Yes, because people are consumers, horses are not.
Jobs are a mean to make people consumers, not the only mean, but a significant one.
The ability to create more economic activity require both sides to catch up, so we will find a way to do so.
Jobs are a mean to make people consumers, not the only mean, but a significant one.
The ability to create more economic activity require both sides to catch up, so we will find a way to do so.
First, why does it feel wrong?
1. the top 10% get about 50% of pre-tax income
2. they get 30 to 37% of disposable income after tax&transfers (depending on source)
3. and we know the rich have a higher savings rate, so consume a lesser share of their income (US, China)
May be not top 10% but top 0.1% are good at avoiding tax using various loopholes. Like borrowing against stocks (and other appreciating assets) till death to avoid paying CGT and debt is then repaid by heirs which do not pay CGT AFAIK. So they can spend more than income stats would suggest.
This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.
But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.
Crassus amasses so much wealth because Caesar helped him.
And Crassus was the rich man who was monopolizing all of Rome with his slave firefighters + real estate scheme. When the going got tough, they seekwd power from the rich guy, no one was stopping Crassus.
Caesar was killed by the same people (hardline conservative ultra-wealthy 'Optimate' families/factions) who also brutally murdered the tribune of the plebs (person appointed to beg the ultra-wealthy for favorable legislation) and his supporters not once but twice. He was killed for the same reason too - land redistribution, limits on slave labor. That was called 'tyranny' by the elites.
Crassus was wealthy before Caesar and died before Caesar took power. This kind of politicking was just a necessary evil in the Roman Republic - which always was an oligarch-controlled plutocracy and never a true democracy as we know it today (e.g. Athens). It was 'pay to play', sponsorship of the ultra-wealthy was not optional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
True... but not really relevant here.
Wealth inequality is a global problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/un-global-ineq...
Also the logic of what Broadcom/Avago did with VMware: only chase the whales.
Yeah, and not just individual destinations but entire destination cities.
See, for example, the radical reshaping of Las Vegas.
The human system relies on us doing stuff for each other, mediated by "money". We get "paid" by some other human for doing stuff for them. "Stealing" is discouraged. "Being given" is rare. "Money" originates from fiat, goes where it goes.
Humans unable to do for others don't get "paid", get starved/sick etc, experience pain, cause trouble and disappear eventually. When doing stuff for people is not done by people, the pay cycle breaks. When machines do a substantial fraction of economic activity (intangibles like decision-making, writing, answering the phone, etc. as well as transport), there is no need for very many people. Absent the need, there will be no support. The farms won't give their food away, they will arm themselves against the hungry.
There will be some human work. So long as machines cannot equal human touch and experience combined, there will be medicine. There will always be sex work. But who affords it?
Possibly racial disparities will diminish. A machine might actually give equal medical care to, or equally arrest, the Black and white person. Or not, depends on the training. Look who's developing the AIs.
Economists thought that economic development means democratic development. They were wrong, see China. They thought that economic liberalization means good governance. Wrong, see Russia. Economists are right about things until they are wrong, and we can all run off the cliff with them.
When the population drops (war, starvation, refusal to bear children) to the level needed to run the machines, the system will stabilize. Pretty much the horse scenario.
But what's consistent with those events is that they end and economic development is resumed under different circumstances. I don't see any reason that the current era will be different or that current problem will be unfixable. People used to get paid to build national parks. What would be our current iteration of national parks?
Public works projects need funding and purpose. I'm not optimistic about what purposes the make-work funding gets applied to these days. Public beauty, cleanliness, health are not in the priorities.
I imagine this is gonna continue to be true, except that "everyone wants consumers, nobody wants to employ people".
Is it not conceivable that we won't find a way to do so, and that consumption and economic activity will ultimately decline?
What I always come back to is this: Why does it matter what the very richest do? Worst case the economy operates approximately as it does now (maybe with us knowledge workers knocked down a few rungs). But like, the rich can't eat _all_ the food.
I feel like the most likely outcome is that the quality of life of the bottom 90% is overall better than today. HN'ers quality of life is maybe worse than it is today.
Presumably if we're all unemployed or employed in jobs that have zero economic worth to them, they'll buy all of our houses, build a bunch of big grey boxes for us to live in like a human zoo, build even bigger and more tasteless McMansions for themselves, and pass legislation that makes it illegal to live near them or inconvenience them.
The quality of life for the bottom 90% of the world has been getting better because they were so desperately poor that they could rely on economic growth to help them. At some point they're going to be rich enough in commodities that they start looking to buy things like houses or start businesses, at which point they'll find that asset prices are rising faster than their own wealth because of growing inequality, and they will look at their big grey boxes full of shoebox apartments and start to become unhappy too.
- capital / limited goods
- allocation of labor
Things like land are a limited commodity. Concentration of ownership usually comes with rent extraction. Because you need to live somewhere, but available locations are finite (and supply can even be controlled, and is). This means that you can end up with a cartel scenario where increasingly normal peoples previously disposable income is tied up in an increasingly large % to those fixed costs of living. This is arguably well under way in some countries.
The second point is, the richest enjoy goods like personal yachts, private planes, luxury restaurants. If a lot of labor is increasingly allocated to producing highly inefficient luxuries, it's essentially wasted. You might have hundreds of businesses employing thousands of people or machines, but the productivity of their work is essentially all going into products consumed by a few people. I'd say a limited amount of this is a good thing, it's a normal part of the proliferation of choice enabled by capitalism. But taken too far you return to a historic economy where most peoples productive life is spent serving a tiny elite, while living in poor conditions themselves.
In our financial system, your income as an individual has to be significant enough to send a signal to produce the goods you want. If this ceases to be true for even a significant minority of people, you will find consumer choices and available quality decreasing for those people, which is a real problem. This is to a lesser extent happening in some segments of the economy.
This is also largely the conclusion of classical economics (i.e. Adam Smith) and the argument was developed in great detail by Riccardo, George (who explicitly considered the no-labor-required case in 1800s), and many others.
Where do you live? The rich will own all housing.
This is history, not a random hypothesis. Feudal serfs had the ways and means to bootstrap, but in fact lived worse than their pre-feudal ancestors.
I actually have a random thought that it is this innate human drive that causes society to be mostly employed despite massive differences in technology and productivity across geography and time.
What if the driver of employment is not efficient return of capital, but satisfaction of human mind?