And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
The UBI in my mind is not $$$ but merchandises and services coupons.
But there's a big gulf between "sticky" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply".
People on UBI will be much more price sensitive than those supplementing with wage income since the UBI dependent will be time rich and money poor. Landlords will have less power over them. They'll still have some power because of the stickiness.
You have no reason to believe people with new marginal income from UBI would move to lower COL areas. We have strong reason to believe they'd spend that money to move toward high COL areas. Evidence for this is the fact that people, when they have money, choose to live in high COL areas.
Your claim is, I guess, that people supplementing wages with UBI will move to poorer locations, because they are less tied to their jobs, and then the poorest of the poor (those who already live in bottom-percentile COL locations) will... move to even poorer locations?
Seems like a wacky argument relative to: "people will do what they literally always do with new marginal income, which is move to nicer areas, and since everyone is doing it simultaneously without new supply, prices will go up and nobody will improve their lifestyle."
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
When minimum wage rises, yes rents rise.
When high paying employers come to an area, yes rents rise.
These are a lot more random/diffuse in the market than UBI is, but they still cause the same effect.
Can you please explain why rents go up at all?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
Most of the plans I've seen taper off and then become a tax at certain income levels.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
the prices are going up because the landlords have entered a web2.0 mediated cartel.
You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.
I have absolutely zero doubt that if the government had paid me the difference they were trying to charge (as UBI or any other stipend), they would've raised the rate again by the same amount very quickly. In fact, going by the idea that supply & demand are what caused that (rather than simple landlord greed that I generally see it as), UBI definitely can't fix it, since UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand-- they'll still need to charge just enough that some people can't afford it in order for there to be "enough."
You're somewhat correct in that the solution (building more housing, I guess) is not really related to UBI.
(It’s not clear why this only applies to rent and not other things people spend money on.)
Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.
I can’t not consume rent, that’s never an option.
Actually, I contend that it can increase supply of "housing sufficiently near sufficient income" by improving some marginal (existing or potential) housing.
Many devils in the details, of course.
My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all businesses, until all $1,000 was soaked up and the public is no better off than they were before.
Aside from whether the prediction is realistic under this assumption, UBI under any realistic financing scheme doesn't do that. It replaces (and potentially increases the net benefit of) means-tested welfare at the bottom end of the income distribution and spreads the clawback from a set of relatively sharp cliffs that occur between working poor and middle income levels to a much more gradual effective trail-off over nearly the whole income distribution as part of progressive income taxation.
The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.
There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.
The only scenario where UBI/UGI would make sense is one where AI can replace most/all humans at any job they could have. At that point it makes no sense for there to be a economic hierarchy at all.
UBG is a completely different story, though.
- If they don't have employment, and incomes are $0, then in the absence of UBI, would rent also drop to $0? If not, then I think we're better off with UBI.
- These higher prices for rent and groceries seem like strong incentives for competition. Maybe we can't expect that in NIMBY San Francisco, but without a jobs market, the only attraction to live there is the weather. Why not move somewhere cheaper?
Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.
The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.
The idea of adopting a downward-redistributive policy like UBI is to do it before that occurs.
Access to cheap loans has lead to an explosion in costs.
If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison. Instead of saving 500/mo by commuting, now you might save $1000 by relocating.
Rate limit edit: I said commuting, not going going to live in some random place.
Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.
(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)
And then the other portion of rent (the building itself) is also pretty darn supply-inelastic as well, though not entirely.
aside, while i'm at it, let's take another swipe at free market and housing: the YIMBY line has truth about regulations preventing building, but if you look at build starts for like the 10 years after the 2008 crisis, you'll see a lack of buildings that happened during that time. they had record housing starts leading up to the crisis, and you know what also existed then? the same regulatory regime that we are now tearing down to help us build what we need. but after the crisis, the builders stopped building because they were fearful about the market. this suggests to me that "regulations prevent building, just let the free market take care of it," is too simplistic and ignores very real data. the market took care of it by not building.
https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-05-23/uvm-halt...
Consider a 2 acre project:
$3MM in land costs inside Burlington
$300,000 in land costs right outside Burlington
What projects would could you do on the $300,000 lot that you can't possible do on the $3MM? Basically all of them!
Regarding the UVM project: they should sell that parking lot to bring the $1.5MM/ac costs closer to $300k/ac so people can build stuff instead of a place to store asphalt :)
regardless, why do you think land in burlington is expensive?
I suppose the delta is surprising to you?
It's expensive because it's productive. The marginal productivity of living/working in Burlington means the market can sustain higher costs, ergo the costs go up.
This is more problematic than every other good because 1) they cannot add more land inside Burlington and 2) the land doesn’t actually have higher carrying costs by virtue of being more expensive (unlike roughly every other asset).
What? Yes it does. That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
I never said "all land is being used productively." I said "land prices are the primary source of cost in high COL areas." One contributor to high land prices are all the things you mention: people withholding their unused land from the market.
No, there are not more variables than just the sale price. The price of land is the price of land, and it factors in all the variables you mentioned.
> That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
yes exactly how prices work in a textbook but a textbook is not a local market with all sort of dynamics. imagine the political process of UVM choosing to sell all their land, that is just absurd to be like "they can do that and the price problem is solved!" they probably got the land for very cheap and clearly want to develop but they can't because they can't afford construction costs, for a number of reasons (price of land being only one).
UVM’s internal politics are, in fact, accounted for in the price of land.
Yes, for that particular plot of land, which they already owned, the land price is not what prevented construction. That particular project’s failure is not a major driving force of the price of living in Burlington.
The fact that 2 acres costs $3MM is a major driving force.
Of course the counterpoint is: a single stalled project with extremely unique economics (built for students and on land that was already owned)
So who knows!
Wages have increased far more than the price of food over the last 200 years, wage rises aren’t inflationary on their own.
Which is why universal basic services[1] provide a much better solution, because they make it the government's problem to handle the logistics of creating or procuring the resources people will need.
But after decades of red scare, I don't have much faith the U.S. government will move in this direction, and even the working class may protest it due to how conditioned they are to reject anything they might associate with communism.
They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
Only in a democracy.
China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.
America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
(I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)
This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.
They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).
Still too optimistic on how long-term the American approach will be. There won't be a UBI, the oligarchy will be paid directly from government coffers. The deficit, bonds and other government instruments will paper over the collapse of tax-revenue and population for a while, before the whole house of cards collapses[1]. I think the billionaires hope to be in space habitats or dead by then, if not, there's always their bunkers in New Zealand - their cache of gold bars should still work there after they ravage the USD. Capital knows no borders.
1. See late 1990s Russia. Only simple, extractive industries will chug along.
I don't think they're too smart for that. They're too lazy. They prefer to just gut public health and let disease take care of the culling.
I fear this is going to be achieved with a World War in the not-too-distant future.
Get rid of a lot of dissatisfied poor people and seize some more resources for the wealthy at the same time.
It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.
How are you preventing others from stealing your rice? Where are you eating it? Where are you sleeping at night?
Yes, of course you need thousands of dollars to survive. The problem is rent, not food.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
That’s what life has always been about for a large segment of people, going back thousands of years. Media is more or less a bandaid. People are busy, people are anxious, people don’t want to bother to spend money - media can give the sensation of human interaction without the hard bits.
But ultimately, if I could never work but I was surrounded by my loved ones forever, I would be pretty happy with that. We can find stuff to do, or just do nothing at all. With them, it’s always a blast.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
You have to think outside of this consenting slavery box. Individuals will find meaning in their lives. Volunteering is one. Learning a craft is another. Acquiring knowledge and improving oneself as a person is one too. Americans/westerners keep lecturing about "freedom" but they don't even recognize what real freedom is.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.
I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.
But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.
UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People are weird and different.
People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.
With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
There are lots of older people who go back to work, not because they need the money but because the need the structure. In fact, there is an increased risk of death due to retirement.
>Available evidence suggests it is unlikely that changes in health insurance and income can account for the increase in mortality at age 62. So, to further examine the plausibility of retirement leading to higher mortality, Moore examines which causes of death increase when men turn 62, and considers the connection between those and decreased labor force participation.
https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/2022/retirement.ph...
>With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
People have need to feel like they are doing something. Usually something positive but they will settle for something negative, generally that ends poorly for society.
Also UBI would only, as my understanding is, take care of the basics. Food, shelter, medical care. So you would end up with a population that has enough to survive, hungry for more and no way to achieve it.....
We have the unfortunate combination of being uniquely individualistic and with too much time. Community-based societies, which we will have to transition to in a post-scarcity world, don’t have that problem.
1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.
2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.
3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?
I thought it was giving people money.
Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcith era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?
When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?
Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.
Assuming a humanoid robot with human like intelligence it may also be able to enlist humans to accomplish it's task, either by paying them directly, or through intermediaries, or deceiving them into helping it.
If it is capable to human like intelligence and creativity it may be able to pioneer new manufacturing processes -- perhaps it will learn to grow parts for itself by using existing biological processes in ways that we haven't yet figured out.
The point isn't so much the how with a self replicator, the point is the exponential growth rate. You're right that the first machine will take a long time to build the second, but those two will certainly be able to build twice as many in at least the same amount of time -- probably less because they can use the infrastructure that the first set up to build the second.
Once humans make machines that are capable of self replication regardless of where it is on the spectrum from base matter and energy assembly to just off the shelf parts assembly you're going to see exponential growth.
And once certain kinds of creative people get their hands on these machines they will inevitably jailbreak them and make them work for them instead of the companies that will try and lock this kind of stuff down like they always try to do.
The war on general purpose computing will transition into a war on general purpose manufacturing and the same kind of people who want ot sell you devices that you can't compile software for without a license will try to do the same with self replicating hardware but they will fail.
Robots that can build things already exist and can be purchased second hand, but I haven't see this level of hacking them to self replicate. The logistics of getting enough parts, and having the general purpose ability to diagnose a very wide range of issues with used components, and similar seem to prevent this from being some sort of self replicating singularity.
If such a robot did already have the power to do such self replication, why would it wait for a second hand hacker instead of the builder of the robots using them to produce copies at reduce cost?
There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans.
The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
The more customers I have, the less risk there is if I lose a customer. The less I have to bow to my customers whims.
If one of the 10 people ask me to hire their cousin, I might have to do that. If one of the 1,000 people ask me to do so, probably not.
Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
> A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.
What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done.
It'll probably be too late though.
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
Tariffs and industrial policy may increase the US' manufacturing capacity, but don't expect to see many manufacturing jobs from it.
Don't think that that is true when it comes to the steel industry when you include all the verticals, i.e. mineral extraction + transportation of said minerals + energy production + transportation of said energy. You need qualified people for that, lots of them. And I've yet to see the steel factory that can be run with only 10, 25 or even 100 people.
Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US.
> At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right?
We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism.
> Specializing only works when line goes up forever.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people.
This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc).
Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists.
1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen.
If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.