Indeed, it's true, horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans.

Our economy isn't centred around humans, it's centred around capital. Unemployable humans are as useless to it as horses, as they can't exchange their labour with capital owners (or become capital owners themselves).

Unemployable people might want more, but will they get more? No, they won't.

But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do.

This idea was particularly popular during the recession (the video was made on the tale end of it). It was common to hear that the high level of unemployment was because automation had taken our jobs or because Americans didn't have the skills for the jobs that were needed. But much of this was nonsense, and we saw employment gradually rebound as we moved out of the recession. Not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, since it leads people to entirely misunderstand a solvable problem.

-- You'll always have something that some other human wants the human X to do. Whether that other person can pay human X sufficient money to make that activity their job is the question. And it seems plausible you'll reach a point where the answer will be no for a lot of people. You can call that "structural" if you wish but it seems related to the marginal utility provided by a given person and that goes down as one finds automated alternatives.

And just from the definition of money, it's unlikely to find a scenario where people can't pay other people to do arbitrary labor. There will always be people that have a majority of wealth, however that's denoted

It's not possible for civilization as a whole to run out of jobs or money. both are human social concepts and can be re-imagined at any time

And by availability of resources, such as energy.

From the industrial revolution we've being living in a time of effectively limitless energy and without having considered the consequences of tapping that energy. Fossil fuels, and other resources are running out - or we can at least see the end of them - and the consequences of their use are starting to bite hard. Realistically we're looking at a 2degC average global temperature rise this century, and the destruction of ecosystems due to that relatively rapid rise is going to be massive.

When the energy and resources, that we've used to support a consumption economy, grow more scarce that economy will no longer work. We won't be able to get ourselves out of low employment by just consuming more and so making more jobs.

>There will always be people that have a majority of wealth, however that's denoted

That may be true but we can narrow the spread of wealth by a very large factor; and morally we should do so.

I think that's what's essentially being advocated (whether now or later): reimagining human social roles outside the wage/employment model (and perhaps distributing an "automation dividend" to ensure liquidity and market demand).

> But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do.

The question at hand though is exactly why is this true of humans but not horses?

Now, I'm talking about typical desires as they stand now. Obviously you can have people creating increasingly exotic and bizarre desires to the point where it's impossible to satiate them all ("I want to own Antarctica"). It's also possible to hit resources limits, but that's a separate problem from "running out of work because of automation."

Consider a case where person A builds widget X, and person B builds widget Y, and they trade with each other. Automation takes over, they lose their jobs. If they continue getting the widgets they used to trade for (which are now created automatically), they simply have the same wealth as before but more time. If they don't have the widgets, they're now detached from the new automated widgets both in production and consumption. There's no reason they couldn't carry on the same work as before and continue to trade with each other. This might require societal and political will (they might need some sort of support to reach their previous arrangement), but if the desire for their old work is there and not being met, then there is work to be done.

Let's say Person A builds Widget X, and needs Input 1 to produce a Widget X. Person B builds Widget Y and needs Input 2 to produce Widget Y.

Person A uses their capital from their job to purchase Input 1 and produces Widget X. Person B uses their capital Input 2 and produces Y. Person A and B trade widgets and are happy.

But now, as before, automation takes the jobs of Person A and Person B. They lose their jobs, but retain their desire for the opposite widget.

Person A no longer has the resources to acquire Input 1, and Person B can no longer acquire Input 2. Neither X nor Y get produced, and both have their needs but are unsatisfied.

There is no guarantee that new automation will continue to fulfill all the desires that were fulfilled previously.

I mean, sure this arrangement can happen. But why would it? Why would person A want to trade with person B when they can get their goods made by a robot cheaper and better?

Obviously true, but that doesn't mean the things still left to do can be done by anyone.

In a world where there's not enough food or housing, everyone can be gainfully employed, since just about everyone can learn to plant seeds or cut wood.

In a world where all of our material desires are already met, plenty of people will still want e.g. new AAA-quality video games every year. But what are the people who aren't programmers or artists supposed to do?

Keep the programmers and artists happy.

You can make a lot more and better AAA games if 50% of your time isn’t spent on life chores.

That's what the robots are for! And they never complain, never need to sleep, and are always one software upgrade away from amazing new capabilities.

For example: the ballooning of admin jobs in academia that add no benefit to services rendered other than keeping other useless admins busy.

According to the book, when you remove the bullshit jobs and bullshit work most of us already work 20 hour weeks or less.

That wouldn't be a problem if the BS was more or less evenly distributed. But unfortunately the distribution is highly uneven, so eliminating the BS, even if you resolve to not cut paychecks, would leave quite a few folks entirely unemployed (so no paycheck at all), and quite a few more significantly underemployed (so at high risk of their employer consolidating three 5h/week jobs into one 15h/week job).

If wealth continues to become increasingly centralised, the wealthy might be able to have all their desires fully satisfied, while the poor won't have enough power to demand that - which potentially creates a vicious cycle.

Then the existence of sufficient jobs is fraught.

World Gini coefficient for wealth has increased from 0.804 to 0.904 between 2008 and 2018, where 1 means that a single person holds all the wealth.

Besides, you replied to try and refute a comment which was quite unambiguously about wealth inequality. It's possible to occasionally admit you were wrong, rather than doubling down when you are.

If you disagree with these points, please site evidence.

Citation: World Bank. "Poverty and Prosperity 2016 / Taking on Inequality"[1].

1. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2...

Sure, globally. But that's as a result of a rising floor beneath extreme poverty, ie. the percentage of people subsisting on less than $1.90 per day has been dropping.

Sure, that's only a part of the story, and a growing global middle class is nothing to sneeze at, but the reduction in poverty is projected to slow considerably over the next decade, with half a billion remaining in extreme poverty in 2030, 87% of whom will be concentrated in sub-saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, social mobility up and out of the middle class is also slowing considerably in the various advanced economies, as is downward mobility from the upper class into the middle class, while downward mobility from middle to working class is growing.

I don't mean to diminish the progress that has been made so far, but it is starting to look likely that these successes are stagnating.

Sure they do, although almost certainly nowhere near enough to sustain our current situation and the system it's built atop of (from which the holders of capital seem to have benefited immensely), although perhaps this is exactly the point you were making.

It might not be recognizable to most people living in modernity today, but in general humans will always trade (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other humans whenever relative specializations occur between them, which even in small groups is likely to happen naturally.

After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or service to capital in particular that makes an economy, and there is always going to be demand of something and some supply of some of those things as long as humans are around and interacting, regardless of how miserable the existence is, or how "inefficient" such a system might be.

"It might not be recognizable to most people living in modernity today, but in general humans will always trade (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other humans whenever relative specializations occur between them, which even in small groups is likely to happen naturally."

This is reductive. Yes, humans have always traded. But never before our current economic system has trade been the primary ordinator of people's lives - this is a modern creation, indeed core to property itself.

"After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or service to capital in particular that makes an economy, and there is always going to be demand of something and some supply of some of those things as long as humans are around and interacting, regardless of how miserable the existence is, or how "inefficient" such a system might be."

This is also reductive in the same sense. Traditionally in human society, demand and supply were not, for the majority of people, the very core of one's life - that is a modern invention. And that was only possible in the framework where labour became service to capital before service to oneself. Outside this set of relations of production, the problem of runaway unemployment isn't possible, because employment itself is not a major productive force. And that's precisely how humans got into a situation like that of workhorses - or rather how workhorses got into the situation of humans!

Well, actually around value - which is different from capital. It just so happens that we use capital to trade a lot (but not all) of what we consider to be valuable.

Even in a world of abundance there would be things that are scarce but we still consider valuable. Social status for example.

Trade is not what I'm discussing as an abstract concept, but instead how we structure our relationship to sustenance and work. That is centred around capital, not value - hence the word "capitalism". Which is not necessarily a bad thing, in some ways this is a good organization for things we care about, but it's not mainly about maximizing value for everyone, it came about very mechanistically.

Capital is valuable (high price) when it's needed and scarce, e.g in the junk bond market. Labor is valuable (high price) when it's needed and scarce, e.g productive software engineers.

There's no sense in conceptually elevating capital above labor, or vice versa, insofar as we're attempting to understand economic systems, as they're both just factors of production.

Now, that's not disagreement with Sam's point. Labor will decline in value as an input since AI will provide zero marginal cost competition to labor (effectively it'll be a massive increase in the supply of labor). More supply = less unique value = wages crater. Capital may slightly decline in value too, but at a slower rate than labor.

What Sam is proposing is massive wealth redistribution by taxing land and capital. Seen any memes referencing $1400 lately? Unemployed humans who are given cash absolutely create demand.

Besides, massive wealth redistribution in the form of direct payments indiscriminately is not politically viable right now, but maybe this line of argument can help.

That's artificial demand which creates inflation.

Isn't one story of how some currencies get their start, that some monarch or someone wants their troops fed, and so they require (on threat of force) that their subjects pay a tax in coins that the monarch has printed, and distributes to their troops? If they did this continuously over time, say distributing only the same coins to their troops that they received as taxes, (or, keeping the amount in circulation constant, by some means), why would the amount of bread that each coin would tend to buy, decrease over the years?

(Of course, the monarch or whatever would also use some of the same coins for their own use, but they aren't being paid to do anything.)

There is nothing wrong with subsidizing citizens and/or companies but there should be limit because you can end up with inflation where you for example over subsidy citizens and therefore excess of money and demand drives prices of goods and services up.

Reflecting on your example Roman Empire for instance had huge military expenses and they started diluting coins in order to mint more coins but they ended up in inflationary spiral in which coins eventually lost value and their economy collapsed.

Here is chart showing debasement of roman coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#/media/File:Finenes...

I don't understand what you mean.

What are the supply and demand in question? supply of and demand for money? I've generally been confused by what people mean when they talk about the demand for money, especially when they talk about whether it is equal to the supply. The supply of money is a particular quantity of money (like, M0 or M1 or M2 or whatever), and so, if the question "is the demand for money equal to the supply of money?" to not have a type error, then the demand for money would have to also be a particular quantity of money. But, I don't understand what this quantity could mean. I understand that for each desirable item, there is a "how many [the type of item] would you be willing to forgo for [quantity of money]" which relates how much someone values money, their demand for it, in terms of each of the types of items, but I see no way to take these together to produce a single quantity with units of money. Maybe add up how much someone would accept as payment in terms of each of their possessions individually? idgi.

__

I appreciate that chart and the info about Roman Empire coins. I of course recognize that increasing the amount of money the state spends, making it easier for people to obtain money, tends to make the money less valuable, but I think this would be largely counteracted by increasing the amount of money that the state requires that people return to it?

Though, there is of course a limit to how much you can pay for this way. If you were a sovereign and wanted to, idk, produce as many chicken eggs as you could, by increasing spending on chicken eggs while also increasing the amount of taxes you attempt to extract, you will eventually run up to a limit on how many chicken eggs you can get each year, and trying to buy more chicken eggs, would just result in either the price of chicken eggs increasing without increasing how many you get, or would just result in more people being unable to pay their tax obligations and being punished. Probably also a lot of people starving and such, because this would be forcing as much of the economy as you can towards producing chicken eggs? Kind of a horrifying situation actually. Would probably produce decreasing numbers of chicken eggs at some point. Well, much before this point, there would be a coup/coop. haha.

But, yeah, there's clearly a limit, and I suppose that this probably suggests a flaw in the way I initially thought of the idea, but I'm not where. Ok, yes, it does show that increasing how much you spend, even if you claw all of it back through taxes, will eventually buy smaller quantities of the thing you are spending on, per unit. In the chicken egg situation, how would the price of the cheapest sufficiently nutritious meal change? This isn't clear to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition [1]

And I said money supply depends on market activity meaning only scenario where would amount of money be constant is perfect market competition(quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal) but perfect market competition does not exist in reality.

It is also called Market equilibrium: "in this case is a condition where a market price is established through competition such that the amount of goods or services sought by buyers is equal to the amount of goods or services produced by sellers." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium

Also, without the fed printing money, we'd be feeling deflationary pressures, because we are in, you know, a recession. Some printing doesn't actually cause abnormal inflation in that situation.

Unemployed humans don't create supply. Incomeless humans don't create demand.

Horses also can learn to provide different value, just up to a threshold lower than that of humans. But humans still have a threshold.

All you have to do is look at the bell curve for IQ and see where this all leads, and its nowhere pretty.

A person with an 85 IQ or below is too dumb to even be in the Army, even doing the most basic of tasks. Turns out, a military force with advanced computerized weaponry requires smart people. Now here's the kicker... 85 and below is something like 16% of the population.

That's 1,250,000,000 people that will, in the coming years / decades, be totally unable to function in the economy in any worthwhile way. And I'm sorry, I just do not trust the "benevolence" of the human race to fix this problem when our technology advances to the point that people of 100 IQ and below aren't useful. There is no way that 50% of the people with 101 IQs and above are going to spend money to keep the other 50% of the human race alive.

I doubt there'll be "mass exterminations" like we've seen of ethnic groups throughout history, but more likely the unemployable will be left to their own devices; after all, out of sight, out of mind.

As higher and higher IQ individuals are keeping the same company more and more and self-segregating, I suspect we're going to see the development of an overclass of individuals that will eventually grow resentful of spending X percent of their income, whatever number "X" ends up being, for keeping those who aren't able to provide for themselves alive. That's a pretty common human emotion. The tribe works fine when every tribe member is even minimally capable. When half the tribe members are literally dead weight? Nothing good, I'm afraid.

More than 25% of people OF WORKING AGE aren't part of the labor force in almost all western economies [1]. And another 20-30%+ of the population is too old to be part of the labor force / retired [2].

This is well over 16% with too low of an IQ to contribute in a theoretical economy. It doesn't seem hard to shift priorities - the age for retirement, the people who qualify for welfare, etc...

Since 2015, the US and France already spend over 30% of GDP on social programs [3].

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_str...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...

Job retraining has an abysmal success rate. I don't think it's even 10%, last time I looked into it.

That's why all the "Learn 2 Code" shit that Huff Post and Vox and etc. so forth were spouting off to rural West Virginian coal miners was so stupid... if you can write, or can even learn to write, complex C++ code, why the fuck would you keep mining coal to begin with? Strangely, I didn't see much "#learntocode" when those 47 Huff Post workers got fired, many of whom had been there for 9-10 years.

Where are all the toilet-manufacturing and toilet-installing jobs? We certainly have the technology to produce billions of toilets if we as a society decided to. We know there are billions of humans who need toilets, why isn't this demand creating jobs? Where are the toilets?

A big part of the answer to that question is that the billions of people who need toilets can't afford them, because they don't have jobs that would enable them to pay for toilets.

Toilets are so easy to manufacture at our technological level that toilet factories don't require many workers. Certainly not billions of workers, but we have billions of humans who need toilets.

Maybe the same problem affects all products. Will technology advance until 10000 or 10 or zero human workers will be required to run all the factories in the entire world for every imaginable product? Where then will billions of unemployed humans get money to buy the products from those factories?

So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed.

Neither was making things better for humans. The point of the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans being taken care of is an accidental side effect because capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.

No, in any non-totalitarian society, humans being taken care of is the main effect. In a market of buyers and sellers, it is only by making the buyer better off that the seller survives. As Smith said over 200 years ago, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

And humans are literally just collections of cells, does that mean you have no wants and that your pancreas is running the show?

It's very arrogant to think that only humans have desires. Nations have desires, institutions have desires, and capital itself has a lot of desires. Lots of scary entities out there that have desires.

When capital is unhappy with capital owners it's prone to fire all of them, reconfigure entire industries, eliminate entire sectors of human activity, redraw nation-states and in the not so distant future probably reconfigure human bodies.

Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Capital keeps tagging along, individual actors, not so much. Give it another few decades and you may interact with a lot of firms that have no human working for it at all, and possibly not even one owning it.

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they refer to organizations as entities. One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans. When people say "the government wants X" or "Britain doesn't like Y", they don't mean it literally. Government is nothing without the human politicians and officials it's comprised of and/or the human citizens that recognize its authority. A hundred dollar bill is worth nothing without humans to want it and the things it can buy. Suggesting that capitalism can produce non-human economic value contradicts the most basic definition of economic value.

And no, I don't think only humans have desires, but the capitalist economy we have created is based on human desires. Horses clearly have desires too, but thus far they have not invented an economy to serve horse desires. It wasn't non-existent horse capitalism that replaced horses, it was human capitalism.

> Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen?

Yes actually, I don't know why you think that's somehow undesirable. A lot of firms fail to adapt to human desires & needs so humans drop them. I'm honestly confused at the implication that capital owners want a lot of "firms" to exist when they're only a means to an end.

the same applies to you. You're a system of competing interests which we call "themacguffinman" solely for the purpose of simplification. You're nothing but an organisation of cells, systems and drives and the interaction of a lot of parts that we slap a label on for practical purposes. When we say something like "Britain likes X" we actually should take it literally, because Britain is a very real thing. Just like your body sends immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease, Britain sends her soldiers to die for a quasi empty rock off the coast of Argentina. Britain has territory, but none of her citizens have one. Britain has interests that are older and different than the interests of any of her people.

The world actually makes a lot more sense when you let go of the very atavistic idea that humans have any sort of special ontological status or have some level of realness that other entities don't have, it's just systems all the way up and down.

People actually intuitively understand this when they discuss the so called 'AI alignment problem'. They just don't understand that all the AIs are already around and we're solving alignment problems with entities with non-human desires and interests all day already.

Well no, Britain's interests are literally and technically and metaphorically and whatever-ly not older than the interests of any of her people. Britain did not exist in any way, shape, or form before any of her people. The humans of Britain sent other humans of Britain to die for the sake of humans of Britain. Britain doesn't have territory, the rulers and leaders of Britain have territory. Someone always benefits.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of systems thinking. It can be useful to describe the collective interests of an organization as a whole system, but they're still human interests. Sending immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease is still in the interests of cells, just like the humans of Britain sending humans to die in a war is still in the interests of humans. And just like humans can't have interests without cells, organizations and economies can't have interests without humans.

I'm also not saying that humans are special or unique in the way that they can have interests, I'm saying that the capitalist economy we live in is defined by human interests and cannot somehow become non-human. Human interests will always be involved because that's how we define the system of capitalism & economy. Suggesting that our economy could somehow replace all humans makes as much sense to me as suggesting that a body of water could some day replace all of its H2O molecules.

I'm going to go ahead and say that of course increasing inequality caused by capitalism is a major concern for many humans which seems to be what you're getting at. This talk of Britain & capitalism functioning without humans is distractingly nonsensical. No, capitalism can't get rid of humans because a capitalist economy without humans is not a capitalist economy. No, the importance of horses is not comparable to the importance of humans to a system literally defined by interactions between humans.

I think you're missing the point that if necessary, the humans involved can be swapped out until ones with the 'right' desires are in place.

> but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans.

An organization doesn't have to be capable of functioning without humans to be an inhuman entity with inhuman motivations and so on. The human components just need to be fungible and more easily steered by tweaking incentives etc. than the organization is.

For that matter, epiphenomena like regulatory capture really don't occur at an individual level much, but largely at the interface between governments/agencies and corporations, or even higher-level entities like industry trade groups and consortia.

I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.

Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too.

It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.

I think that most technology has made life easier if not measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery, transportation. Those things dont make life better for people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is that even the lower rungs of society have at least some access to better jobs than they did 100 years ago.

What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers anymore?

You kind of can though. The economy cares about no one, it cares only about capital. And as far as capital is concerned, humans are just fancy horses. Humans are expenses that need minimizing to the point of zeroing. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, no one pays any humans for anything ever.