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To enable that, we need to have an economic system that redistributes the resources so that we can all have a shot a living a decent life, reducing the working

To enable that, we need to have an economic system that redistributes the resources so that we can all have a shot a living a decent life, reducing the working hours of the many rather than the wealth of the few. Has there been a time in history where so many people have been working so much for so little?

abduhl 11y ago
Of course there's been a time in history where so many people have been working so much for so little. Plantation owners used to work their slaves from dawn till dusk for nothing. Farmers used to work the land from sun up to sun down just to feed their family. What a ridiculous question. Why do so many people think that times have never been so bad when, in all honesty, times have never been so good?
- harryh 11y ago
  Because we used to live in the garden of eden where everything was perfect, but then we sinned against god and if we don't repent we're all going to hell. I'm joking a little but I'm also serious. I kind of think that humans are somewhat hardwired to think this way given that so many people believe some version of this story.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Because the specific subset of people who post in these forums, mostly middle-class North Americans and Europeans, are worse off than a couple of decades ago - coupled with the fact that the type of jobs that are lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty make us feel dirty and self-righteous.
- frandroid 11y ago
  Worldwide, there are more people in slavery today than there was when slavery was legal. Plus all kinds of manufacturing quasi-slavery in south and south-east asia with crazy hours.
brc 11y ago
It's not clear. Are you advocating for socialism?
- infinite8s 11y ago
  Capitalism is a method for distributing scarce resources. Remove the scarcity and you remove the need for capitalism.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    You can't really remove the scarcity; if machines make mass-produced stuff non-scarce, the rest (including intangibles) will become more important. In Star Trek, everyone could probably have their own luxury car, but there was still only one captain for each whole ship.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      "The Australia Project" from the novel Manna is one possible future in a post scarcity economy, it also shows one of the others.
  - tjradcliffe 11y ago
    Not all resources will be non-scarce, though, so this kind of one-size-fits-all thinking is misleading. Nor are all alternatives to capitalism socialism. Socialism is also known to have very severe problems in application, particularly how to incentivize socialist managers to behave like capitalist ones in most circumstances, driving innovation and maximizing productivity. Socialist managers have somewhat different contstraints on them from capitalist managers, and nominally different long-term goals, but they are more similar than you might think. The thing is: we know how to make capitalism work in a range of varieties, from the Scandanavian social democracies to the mess that's Texas. We have never seen a successful system of public ownership of the means of production (which is what socialism is, and nothing else). It has been tried in a variety of places and times, and it has always run up against fundamental problems of managerial incentives and political corruption at levels that make most capitalist political economies look pretty good (which is saying something!) So looking for non-socialist means of distributing wealth in a society that is unequally post-scarce is a good idea. Today wealth is distributed almost exclusively through paid work, but that is a relatively recent invention. I'm not suggesting a return to feudalism or anything like it, but think we should be willing to consider variations in social order that are at least that large-scale, because the difference between what is coming and industrial capitalism is going to be at least as big as the difference between industrial capitalism and the semi-feudal societies that preceded it in many places.

abduhl 11y ago

Of course there's been a time in history where so many people have been working so much for so little. Plantation owners used to work their slaves from dawn till dusk for nothing. Farmers used to work the land from sun up to sun down just to feed their family. What a ridiculous question. Why do so many people think that times have never been so bad when, in all honesty, times have never been so good?

harryh 11y ago
Because we used to live in the garden of eden where everything was perfect, but then we sinned against god and if we don't repent we're all going to hell. I'm joking a little but I'm also serious. I kind of think that humans are somewhat hardwired to think this way given that so many people believe some version of this story.
icebraining 11y ago
Because the specific subset of people who post in these forums, mostly middle-class North Americans and Europeans, are worse off than a couple of decades ago - coupled with the fact that the type of jobs that are lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty make us feel dirty and self-righteous.
frandroid 11y ago
Worldwide, there are more people in slavery today than there was when slavery was legal. Plus all kinds of manufacturing quasi-slavery in south and south-east asia with crazy hours.

brc 11y ago

It's not clear. Are you advocating for socialism?

infinite8s 11y ago
Capitalism is a method for distributing scarce resources. Remove the scarcity and you remove the need for capitalism.
- icebraining 11y ago
  You can't really remove the scarcity; if machines make mass-produced stuff non-scarce, the rest (including intangibles) will become more important. In Star Trek, everyone could probably have their own luxury car, but there was still only one captain for each whole ship.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    "The Australia Project" from the novel Manna is one possible future in a post scarcity economy, it also shows one of the others.
- tjradcliffe 11y ago
  Not all resources will be non-scarce, though, so this kind of one-size-fits-all thinking is misleading. Nor are all alternatives to capitalism socialism. Socialism is also known to have very severe problems in application, particularly how to incentivize socialist managers to behave like capitalist ones in most circumstances, driving innovation and maximizing productivity. Socialist managers have somewhat different contstraints on them from capitalist managers, and nominally different long-term goals, but they are more similar than you might think. The thing is: we know how to make capitalism work in a range of varieties, from the Scandanavian social democracies to the mess that's Texas. We have never seen a successful system of public ownership of the means of production (which is what socialism is, and nothing else). It has been tried in a variety of places and times, and it has always run up against fundamental problems of managerial incentives and political corruption at levels that make most capitalist political economies look pretty good (which is saying something!) So looking for non-socialist means of distributing wealth in a society that is unequally post-scarce is a good idea. Today wealth is distributed almost exclusively through paid work, but that is a relatively recent invention. I'm not suggesting a return to feudalism or anything like it, but think we should be willing to consider variations in social order that are at least that large-scale, because the difference between what is coming and industrial capitalism is going to be at least as big as the difference between industrial capitalism and the semi-feudal societies that preceded it in many places.