Hacker News Reader

Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

>I'd rather be building complex medical instruments than toasters.

Why? In what way is it better to have a handful of elite workers creating a handful of units sold to a handful of consumers instead of having many ordinary workers producing many units for many consumers?

View on HN

Because ordinary workers, producing many units, is a business with low margins.

And in modern developed economies, those margins are insufficient to support a decent salary.

So what happens when every economy becomes developed? What happens when we can't rely on the existence of low wage workers?

I have a sneaking suspicion that's fundamentally impossible, as some of the prerequisites for developed economies (in the modern, not-industrialization sense) seem to require predatory exploitation of developing economies. And the global inequality of capital ensures there's a power disparity sufficient to enforce it for the former, to the detriment of the latter.

But I guess it's really a question about post-scarcity economics, and whether they're possible?

I think your mistaking how it tends to be for how it must be.

I’m more optimistic. Not really sure I have much to base my optimism on, but oh well.

Edit: fixed a word

This always seems like a question with an agenda.

What happens? Well I suppose the economy collapses and the proletariat rise up and usurp power, or something fantastical.

What’ll more likely happen is we’ll further automate repetitive low skill tasks, and / or start making more durable goods, or otherwise ingenuity our way forward.

Post-industrialized countries make it impossible to for those countries arriving late to the party to advance any further, by way of global environmental agreements and glass bead "carbon credit" payments, thereby ensuring a permanent pool of slave labor.

All of the statistics on wage and per capita GDP growth contradict your claim..

> > > So what happens when...

> > Answer for what happens when

> That hasn't happened yet!1!!

Time isn't that complicated a concept.

Eventually it becomes more profitable to automate. See: Sony's automated PS4/5 factory. Formerly these would've been assembled in some Foxconn plant by tens of thousands of low wage workers.

It happens very gradually, and in aggregate we tend to end up working fewer and fewer hours per year.

Because there won't be "many ordinary workers" producing those toasters. Low margin products like that will have their manufacture automated to the n'th degree and they'll be built by "a handful of elite workers" supervising the automation.

Or, you know, they'll send it to the lowest-cost labor supplier they can find to build by hand and that won't be in the US!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com