To make money in order to eat food and have a home.
Will all rich people in all countries collectively agree to be moved into tiny apts same size and give up their luxuries?
If not, how do you define who gets what? Who gets to live in the fancy house, etc?
Using the metric of “4 earths of resources” is confusing and easily misunderstood. What that metric means is that if everyone were to have the same consumption as the average U.S. person tomorrow, we wouldn’t have enough renewable resources to meet demand.
This is not an insurmountable problem. It just requires increasing production everywhere else. Your cited metric isn’t a stat on the theoretical limit of global production, it’s one that describes its current limits.
The stat also factors in carbon emissions, but this is also easily addressable in a world where labor and maintenance is cheap.
Land, energy infrastructure, mineral deposits, grid capacity, etc.
Who gets to live in the nice parts of the world? Who has a national park as a neighbour? Who gets to be ravaged by hurricanes every year? Who gets to have more energy production closer to then? Who will own the land that has the finite resources that are used to create abundance? Where will people with the most power live?
There are so many reasons beyond production why certain areas fare better than others inherently, I have not seen any answer to this apart from that all rich people will just fold and we will all be moved into soviet skyscrapers which I find improbable.
Our current oligarch-capitalist system (wherein most of the world is dictatorship or plutocratic) is not capable of equitable resource distribution. However, future, better systems of organization will likely provide better mechanisms for distrubtion.
Capitalism is an old and dying system. It is clearly unfit for the 21st century. It's best thought of as anachronistic, like feudalism. Once it's been excised from our societies, we'll be able to answer your questions.
Meanwhile capitalism bases itself on game-theory and evolutionary selection. You compete with power, sexual selection and resources. It's sadly a system more aligned with the natural order of things. If you strip away all banks, hedge funds, etc, you are again going to get people who want to mate with the hottest fit partner, get the most resources to ensure survival of their offspring, etc.
The organizational/political problem I mention above with the land use land in the same bucket. Who gets the best land, etc. Historically this has just been decided by war and killing each other. Maybe you're right and that's where we end up, but that is very far from the utopias talked about in the comments above.
A “planned economy” is very vague. Usually people imply a central committee deciding what to do. Our economy relies on plutocrats to decide what to do. At what point of plutocratic concentration would you call the US economy planned? My point is all these terms are fuzzy.
My point is that capitalism as is practiced in America is a failed ideology. From the vantage of the present day, it appears painfully antiquated. A pathetic vestige of a less civilized world.
It’s interesting because America had the opportunity to lead the journey to the next organizing principle for socio-economic, but instead decided to get stuck in the past. Pathetic, but standard course. I think it’s because our leadership is in their 80s.
While you can't do this, capitalism is not failed, outdated, or antiquated. Which country gets what, who gets to live where, why, etc.
Why? Do movie critics need to be directors to critique? Obviously not.
> While you can't do this, capitalism is not failed, outdated, or antiquated.
Why? Capitalism is clearly failing the world. Being outdated is I suppose a relative perspective. I view it as outdated because it doesn't meet the needs of our current technology. Remember that economic systems are a function of available technology: they exist only in a social context. Our technology has already reached the point where capitalism is counter-productive.
I would love to have a replacement system ready to go. My hunch is it will require a lot of compute.
This is beyond naive.
[1]https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.1525/elem...
Firstly, each country is different. So the relationship between say the USA and Mexico is different to the relationship between the USA and say Ethiopia.
By "richness" we might also be better off thinking as less "spare cash" and more "standard of living". Which includes food, housing etc but also security, safety etc.
In truth much of the US "richness" depends on other nations. If there was no Latin labor the US would have a fresh produce problem. Indeed the very premise of DJT is that the US has a trade deficit with just about everyone. Much of US "richness" is thus dependent on the "poorness" of others.
Yes automation, cheaper energy, AI can reduce the labor content of goods and make them universally cheaper. Yes I believe in a future where the overall standard of living increases.
But it would be a mistake to believe the US is "leading" US there. The US achieved its current position at the barrel of a gun, and uses the military (and threat of military) to interfere with countries and regions either overtly or covertly. The entire premise of the cold war (outside of western europe) was premised on interventions to resist countries switching their political model to something the locals preferred.
And yes, maybe the locals preferred wrong. But the US didn't promote democracy, they promoted "willingness to keep supplying us". Countries which were leaning away from the US had to be punished. (Shah in Iran, Vietnam etc.)
I could go on, but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that an equitable standard of living is not in the (current) interest of most US citizens.
The companies do not do this, because equal distribution of resources is poison to capitalism. The world where everyone are fed, and their basic needs - shelter, medication etc. - are taken care of, does not have trillionaires. Possibly not even billionaires.
It is not profitable to give people humane standards of living. You work a lot harder when you see the homeless on the street on your way to work.
What it does change is the basic equation underlying capitalism as an economic system: a few people concentrate capital in their hands, but capital by itself is useless without labor, so they have to hire workers to produce something useful with all that capital that they own. The workers get a shit sandwich, comparatively speaking (given the amount of wealth they generate), but they do get something out of it. The system is stable overall because, while a better arrangement is possible, most people - even low-wage workers - have too much to lose to riot.
With AI that can do most work, the capital no longer needs labor. People who own all the robots can just have them produce whatever they need. Everybody else is then "economically redundant", and the whole system collapses because people aren't going to sit around and starve because there are no longer jobs to be had - and at this point they have nothing left to lose and everything to gain by rebelling and taking over the capital.
This is a non sequitur. People being economically redundant doesn’t necessitate a system collapse. It assumes our existing systems can’t handle an increase (assuming we have economically redundant people today) in those who are economically redundant.
Capitalism defines who owns the means of production scoped to the definition of ownership in a particular governance structure. In the U.S., for example, full ownership gives people the right to produce as much as they want with rules in place to seize the rights of ownership if broken.
One rule of ownership is that taxes must be levied on the positive return of capital. This today is what helps funds the welfare state. The idea that the system collapses implies we won’t be able to scale this welfare state up which seems unlikely to me.
There’s already a deficit caused by welfare spending. An increase in abundance (of work, resources, etc.) can reasonably alleviate this if we consider the possibilities in removing inefficiencies within the government itself and their biggest cost drivers like public health.
That doesn't mean the transition will be smooth. It doesn't mean that certain classes won't be worse off. I can certainly imagine programmers being among the losers. And there certainly are futures where we slide in dystopia. So let's try building the good futures. Alea iacta est.
For you.