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Marshall is considering an distant future economy where, essentially, only executives get paid; all low-wage jobs have been automated away. For such an economy
by jcl 18y ago
Marshall is considering an distant future economy where, essentially, only executives get paid; all low-wage jobs have been automated away.
For such an economy to function, you'd need an "extreme income tax" to redistribute wealth. Otherwise, the executives would be making ultra-cheap products that no average person could buy, because he wouldn't have a salary to afford it.
- daniel-cussen 18y agoMaybe stupid people would become obsolete.
- daniel-cussen 18y agoI'm not kidding, though. This is, roughly speaking, the mechanism by which humans evolved to be intelligent.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoOnce we've reached such a future, all basic necessities will be so cheap and plentiful that no one minds having the government pay for them. So I see no reason an "extreme income tax" will be necessary.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoI would argue that we've already reached that point. If the government was streamlined by market processes and we ceased blowing surpluses on wars we could easily fund a safety net.
- gaius 18y agoHere in the UK we spend about 30 billion squids a year on defence. About a third of that is service pensions, another third goes on the bureaucracy/long term projects and another third on the actual services themselves. That's half what we spend on healthcare and one-fifth of what we spend on welfare. Anyone who thinks that by cutting defence spending a government can suddenly afford anything is dangerously misguided.
- blasdel 18y agoHere in the US, we spend at least $600 billion a year to start, plus another $30B+ on pensions, plus shitloads of black budget on intelligence. This amounts to about the entire UK budget, just on yearly budgeted defence. None of this includes the cost of actually fighting our ridiculous wars: the cost of the Iraq shenanigans alone will be well over a Trillion dollars even if Obama pulls out this year and no more money is spent after that.
- jcl 18y agoIs there really a difference between "extreme income tax" and "government pays for everything"?
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoThis ignores basic supply and demand, though. If no one can buy them, why would they make them? And if Company A is pricing them way too high or unfairly, what's to stop Company B from offering the same thing at a lower price point?
- nostrademons 18y agoThat's sorta the problem. No one can buy them, so nobody makes them. End result is that the economy stops functioning, nobody builds anything, and a perma-depression occurs. This can't be a good thing... As for what stops company B from competing - it's the cost of tooling up all these automation centers and the risk that after all that, your "prey" may itself get better and nobody will buy your product. Microsoft was massively profitable for the 1990s. Google was massively profitable for the 2000s. Why did nobody compete with them? Because if they did, Microsoft/Google would crush them like a bug.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoCompanies have and are competing with both MS and Google. If MS/G aren't competing fairly, that's why we have antitrust laws.
- ajju 18y agoLet's examine your thesis by replacing Google with Microsoft in your third last sentence. Microsoft was massively profitable in the 90s. Why did nobody compete with them? Oh wait, Google did. Why did they not get crushed like a bug? Because they innovated.
- nostrademons 18y agoGoogle didn't compete with Microsoft. They took advantage of a shift in the environment that made Microsoft irrelevant. Microsoft is still as dominant in the desktop app world as they ever were. It's just that nobody cares about desktop apps. (And eventually, the same thing will happen to Google and nobody will care about webapps, but not yet...)
- 18y ago
- jacoblyles 18y agoThe Luddite fallacy has been wrong for a few centuries now. We have vastly more automation than we did a hundred years ago, yet the unemployment rate is about the same and the median standard of living is much higher. Something could change to make it correct in the future, but I wouldn't assume that it will happen.
- ajju 18y agoWho'll make the machines that automate? If there are a million people sitting on their haunches with nothing to do, don't you think some of them will find something constructive to build and employ the rest? The industrial revolution massively automated practically all aspects of life. I didn't see a world wide job scarcity throughout the 20th century.