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Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

What about as consumers then? Without workers who's going to buy anything? We have some serious logistics to figure out if we automate the majority of jobs away, and yet somehow all these companies are expecting people to still be able to buy their products.

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100 oligarchs can own everything and trade among each other to fulfill their megaprojects. Does a pharaoh care who built his pyramid? Or spaceship? The workers will still be needed to laugh at their suffering. Unless robots get better than humans even at that.

Where are the pharaohs today? That sort of social imbalance leads inevitably to revolution. Always has. It's not sustainable.

Yep. The most powerful demographic in America today don't even have jobs, it's people 60+ voting to keep social security and Medicare and kicking away the ladder.

> it's people 60+ voting

Most of the people I personally know who are 60 and older have jobs.

The pharaohs of today? They are launching war against their neighbors in Ukraine.

Right, the problem I see is that dictators like to help each other. It is in their interest to make deals with other dictators because they can, rather than their own people, which they can't unless they allow free elections. For instance Trump's best friends seem to be Putin and other autocrats. Why is that? Because they can make deals with each other, to suppress democracy everywhere.

It's no coincidence that we in the US have massive wealth inequality and are constantly teetering on the edge of political instability.

We've always had massive wealth inequality. Look at Rockefeller or Carnegie or du Pont compared to immigrants living 10 to a room in NYC tenements.

Wait, so you think that pharaohs were overthrown by a popular uprising? Xi, Kim and Putin sit pretty sturdily in their sits.

Read CitiGroup's Plutonomy paper and equity strategy that addresses just this contradiction[1].

The economy will shift to just addressing the wants and needs of those with wealth via luxury goods and services:

> How do we make money from this theme? We see two ways. The first is simple. If you believe, like us, that the Plutonomy exists, and explains why global imbalances have built up (for example the savings rate differentials), and you believe there is no imminent threat to plutonomy, you must in turn believe that the current “end of the world is nigh” risk premium on equities, due to current account deficits, is too high. Conclusion: buy equities.

> There is however a more refined way to play plutonomy, and this is to buy shares in the companies that make the toys that the Plutonomists enjoy.

[1] https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf

There will be more companies making things and providing things than there are today because there’s more labor available. We can do the things that aren’t of higher necessity today.

To sell to who? If no one has income, who buys the things?

Income can be generated politically, see e.g. Soviet command economy.

In Soviet economy virtually all people had a job though. In communist Poland where I grew, safe for the years of martial law in mid 80s everyone who wanted a job had one.

In our modern economy everyone that wants a job has one. Unemployment is extremely low and has been.

That's only true of the US in this very moment, it's not a property of capitalism per se.

New businesses will form. Why wouldn't they? We have a ton of businesses that even 50 years ago no one would imagine. We can continue up the pyramid to more and more things that wouldn’t be possible or practical today.

Your mistake is you’re looking at a future world in todays state.

Why would they? There is nothing suggesting that there are infinite industries to be invented, once we have automated our core industries, will we all be working for superfluous industries? Seems far more naive to assume the status quo of total employment will continue due to some unforseen future of yet known new jobs, rather than thinking criticaly about the more near future outcomes of a much deeper automation of jobs we already have.

Neoliberal economics is so exhausting.

This is similar to:

Replacing horses with cars will free up those horses to do other productive work, like pulling plows and turning stone mills, thereby benifiting the horses.

I don’t agree because horses are extremely limited in function compared to humans. There is a very small set of things horses are useful for and you’re right, we’ve mechanized most of them.

Work and value are consitantly redefined to exclude automatable parts. Peanut butter could become free but sandwiches won't be. Or if sandwiches becone free the recipe remains nonfree.

Ultimately the fact that you an individual intended to intend an intention continues to hold a $1 value represented in metal coins until the last of us joins the rest in pickle jars.

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