All it really needs is a welfare program for the general population that doesn't punish those whose jobs have been automated.
A system how to solve that has been discussed in Germany by left-leaning parties. The idea is simple: give everyone a certain salary per month that allows them to rent a flat, buy groceries, and have a social life. Without the fear of losing their job, not being able to afford food or just becoming poor, people will do whatever they like: some will continue their job (which earns them extra pay, obviously), some will try out a business idea they have, some won't work. Or that's the idea, at least, with the assumption that people aren't lazy by nature and thus must be punished if they neither work nor actively seek for jobs (i.e. the current unemployment benefit system in Germany), but instead would like to work, except working on the stuff they like working on.
It's only on the US where Socialism is such a term of abuse on even the left of the political spectrum.
They are both wrong. Socialism involves collective ownership of the means of production, not capitalism plus a welfare state.
There is actually an open socialist in the US Senate. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont. He's surprisingly widely liked.
The cost of the welfare system in the UK is such that it would actually be cheaper to just give every man, woman and child in the UK 3000/year no questions asked, no strings attached. Could a single person live on 3000/year in London? Well it was a long time ago now, but I did, as did millions of others, when we were students. Could a family of 4 live on 12000 somewhere like Wales, today? Sure, especially if it was supplemented by a little casual work from one or both parents. And we'd need to stabilize the population too.
People say I'm a fascist because I want to abolish the welfare state, but it's not true: I merely wish to abolish the department that runs it and go direct!
Are you adjusting for inflation? Did you get £3,000 a long time ago? Or did you get what is now worth £3,000? 3k in 2000 is the same as 4.2k, in '95 it's the same as 4.8k now, in '90 it's like 5.7k now.
I'm not saying it would be a necessarily desirable lifestyle mind, but if you're young and all your friends are in the same boat, that much plus a little part-time work was enough to live on, certainly.
The point it, tho', we in the UK could afford that level of minimum income guarantee, as in that's what the welfare state costs right now. If we need more then we'd need to decide where that money was going to come from.
Also, if this is true why are there so many more homeless people in the US than any other Western country I've been to?
Also, homelessness in the US is barely related to the question of subsidizing non-work. It's more of a failure on the part of our mental health system. If you talk to a homeless guy in the US, odds are he'll have some pretty noticeable mental issue right from the get-go.
People on SSI + Food Stamps + Section 8 + Medicaid certainly aren't living the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but their effective income at PPP is comparable the median household income in a country like Czech Republic or Portugal.
I also think the comments here about how its luxury compared to a 3rd world are true, but also note that it is more expensive to live here, and there are very few fallback options if the government programs don't work out. The homeless in my town don't have a shelter they can legally sleep at, and with all of the regulations we have in place, a minimally legal structure still has a pretty high cost.
Depression is a valid point though, something that's frequently omitted in such discussions, which center on the fact that if only you provided people with ATM cards, things would be nice and clean and drug-free.
The US is strongly anti-authoritarian. Rounding up the crazies and putting them in a managed home simply is not done. It would infringe the civil rights of burned out alcoholics, schizophrenics, etc.
An easy change in the United States could be through the social security system. Social security was originally presented as a government-run pension fund that accumulated wages for retirement, but in practice it transfers income from workers to retirees. The system will probably be subsidized from general taxes in coming decades, when too few workers are available to support the retiring post World War II baby boom. Incremental expansion of such a subsidy would let money from robot industries, collected as corporate taxes, be returned to the general population as pension payments. By gradually lowering the retirement age towards birth, most of the population would eventually be supported. The money could be distributed under other names, but calling it a pension is meaningful symbolism: we are describing the long, comfortable retirement of the original-model human race.
from http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
In the economies with large percentage of makers and small percentage of moochers things work out decently, as the moochers category includes babies and elderly, so the work by makers is almost a social contract, a "thank you" to the society for support while being a baby, and a rainy day fund for one day when the maker himself will turn elderly.
Having a large population of working-age moochers violates the social contract, and creates incentives for the makers to optimize their revenue generation, if not quit altogether, Atlas Shrugged style.
The perverse incentives are apparent in post-Soviet economies, where under Soviet ruling government-owned enterprises frequently supported a vast infrastructure of company towns - everything from kindergartens to hospitals was included in the balance sheet of the local plant or factory.
Fast forward a few decades ahead, when the government-owned enterprises are now privately-owned, and typical pattern you see is profit-less plants and factories now selling their products at cost, avoiding profit sharing, to a Cyprus or Cayman Islands affiliate, with affiliate (incidentally controlled by large shareholders and top management) pocketing all the profits in tax-efficient manner.
The quote in my other post up there says community pension is fueled by taxing corporations who generate income from virtually zero (or highly leveraged toward automation) human labor. So, yes, optimizing their revenue will increase the payments to the community pension fund which will help it grow larger.
Post-scarcaity will come right after everybody is automated out of a job, so we'll have zero employment and massive corporations. I see your point about backwards third world places being run by money warlords, but I'm not sure that's a rational outcome for modern society. Once you have empowered populations, those go away quickly.
The scheme I've described could very well apply to the US. Company A in China is doing the manufacturing with virtually zero human labor. It sells its product to Company B, located in a tax-free zone, which then resells the product to the US importer, Company C, which then sells it in the US. It just so happens that Company C makes a tiny margin on the profit it receives after buying from Company B, so it's happy to pay an exorbitant tax on that profit margin.
Company B is the one who makes a killing, but hey, it's in the tax-free zone, those lucky bastards.
"Wouldn't that be perfect if she could actually pursue her hobby?" is a very ignorant statement if you start to consider the implications of industry automation for all of the workers who have been automated away.
I believe that if we don't fundamentally change the economy through reform this will eventually lead to the next large revolution.
The "hobbies" line is also infuriating because it practically drips with condescension. "I'm sure you have a hobby, don't you, dear? Of course you do! Why don't you go and spend some time on that while the grown-ups do the important work." All it's missing is a little pat on the head at the end.
If they could still support themselves or get paid, but not have to spend their day working, wouldn't they be better off?
Also hobbies is definitely not the right word here.
I think that's the reality, but I am not sure that people like White from the article really acknowledge this. That is, he trivializes it by kind of offhandedly suggesting that it is good for people to have these new options open up as a result of losing their jobs.
But, in fact, what is required is a radical restructuring of our economy and society at large (including our ideas about work) in order to arrive at what he suggests. This is not a point that can simply be glossed over or assumed if he is being earnest or even remotely serious about addressing the automation issue.
Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts. Step one is the automation of workers. Step three is this perfect utopian society, wherein we all just pursue our "hobbies".
We have to some degree offset this with rabid consumerism, debt, and globalization. The latter in the sense of both opening new markets and the appeal of low wage workers usurping the appeal/cost of automation. But as the wages in these countries rise and technology continues to evolve while growing ever cheaper, even this can't stem the tide forever.
Either the customer gets a better deal (and has more money), the shareholders get more profit, or some combination of the two.
Either way, the customer buys more stuff or passes the benefits onto their customers, and the shareholders buy more stuff. All of a sudden, there is more demand for labor, and over time, the displaced humans get hired again.
You are invoking the luddite fallacy.
The fear is not that demand for labor will decrease, but that the speed at which the labor force is upskilled will be outpaced by the progress of technology. So your factory and warehouse workers (who are already in a perilous financial situation) are unemployed, but more than that, their skills are no longer relevant. Increased demand for labor will not readily mesh with the skills of the existing workforce.
In the past, the gap has closed. But what if jobs are shed faster than their workers can transition to new ones? A scary, and not unrealistic prospect.
It is human physicality and desire that creates necessity. When humans are freed from servitude under other humans, their own passions are able to flourish.
technological elites enjoying fruits of the economic growth, while the majority gets gradually reduced to TaskRabbits - that's really a disgusting picture...
Socialism, as a whole, leads to Bad Things. Sprinklings of socialism help and are good, but if you subscribe fully to any specific socialist doctrine, history shows your group will be harmed by it.
If you mean 'communist', then say 'communist'.
Not to mention that there isn't any system which survives your counterargument.
>>> Not to mention that there isn't any system which survives your counterargument.
If you can't distinguish good from harm or follow casual links - maybe. Fortunately, many people can.
The producers are actually the poor bastards working 40+ hours a week on the factory floor. The entities forcibly taking resources from them are the wealthy, by controlling the means of production, increasing CEO salaries, and colluding with legislators to provide more tax cuts and loopholes that only the wealthy can take advantage of. The political whim is that congressmen get more dollars from corporations after Citizen's United.
It's fucking ridiculous to be an Objectivist. You can continue to assert that poors are able to fight their way into the "producer" class by "not being lazy" or whatever. But the reality is when you can barely support your housing, food, transportation, and healthcare you don't have many rational options for aggressive advancement.
This is one kind of producers. But definitely not "the producers" - there are a lot of ways to produce value besides working on the factory floor. I suspect you yourself are paying your bills via one of such ways.
>>> The entities forcibly taking resources from them are the wealthy,
If they indeed do so, and you know about it, please call the police. I suspect, however, you do not understand what "forcibly" means, as wealthy people rarely resort to robbery - it is usually resort of the desperate and stupid.
It is true, however, that some wealthy employ other means of forcibly taking resources from other - namely, they benefit from various government programs, which forcibly extract resources from producers - ones working at the factories and in other places - and give it to some wealthy that are politically connected, claiming it is "for public good". Unfortunately, Supreme Court in infamous decision in Kelo vs. New London, decided it is completely legal to take private property and give it to another private person just because some government bureaucrat decided it is a good idea. In the very New London the case was about, they succeeded into converting a thriving residential neighborhood into a literal dump, spending tons of taxpayer money on the way. But I suspect for a socialist it is no problem at all.
>>> The political whim is that congressmen get more dollars from corporations after Citizen's United.
Barack Obama, who criticized this decision, spent $775 million on last election (http://www.cnbc.com/id/49550998/) outspending Romney by 75 mln. Romney is a rich man, and Obama is not exactly poor either, but this kind of money is not possible to come up without attracting donations, unless you want to have elections between Warren Buffett and Bill Gates each time.
Biggest political spenders are the unions (see here: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?type=A). So if you are worried about money in politics, that's where I would look. But then I don't see how you'd finance it... Oh, let me guess - instead of fatcats giving up the money voluntarily you want to tax the poor bastards working 40+ hours and get the money from them. Thanks, man, brilliant idea.
>>> It's fucking ridiculous to be an Objectivist.
I wouldn't know but if you say so...
>>> You can continue to assert that poors are able to fight their way into the "producer" class by "not being lazy" or whatever
No, I can't "continue" to assert that since I never started to assert it.
>>> But the reality is when you can barely support your housing, food, transportation, and healthcare you don't have many rational options for aggressive advancement.
When you have 1 welfare recipient for every 1.65 workers and the ratio is getting worse each year (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-...), and if you count government workers who are financed form taxes the ration is 1.25 - this means you only getting barely more than half of the value you're producing on average. If you don't produce a lot, this half indeed may not be enough to have very good life. However, for some people solution is for the state to take more and make the ratio worse. How this makes sense for them - I have no idea.
what seems more important, history shows that there are no Iron Laws Of History Written In Capital Letters. what we see is always an outcome of particular circumstances. like - "trying to establish a particular form of socialism (i would rather say this was communism, not socialism, but let's not open an argument here...) in an isolated, pre-capitalist country, that was recently destroyed by war, and has no democratic culture, produces shitty effects". that doesn't tell much about choices we have today.
But if you are not happy with this, I can easily offer you a job creation program. Take two people. One would dig the ditch for 8 hours, the other would come next day and fill up the same ditch. Since you claim "jobs" are something we should pursue, this is a perfect example of jobs that can be created cheaply and abundantly. Of course, these jobs would provide zero value, but if you don't care about loss of value from employing people to do things that can be done with much higher value, then why should you care there? Just tax "the rich" and dig the ditch, and the jobs would be there forever.
Hint: google "broken window fallacy".
I think the "dominant life form" thing is a bit of semantics. But I have found this entire thread very interesting.
It will be interesting to see what happens when humanity lacks scarcity. Research indicates that humans tend towards heirarchies, which are defined relative to neighbors. The "keeping up with the joneses" disease might be part of our core programming.
In a surplus society, I wonder what will substitute for status. Probably something much like our current system, I suppose.
You think I'm joking, but really I am only sort of.