Very well. Let us agree that for purposes of this discussion, “capitalism” means a thing that did not exist before the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial mercantile capitalism does not count.
Western civilization hasn’t had a substantial agrarian class for over century, and barring some sort of societal collapse never will again. It’s one thing to blindly extrapolate existing trends into the future; it’s completely unjustifiable to extrapolate the distant past into the distant future.
[QUOTE=XT]
The ability to capitalize a sentence or a name comes from capitalism.
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You’re talking about a ludicrously small employment niche. You might as well be offering movie stars as an industry that will replace trucking as an employer when driverless trucks come online in the next few years.
You are the one missing the point. We will have driverless cars and trucks on the road in the next 20 years or so, and yet, 20 years ago, you would undoubtedly have called them “magical driverless cars and trucks.” Did magical spreadsheets do in a lot of accounting jobs? Yes! Did magical graphics programs do in a lot of graphic arts jobs? Yes! Did magical robots take over a lot of assembly line jobs? Yes! What’s going to happen is, computer software and robotic devices will get better and better at doing the tasks human beings do … ALL KINDS OF TASKS, physical and mental. And there will be nothing magical about it, just the ordinary progress of technology, except that once you have the programming to make a robot hand do one set of tasks, you may be able to adapt it to perform another set of tasks very easily, greatly speeding up the rate of human displacement as things proceed. In short, normal technological progress, and nothing more, will be all it takes to displace most human beings from most of the work now present.
One of the reasons the One Percent keeps getting wealthier and wealthier is that EXACTLY this is happening. More and more of the one percent are finding they need less and less human help to increase their wealth. Money goes to them, not their employees. Whether it’s computer stock trading or robotic assembly lines or programs that can do the work of paralegals or robotic warehouses, fewer and fewer people are needed to produce goods and services generally.
You apparently believe that the invisible hand of the marketplace will magically create new classes of jobs that robots and software cannot do, faster than an ever-increasing array of robots and software can be adapted to do them. And you accuse ME of magical thinking!
I am quelled, annihilated. The poor and the working class have just as much money as the middle class (possibly more!) and when the middle class has finally been sunk to their level financially, as the conservatives and Republicans continue on their merry way, everything will be the same, only better. What was I thinking?
You were obviously thinking ‘why don’t I reply to this out of context and with a strawman argument, perhaps wave my hands in the air and hope no one scrolls up and reads the exchange and that no one notices’.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
You are the one missing the point. We will have driverless cars and trucks on the road in the next 20 years or so, and yet, 20 years ago, you would undoubtedly have called them “magical driverless cars and trucks.” Did magical spreadsheets do in a lot of accounting jobs? Yes! Did magical graphics programs do in a lot of graphic arts jobs? Yes! Did magical robots take over a lot of assembly line jobs? Yes! What’s going to happen is, computer software and robotic devices will get better and better at doing the tasks human beings do … ALL KINDS OF TASKS, physical and mental. And there will be nothing magical about it, just the ordinary progress of technology, except that once you have the programming to make a robot hand do one set of tasks, you may be able to adapt it to perform another set of tasks very easily, greatly speeding up the rate of human displacement as things proceed. In short, normal technological progress, and nothing more, will be all it takes to displace most human beings from most of the work now present.
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Oh my gods!! Those assembly lines are going to put us all out of work!! Holy shit-sky!! Once they have a device in 20 years that will allow people to make a voice call, none of these telegraph jobs will be around any more! What will we do??? Jesu christcracker!! They are talking about letting people use a rotor dialer thingy to make their own freaking calls!! What the fuck will all those switchboard operators do??? Madre de mierda!!! If they build those damned car thingies it’s going to not only put the buggy whip and buggy building industries out of work but also all those stable hands and shit shoveler’s too…it will be the collapse of AN ENTIRE INDUSTRY AND ALL THOSE PEOPLE WILL BE OUT OF WORK AND LIVING ON THE STREETS…STREETS THAT ARE NOW NOT FILLED WITH HORSESHIT!!! Whatwillwedowhatwillwedo???
no, you are babbling frantic lefty fantasy…and it’s not even an original frantic lefty fantasy. It’s one that has been being sung by the Luddite fringe for centuries now…and on the intergalactic SDMB a 100 years from now, there will undoubtedly be someone just like you singing it again while wringing his or her hands and worrying how the poor (who will undoubtedly be better off world wide than they are today, but who will still be ‘poor’ compared to others) will ever survive in this harsh Capitalist world.
I find in these debates that there are few advocates for what we currently have - which is a mixed economy. Some markets lend themselves better to centralized governance, and some benefit from the innovation of multiple competing stakeholders.
My biggest gripe are markets that aren’t open to competition but continue to be ran as a racket by their incumbents; Things like toll roads, credit bureaus, old energy, prisons, hospitals, etc. I am a firm believer that once the competition in a current marketplace ceases, and the investors have made their money, and providing they are still profitable, the elected representatives need to use tax dollars to buy these commercial assets (preferably at a discount) and run them to service the public.
No company got rich in a vacuum. Capitalism needs to have limits - Countries don’t exist to create despots.
And once upon a time, computerized telephone switches would have bene regarded as magical.
Why are things different now?
You mean just like what has already happened?
Well, no, that’s not true at all. Obscenely wealthy people have always been around.
Capitalism is like Democracy. It’s the worst, except for all the others.
I’m a staunch advocate of capitalism, provided that externalities are addressed. But I do worry about this point.
What happens when most people don’t have anything to offer to the economy?
Up until now (or perhaps, recently), the argument was often raised that technology (that improves productivity) would put people out of work, but the opposite always happened: the improved productivity lead to higher output, feeding a deman-and-supply spiral, leading to more jobs and more wealth. So, it’s an argument that we have to take with a big grain of salt. But what if productivity advances to the point that most people just aren’t required to produce wealth?
Aren’t we seeing the beginnings of this already? Of course, the huge loss of middle class jobs in the US isn’t mostly due to automation, but rather, they’re being transferred overseas. Right now, a large segment of people in the US don’t have a serious contribution to make to the economy, thanks to cheap labor in Asia. But I see no reason that cheap labor in Asia won’t eventually be replaced by the cheap “labor” of machines.
When we get to the point where productivity depends almost entirely on capital and not on labor, it seems to me that Capitalism will fail from the point of view of the vast majority.
Of course, we live in a democracy, so those who own will have an incentive to keep those who don’t happy, somehow. Oddly, I don’t see much evidence of that yet. Maybe they didn’t get the memo.
These are both good points. It’s hard for me to find the right balance here. Regardless, in most places, the rule of law prevents jacking up prices in emergencies, and IMHO exacerbating certain scarcities.
That’s my worry. The arguments against this point amount to “Well, it hasn’t happened YET!” but without a compelling argument about why it can’t in the future. Advanced automation changes the rules, since it makes human labor irrelevant. Of course, if there ARE things of value that people can do in the economy, free markets will find them, and that’s what’s always happened up until now, or until recently.
As a believer in free markets, I confess I’m a bit dismayed that the radio and TV stations I like are the publicly subsidized ones, like NPR radio stations and BBCAM. I also notice the difference between unregulated commercial strips and national parks and sigh. Capitalism produces a lot of great stuff (like this computer I’m using, and my musical instruments), but it sure does produce a lot of crap! Is it really because people LIKE crap?
Most of those are things that are usually one of 3 things:
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Governmental services. Prisons are typically, although not always, run by the government without a profit motive. Some toll roads are governmental services as well. Most utilities with the exception of electricity and telephones are usually government-run as well.
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Some sort of sanctioned monopoly that the government allows and regulates for purposes of uniformity and accountability. Toll roads tend to work that way- at least around here, the way it works is that the company gives the government a deal on building/improving the road, and as payback, the government allows them to collect certain tolls for a certain amount of time.
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Natural monopolies. In certain industries, usually ones with large capital investments or barriers to entry, the first-mover in an industry will end up with a massive leg-up on the competition and be able to out-compete them to the point of driving them out of business. Many of these natural monopolies overlap with categories 1 and 2 above, in that governments tend to absorb those kinds of monopolies to internalize that profit, or they want to regulate them strictly to prevent them from abusing their market position (“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”).
So ultimately competition in most of those areas is kind of pointless, or for a few of your examples like hospitals, there IS a lot of competition.
Well, then, people will be wealthy without having to work. What’s wrong with that?
Actually, what would happen, really, is that other things would be redefined as “work.” To an observer from a thousand years ago, many jobs we do NOW would seem absurd, the sort of time-wasting angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin kinds of frippery that they would find hard to believe was “work.” The idea of quality auditors, college sports coaches, coffee shop baristas and freight forwarders being “jobs” would seem idiotic to the people of the year 1015, when basically every job was “make food,” with a few people involve in “make clothes,” “make buildings” and “try to keep God from being angry at us.”
It’s quite plausible that in two hundred years people will be amazed that there ever was a day we accepted menial manufacturing labour as being a thing, just as today we consider it horrifying that once upon a time pretty much everyone was a peasant, and the vast majority of people will be involved in information exchanges, caring for others, teaching children, or something else. Teaching children - I mean, why not that? If the robots take over the other jobs and make wealth incredible easy to get, why not have more teachers? Every classroom, built by the cheap robots, could have a teacher for every five students. Geez, that might be awesome. Maybe more people could create music, paintings, movies, and other kinds of art; since everything manufactured will be cheap, there will be money to pay them to do so. We can have far more caregivers for the elderly. More writers! These sound like great things.
Maybe we’ll only have to work two days a week. Wouldn’t that be COOL? I wish I could speed things ahead to the time when robots make everything so cheaply and so well that I only have to work two days a week to afford a house, food, and stuff like that.
What makes you think capitalism is prone to producing crap, as opposed to any other economic system? Was the “Trololo” guy the height of artistic achievement?
I suppose it’s because detractors of capitalism intuitively believe that if some wise person were in charge of a centralized economy, they would have the “common sense” to pick the most useful things to product.
Nothing. The problem is with the people who will be destitute with no hope of working to achieve an income.
A lot of your suggestions would be great. Too bad it seems to be going the other way, with the median income dropping (normalized by consumer price index) rather than increasing.
It’s what I hear when I spin the radio dial, or what I see when I go to a place of natural beauty and compare public parks versus unregulated places.
Yeah, there’s that. I’m definitely one who’s suspicious of letting Wise Ones choose for us. My theory is, let the market decide! Yet I keep coming up with examples that prove my theory wrong. Public transport is another good one.
But I haven’t put my finger on when it’s best to let the market sort it out and when it’s best to let Big Brother decide. The market clearly rocks and rules when it comes to consumable products, as I pointed out above. So, I say the default should be markets, and make exceptions when we can make a good argument, and it helps when we can point to good examples. That’s where I depart from libertarians, who admit no such arguments.
No, detractors of capitalism experientially believe that unregulated capitalism creates plutocracies instead of democracies, and hence creates poverty and limits the growth of small businesses (which capitalists and libertarians pretend to LURVE) because wealthy capitalists use regulation to strangle small business competitors in the crib.
Bit of a strawman argument though, since we not only don’t have unregulated capitalism, but no one in this thread is advocating for it either…nor is the thread topic about that.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Actually, what would happen, really, is that other things would be redefined as “work.” To an observer from a thousand years ago, many jobs we do NOW would seem absurd, the sort of time-wasting angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin kinds of frippery that they would find hard to believe was “work.” The idea of quality auditors, college sports coaches, coffee shop baristas and freight forwarders being “jobs” would seem idiotic to the people of the year 1015, when basically every job was “make food,” with a few people involve in “make clothes,” “make buildings” and “try to keep God from being angry at us.”
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My favorite current example of this is guys who have Twitch channels and subs. From what I understand, people with decent channels and decent numbers of subs can make thousands or even 10’s of thousands of dollars a month…playing and commenting about computer or console games they are playing. 
Hell, you don’t have to go back a thousand years to find people who would think that was absurd…my dad is totally blown away by even video gamers who play in tournaments and make prize money for winning, let along people who are able to have a constant revenue stream for just basically playing games and chatting about it for others to watch.
Never before in human history has a functioning state, where the rule of law was relatively functional, seen technological progress create a huge class of destitute people, even though technological progress has eliminated most jobs.
It may be that the U.S. median income is dropping (well, really, it’s kind of flat.) The WORLD’S median income is rising. That the USA is not a well run country by the standards of Western democracies does not indict capitalism or technological progress.
Do I really need to make a list of wonderful artistic achievements made for profit? Do you actually think the art in the Soviet Union was better than in the United States? You’ve never seen “The Godfather,” read “Oliver Twist,” listened to Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors”? You’ve never seen the Chrysler Building?
True, only the most ardent libertarian desires truly unregulated capitalism. But the financial oligarchs keep chipping away at an regulations that create problems for them and widening tax loopholes until they are canals, so that we have de facto unregulated capitalism, since the people we need to regulate are the ones driving the regulatory process and have achieved regulatory capture of the agencies charted with following through on what regulation there is.
We seem to be talking past one another. Things are different now because the combination of computer software and robotic devices are eventually going to be able to do anything humans can do, better and cheaper than humans can do it. And the shit is going to hit the economic fan LONG before 100% replacement is achieved. What part of that are you not getting?
Obscenely wealthy people have not always had the option of hiring machines instead of human beings to do almost everything needed to generate wealth for them.
Something that someone interested in this can do today is to take a stroll through the former East Berlin and look at the government created architecture and socialist realist murals.
But capitalism does product crap art and great art - but no one can tell the difference until we see how people react to it. Real crap doesn’t last long. Popular crap isn’t really crap in the larger sense.