There's a wonderful little essay by Ernest Mandel on the effects of automation on the amount of wage labour employed in his own time (the 80s), why this occurs, and how capitalism deals with automation versus how a Socialist mode of production might do so: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html
Edit: a relevant little quote follows.
"Japanese socialists [7] have tried to study the effects of new technologies especially on the automobile industry. Also stressing qualitative aspects of the changes (loss of skills, increase in accidents, emergence of new layers of workers and of skills etc.), the authors find a reduction of shop floor workers of around 10% at the most highly ‘robotised’ automobile plant in Japan, Nissan’s Myrayama Plant, between September 1974 and January 1982, accompanied however, by small increases in white-collar personnel. Even the Japanese ‘company unions’ seem worried by these developments, ‘life-long employment’ still the rule in Japan notwithstanding (Japan Economic Journal, February 21, 1984)."
What I was asking about is the process of taking something that costs x and charging 3x to make the profit. Where does the 2X come from doesn't that result in debt. I understand you're paying for time that you didn't spend/resources. But it's like swishing water around in a bucket right without external input?
Probably a dumb question but also doesn't help my professor barely spoke English and I stuttered over the word "Inevitably" haha
I'm less certain about the second thing, but I think that debt (and banks?) increase the (effective?) money supply. If you borrow money from a bank (or debt directly from a company for goods or services) to build a new house, then you've acquired a valuable new asset, the laborers you paid acquired new currency, so the total economy can exceed the number of bills that have been printed and are physically in circulation.
There's a lot there that I'm not sure about, and there's plenty of further fascinating questions that follow on from there that I don't know anything about, but I hope that helps you understand some things about how production and the money supply work!
EDIT: Wikipedia seems to agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Fractional-reserv...
> Whenever a bank gives out a loan in a fractional-reserve banking system, a new sum of money is created. This new type of money is what makes up the non-M0 components in the M1-M3 statistics.
I just assume we get money from other countries. And provided we (people in the US) accept dollars from each other then it keeps going.
Yeah it's confusing I'm definitely not an economist myself haha.
edit: thanks
I think you should read Marx's Capital. It is devoted to answering that question: the generation of surplus value and its consequences in society. As you suggest, such system is not stable, explaining capitalism's tendency to crisis.
You could probably map this out.
If X is the united states, and Y is another country. All of the money in business/laborers would eventually go to the top (business) because of the "profit" or 2x but then how does the worker not end up in debt. Unless the worker did the same thing you know building services that multiplied their worth instead of hourly rate, even hourly rate though if you had high wage.
I don't know I tried reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations man that was a hard book to read.
Whenever you draw a supply and demand graph, traditionally as a big 'X', draw a horizontal line from the left of the intersection of supply and demand. The area above that line and under the demand curve is the consumer benefit of trade. The area below that line and above the supply curve is the producer benefit of trade. That is the surplus produced just by the act of going to the market instead of trying to do everything yourself.
Ford's employees build more cars than they could possibly use themselves. Ford's customers have to bring something to trade. The existence of money lubricates the trade process. One customer may, after following the cash flows, do plumbing repairs in all the houses of all the employees, and in the Ford-owned buildings. It is easier for that plumber to fix a thousand toilets than to build one car. It is easier for the factory employees to build one car than to fix ten toilets. So if the plumber trades 100 toilet repairs for one car, everybody wins. The plumber, wanting the car, gets one with 10% the effort, and the workers get 10x more toilet repairs with the same effort. Ford himself decides the proportion of toilet repairs that go to him, and how many go to each worker.
The money price of goods and services continuously rebalance to reflect the desires of customers and the capabilities of producers.
In modern times, the owners of robotic capital are essentially allocating themselves--by means of adjusting money payments--tens of thousands of toilet repairs per year, and maybe half of one repair per year to each of their human employees. The robots, of course, don't poop. This just doesn't work. The owner can't possibly break that many toilets, and the employees are forced to repair their own toilets in addition to their regular jobs whenever they break more than once every two years, which reduces the amount of surplus produced by trade between specialists. You have to pay people enough for what they do or make to pay for the things they want, or you can't support economic specialization.
Ford paid his employees more because all of his employees were on average more specialized than the rest of the economy. Assembly-line auto production could not exist without specialization.
It isn't like swishing water around a bucket. It's like ten people adding one bucket of vegetables each to a pot and getting twenty buckets of soup out of it. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Debt is more like a time machine for making trades happen that could not take place otherwise, as though the vegetables in the soup are all fresh when they go in the pot, but are harvested in different seasons.
I mean the system is running already and you just join in.
Yeah alright, I'm not arguing over thinking with a bad brain.
In an Amazon warehouse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
(Famed animator and film director Miyazaki giving thoughts on AI animation efforts)