Hacker News Reader

Comment by Noumenon72 | Hacker News Reader

> if you don't pay people, they can't buy your product.

I've never seen any value in this argument. If I make Bugattis, I gain nothing by paying my employees enough to buy a Bugatti. In a two-person one-good economy, yes, I can't hire you to milk the cow for $1 and then charge you $2 for the milk, but this isn't going to lead to you starving among spoiling milk. The market will clear, the prices of labor and milk will equalize, because $2 is more than the market will bear.

With robots the price of the milk will go very low because it's so easy to make, meaning I will be willing to sell it for very little in return. You can get a near worthless job like collecting pretty rocks and buy milk with that.

View on HN

>With robots the price of the milk will go very low because it's so easy to make

This is making a huge amount of dangerous assumptions. With robots the price of milk might skyrocket, for example, if land becomes more desirable for other purposes that robots unlock driving up feedstock costs. We are already seeing farmland costs increase significantly. As long as land/homes are a good investment expect costs to increase.

You literally trimmed the sentence before this which said much the same thing. I said handbags, you said Bugatti.

And, the "two person economy" is a reductive argument which misses the point: Ford had to sell cars to people in the income bracket of his workforce. He did not drive the price of labour down below the cost of his cars because he knew that he needed people in that income bracket to be able to buy Model-T cars (he extended favourable terms which probably was a trap, but thats sort of beside the point: he wanted them to be car owners and buy cars) _ I say Ford because he was anything BUT a socialist economist on this matter. He did NOT like organised labour, and fought hard to avoid it. At points, he deliberately paid his workers above scale, to force his opposition out of business (and then subsequently probably drove their rate of delivery up with his massive commitment to Time and Motion Tailorism models of production lines)

Unless, of course, someone has already monopolized the pretty rock collection market with robots.

That's really the threat; that all 'useful' labor will be conducted and collected upon by a very few, and how do we as a society handle that? I haven't seen an economic model situated in capitalism to explain how that can work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com