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Comment by chr1 | Hacker News Reader

If by "socialism" you mean government owning all the robots, deciding what to build, and how much everyone should get, then the majority of people will not get good life. (we'd be lucky if people don't forget how to build robots in generation or two!).

If you mean that when majority of work is free, people simply by existing will produce enough value for other people to deserve UBI large enough to live(1), then yes, but it is not a system that is called socialism today.

(1) the value for other people will be produced simply by increasing the likelihood of new science and art being created, so like investors are happy to waste lots of money to get one really successful startup, people as a whole would be happy to waste lots of money on UBI to many people, to get some really talented scientists.

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By socialism I mean "social ownership of the means of production".

This idea works very well, as long as it is applied to a tiny group of people who know each other well (one family). With larger groups it doesn't work at all because of game theory. The people who work hard to build better "means of production" or use them more effectively, as a reward get all of their work seized by people who do not want or know how to use these "means of production". As a result the production goes down and the quality of life of the people goes down too. If you allow people to leave your country the best workers leave it, dragging the quality of live of the remaining people too, if you want to not allow that you have to build a police state, and the quality of life becomes even worse. This is a simple theory, which have been tested multiple times, and sadly in my country too, and i hope the next time this idea gets tested it is tested on people who wilfully join the test and have the ability to leave it.

> as a reward get all of their work seized by people who do not want or know how to use these "means of production".

This is only true in some kind of socialism, counterexample: mutalism.

I am confused, According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory) mutalism does not advocate for social ownership of the means of production, so it's not what you meant in the previous comment.

In the previous comment:

"social ownership of the means of production"

Social ownership: can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.

Ref: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

> Social ownership: can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.

The problem with all of this, is that if someone works better than others, and creates his own "means of production" there must exist someone else who will seize it and distribute it to the collective, otherwise the means will again concentrate at the hands of lucky or more hardworking people.

And size of the group is also a fuzzy term.

In some cases whole population of a country may behave as a single group. Let's say USSR at 1941 was clearly one single group focused on "do everything for the victory".

As of the humanity... Global warming and other global threats will group us all.

> Let's say USSR at 1941

That's a very good example of a case where people were not acting as a single group at all. Most of the soldiers were simply leaving everything and retreating, because at first they were not sure if Hitler was really worse than Stalin (http://www.solonin.org/en), groups of people were joining with German army sometimes hoping to get rid of soviets and sometimes because wanting to kill neighbours (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera), food was being captured from all the areas that potentially could end up under German control, which ended up causing the famine in Leningrad. So even if from afar it looks like a single group, it was much more complex and turbulent close up.

Can you explain why you think that is necessary and not eg Social Democracy? Industrialization and automation has gone most of the way already (from working 7x16 to working 5x8 because of it), and socialism hasn’t even worked briefly while social democracy has done a lot better. What is it about this final small push of automation that requires public ownership?

You are right.

But nowadays we should have taken another step (4x7?). Millenials are the first generation living worst than their parents, inequality increases and wealth and work are not well balanced.

Why? Because capitalism has won and socialism is not watched as an alternative.

We are slowly getting there. We went from no paid holidays to one two three weeks and so on. Many countries have less than 40 work weeks in some sectors already. It won’t be quick to hit 35h workweeks but it wasn’t exactly quick to get to 40 either.

(Note: this reasoning of past progress doesn’t apply to the US)

We've had excess transfer of wealth to the rich before, around the 1920s. It was dealt with in capitalist countries by raising taxes and increasing spend on things like health and education. The countries that did that fared better than those going for full socialism.

The notion of "means of production" is not applicable to modern economy since now a simple computer can be "means of production" in the right hands, that's why modern states redistribute some percentage of produced goods, instead of trying to seize means of production. This redistribution still does lots of harm, but if we decide to not redistribute at all, we end up with a large number of people who are so unhappy that may agree to destroy everything as they don't have anything to lose (though usually it turns out they underestimate the amount of things they can lose), so to prevent this we may end up with ubi, as my unpopular comment above was suggesting.

If by "socialism" you mean government owning all the robots, deciding what to build, and how much everyone should get, then the majority of people will not get good life.

Is that so far from Walmart?

It is not comparable at all, first of all walmart handles only one specific field, unlike the state having monopoly on everything. Second, there are competitors to walmart so when walmart starts to do crappy job a competitor that does better job will drive it out of business. Third if you build your own robot walmart won't be able to take it, and socialist state will have to take it to remain socialist. All of this forces walmart to listen to the people who consume its services, in socialist economy no one has incentive to care.

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