-worth.
There's this idea that without work, we'd all just instantly self-actualize and write poetry or paint masterpieces. Not sure why we imagine this vs. the more likely reality that we'd instead sit around sharing cat memes, making heinous YouTube comments, and generally getting dumber.
I'm not sure if society is really ready for a post-work world.
Of course, that's not ideal either. My main point was that a UBI (or not having to work) wouldn't be the instant panacea that some suggest, leading to a sudden heightening of the human race as we are collectively released to pursue our higher purposes.
Of course not all of them will be unemployed, so you only have to pay for 100 + (unemployment rate) × 400 people.
If the cost of your efficiency increase is not too high, you get to pocket the difference.
Unless your automation is as expensive as hundreds of workers, this will likely still be a large sum.
My neighbor bakes nice cookies. I have programmer money. You can guess whats supposed to happen here, but legally can't happen. Some education might help a little with WRT food safety, but it doesn't matter because the purpose of the government is to prevent her from going into the cookie baking business and compete with existing processed food factories.
The ultimate micro-brew isn't some multinational corporation spending lots of money on branding, but its the guy down the block. That of course is incredibly illegal, because the multinational corporation decides whats legal or illegal.
My wife's favorite hairdresser became unemployed due to the cost of health insurance; for awhile she cut hair at home on the side, but the .gov comes down heavy on that for obvious financial reasons.
Some sort of ideal world for lower IQ / lower functioning people would require better government. Rather than the government existing solely to protect Nabisco Inc sales, you'd have to refocus it entirely on safety and small business support services so my neighbor can sell cookies.
If my neighbor did all the homemade baked goods for my entire subdivision, I'm not entirely sure she's be poor, either. If she ran a 50% profit margin and everyone in my subdivision dropped $2/day for baked goods service (like she'd hand deliver you a hot loaf of bread every day?) that would be 6012500*0.50=$180K profit per year, not bad for an area where the median household income is a hair under $60K. Of course the purpose of the government it to annihilate small businesses in favor of large businesses.
Of course you could only fund the re-education of certain job fields, centrally controlled economy style, but that never worked well for the Soviets and you'd likely end up with political goals like flooding the programming market with really bad programmers who none the less work for $7.25/hr (or less) because of the "shortage". It might be possible to actually destroy economic sectors by flooding them with unqualified people. Would you go to the hospital if you knew the doctors were intentionally uneducated?
The problem with re education is it isn't likely to be any more successful in the long run than non-re education. Its the same people with the same brainpower operating off the same observed signals. If a quarter of the population was improperly educated the last time they went to school, the result of re-education is virtually certain to be a quarter of the population being differently improperly educated. Its sort of like handing out money to rebuild housing in flood plains, you know you're just going to be handing out more money to the same people in a couple years.
Then who pays the tax?
What if I invent a whole new product category that obsoletes a whole industry? Not a lot of people manufacturing typewriters anymore.
What if I invent a cheaper way to ship goods from China making it easier to shift manufacturing there? Who pays the tax then?
What if I'm an employee at the factory and I figure out a better way of doing things so that I can take on additional responsibility so when Bob (the guy next to me) retires we don't have to hire a replacement? Then do I pay?
And how long does this tax last? Forever? Are people still paying taxes for all the farmers we don't have to have anymore?
How confident are you that you can really write tax rules that make sense for the infinite number of scenarios via which productivity is enhanced in a modern economy?
But our economic system is literally grinding to a halt, which means it's not exactly perfect. I for one welcome suggestions, even if they're only slightly less imperfect.
> And how long does this tax last? Forever? Are people still paying taxes for all the farmers we don't have to have anymore?
Assume for a moment that being a farmer were hereditary and they couldn't do anything else anyone would find of value. Then when you replace all of them by machines, you make huge profit, but also leave hundreds of people without income. In such a case, I think it only fair that the farmers and their descendants be provided for indefinitely.
That this tips the scale against automation is not exactly bad: if the farmers have to be provided for anyway, additionally maintaining machines to do work they could do just as well is a further cost that should be weighted against the benefits.
However, in reality most people can learn to do other work, so automation can still end up a net positive, even when the needs of the displaced workers are taken into account.
I guess the problem will solve itself when workers will either employ themselves as revolutionaries and looters, or the beneficiaries of automation pay the equivalent of this tax to prevent this from happening.