Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

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We may have some bumps in the road and some dark ages of depravity and extremely concentrated ownership of the means of production and all that

Well, this is what I'm personally concerned about. I agree with everything you just said. But what is the politically optimal way to cross over that inflection point? Or to rephrase: what kind of rules should we have in government/society so that the transition doesn't effectively cause a revolution and end up derailed? Should we consider an education system oriented around high-skill labor? Should our system of taxation and assistance account for this new concentration of capital? And can you do this without impeding the very technological/economic growth you're accounting for? Too much taxation may stymie private sector advancement, too little taxation may cause an elective or literal revolution, and the wrong adjustments can easily introduce moral hazards (e.g. nobody working at all before our technology is advanced enough to require zero human capital).

I think adding a living wage and removing the minimum wage is the way you get though this bump. If you make human labor cheap enough someone is always going to want to have their lawns mowed by people or whatever. Assuming they can afford to do so. Basically, people with minimal skills end up working not for food, but to have toy's etc. The trick is finding a number where people can have a little disposable income, but working 20+ hours a week even at 3$ an hour gives them several times as much fun money.

I suspect in the US we could do that now with around a flat 40% tax without deductions. Note: Living wage would need to be a national number ~12 to 15k and not what it takes to get by in NYC or whatever.

PS: What makes the numbers work out is you also get rid of social security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and the lower tax brakes as well as all other tax breaks. Also, people making the average income are revenue neutral in this scheme as they get back the same amount of money as there paying into it minus whatever overhead is involved in running the program.

I think this could have some other benefits, like population centers re-balancing themselves out rather than having the gross concentrations of otherwise unnecessarily dense capital the way we have now - SF is the perfect example. If you had a guaranteed 15k a year, you could not only take more venture risks, but also live pretty much anywhere and work without the dire need for the profit motive to feed yourself and pay absurd $2k a month rent on a 10x10 room because you have to live in SF or NY to get ahead.

This idea was evaluated by comunism in eastern europe. Most people do not have enough drive to fight beyond minimum. If you additionally give them political power they will be able to bring outlayers down efectively.

Eastern Europe was about state control of the market, though. Getting a government stipend for living expenses doesn't mean you take control of everything.

What it does mean is that jobs like waiting and cleaning that are currently easily replaced by automation, but are not due to the artificial need to maintain the wasting of hours to get food. I don't think the traditional restaurant industry would survive such a transition, for example, because it is much more economical to have a local food generator that knows all the recipes and can ship freshly prepared meals via automated vehicle to consumers than to have them go to a restaurant, get served, get waited on, get cooked for by kitchen chefs (who are usually doing something between heating up frozen food to following an instruction sheet from corporate) when we can eliminate all that work for most of us, and anyone who cares enough to get the waited experience can pay a real wage for it, because labor demand is more reasonable in such a circumstance - people would only work for you if you gave reasonable value for their time, not just because they need to eat and our progressively greater per-worker output and ability to eliminate human capital in many endeavors all together makes most labor unnecessary.

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