Re:Where did the other dollar go, Jeff?
by jay_kyburz on Thursday April 29, 2021 @07:08PM
(#26987987)
It seems obvious to me that a world where robots do all the work, and people spend all their time enjoying themselves, is better than a world where everybody has to work to survive.
I think it will be a huge step forward in human culture when we finally accept that that not everybody has to work, and the productivity of society at large will make everything so cheap that money is really not important.
The only question is how we get from here to there. That's not clear at all.
Can the government simply take from the rich and distribute it evenly to everybody? Can the government even distribute money without inflation eating the value of everything, leaving people feeling miserable and poor. Should the government provide food, shelter, medicine, infrastructure directly? Does the government need to own the means of production?
I’m a lot less worried about automaton than I used to be. There’s just zero evidence that it actually leads to any systemic unemployment in practice. Absorbing China into the labour market has been hard on low end wages, but that effect seems to over already. Increasing capacity and efficiency grows the pie for everybody and humans are very adaptable. When there’s under utilised labour, as long as the economy as a whole is healthy somebody will find a way to take commercial advantage of it and all of a sudden you’ve got full employment again. Sure there can be pain, I remember 3m unemployment here in the UK in the early 80s but we’re already back up to near full employment.