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> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us a
by mort96 4y ago
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.
- pydry 4y agoHow do you deprive an oligarch of their ill gotten wealth without violence?
- mistermann 4y agoWhy apply constraints before we've even gotten started?
- commandlinefan 4y agoHow do you do it even with violence? How would you seize and “redistribute” Jeff Bezos’s (for example) wealth? It’s mostly in stocks that would start to lose value if you tried to cash them all out at once.
- maeil 4y agoThis is a non-issue; the stock will temporarily lose a bit of value through the increase of supply and that's it. Amazon as a company would still intrinsically be valued at hundreds of billions if not 1+ trillion, even if Bezos were to die tomorrow and his will would say that all of his shares should be sold on the market within a day. The fact that you might only end up redistributing $70 billion instead of the $80 billion he was worth when alive doesn't matter, it's still $70 billion being redistributed.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoYou disable his AWS account and badge and stop inviting him to meetings, likewise for any other hands that that stock falls into. It's not valuable if it doesn't give the holder enough power to make changes happen.
- sebzim4500 4y agoWho says you have to sell it? It could be held by the taxpayer, and they could pocket the dividends. Not saying I support this kind of action, but I don't think this is a good argument against it.
- pydry 4y agoLaws that force Bezos to open up his platforms to competition would likely collapse the share price while not killing the actual value of what was built. Tax is another. The problem is getting into a position where you could pass those laws without violence. I'm not sure it is possible to do it democratically in such a corrupted political system. 3rd parties are essentially impossible and oligarchs have a lock on the other 2.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoThis is one of the most important questions we should be asking today. I'm not even joking as I think it's a critically important part of fixing society As dumb as it sounds I genuinely think it's a concerted effort to change people's minds - specifically those people who want to become capital class or otherwise are on the way to the capital class. If we can 1. Prevent new billionaires from being created and 2. then create structures to allow the capital class to feel like they are important to the process of reducing their own power and democratizing the economy, there might be a chance.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teucris 4y agoMake the next generation of wealth-generating innovations easily within reach to anyone, not just those with capital.
- klibertp 4y agoIt's time for the "without violence" to, once again, become of no importance compared to "ill gotten" (plus, with ever expanding definition of "ill"). That's what tends to happen, historically. We'll then get a decade or two of reconciliation and then will again start pretending that we're not murderous primate bastards we are, just like we did for the past 50 years (and even that not nearly universally).
- maeil 4y agoThrough violence, as history has shown.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mort96 4y agoThere isn't really any non-violence. The common solution to depriving people of their ill-gotten wealth is state coercion under threat of violence. I don't know if that would work in the case of the 0.1%, but we surely can't limit ourselves to non-violent solutions for the ultra wealthy when we have no trouble with violent solutions for the less wealthy.
- vc8f6vVV 4y agoThink one step further. What happens if you do? Doesn't the USSR example teach you anything? You will have a different breed of oligarchs, that's all (yes, there were oligarchs in the USSR, just not in the way you think, money is not everything and oligarchy is not about money).
- shrimp_emoji 4y agoWhy should you play with a handicap? The "oligarch" forces you to work with violence. They've already violated the non-aggression principle. No work? No money. No rent payment? Eviction (with violence). Stealing food? Arrest and imprisonment (with violence). It's violence all the way down. It always was. It's just a question of how it's organized and rhetorically justified.
- richwater 4y agoClaiming society hasn't massively benefited from productivity increases over the last century is certainly a take.... typical western raised privileged person claiming how terrible everything is.
- mort96 4y agoI don't mean to say that there has been no benefit to the masses. I'm saying there benefits are clearly massively unequally distributed as the 0.1% get an ever increasing share of the wealth.
- runarberg 4y agoIs what you could claim if inequality wasn’t a detrimental to quality of life in and of it self, a fact which psychologists and sociologists have pretty well established at this point. Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
- weatherlite 4y agoHow do we define quality of life? I doubt the average American is mentally healthier than in the 50s.
- runarberg 4y agoAnother excellent point. Many (most?) quality of life indexes have tons of obvious biases, and are quick to fail the sniff test.
- sokoloff 4y agoFretting about inequality and focusing mental energy on someone else having more money than you is surely detrimental.
- JasserInicide 4y agoMaybe that should change. I'd love to see that change but we have a populace that directs its energy at attacking itself instead of the people in power
- isaacremuant 4y agoThat's by design. The whole point about making you fight between blue or red in the US and other fake dichotomies around the world, and have you overindex on some specific social/Identity issue is so that you don't realize that the divide is socioeconomic and democracy is mostly a sham because whoever gets in power doesn't have to serve the interests of its voters but those of its lobbyists, and that's exactly what happens. But hey, that's radical talk,sentiment analysis suggests we should disable this kind of speech and keep our head down, lest we be denied more rights...
- jmerz 4y agoI think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was. You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war. If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd really hate feudalism. I think a lot of modern society's wealth goes into unexpected places, which is one of the things you see if you try living in places with different national GDPs. I'm in a well off European country right now, and the biggest differences I see compared to the US are things like older cars and worse appliances. The technology is older, and cheaper. Everyone having the latest SUV and pickup truck is actually a HUGE investment in wealth! If you spend some time in lat am countries with even lower per person GDP you see older, simpler buildings, cheaper clothing, simpler food, etc etc. If you wanted to live in the united states with a 1950s car, in an old house, with appliances from the 80s and shitty healthcare, you could live pretty cheap as well. The advances in productivity has brought us SOMEWHERE it's just not always obvious where.
- mort96 4y agoYet there are people who wield the wealth equivalent to a moderately rich country's GDP. A great deal of our collective increased value output is going straight to those individuals.
- Kye 4y ago"It could be worse" is and always has been a garbage argument. The problem is those oligarchs are using their outsized accumulation to lobby for and purchase a worsening world for their benefit. Sure, things got better for some people for a while. Now they're getting worse from what flows out of the discretionary spending of those oligarchs.
- satvikpendem 4y agoPeople have a profound recency bias. I wonder if it's that people don't study history enough but I'm always amazed at posts like the grandparent's, which talk about oligarchs today discounting the influence of, you know, actual oligarchs, as in those few who legitimately ruled over others. The system we have today is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.