In the future, will everyone be rich?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=robert_columbia]
So where do I go to get my fabulous country estate, army of servants, fields of grain, and on-site smithery, and never actually work again? Last time I checked, land was quite expensive and even maids make minimum wage nowadays. So something doesn’t add up.
[/QUOTE]

Because you are looking for a 1 to 1 correlation that doesn’t exist. Even ‘rich’ people today don’t have the literal army of servants that a rich (noble) had in the 17th century, because they are unnecessary today, while that’s what you needed to make a large household work back then. However, that rich noble didn’t have access to hot and cold running water (clean, hot and cold running water), good sanitation, nor even clean food available to most people in the Western World today…nor a host of other things (like the ability to get in a car and drive 50 miles in an hour…or across the country). Your life expectancy was lower as well, regardless of class, and your access to even rudimentary medicine sucked and you were as likely to be killed by the doctors ministrations of the time as by the host of diseases and other dangers.

Basically, the quality of life for someone, even someone rich in the 17th century sucked. It sucked a hell of a lot worse for someone who was poor in the 17th century, but compared to our modern life it blew chunks.

22

Well, look at what happened - the democratisation of wealth, at least to a large extent.

Sure there are still oligarchs, but also the greater the sufferage, the greater the spread of wealth.

23

It’s not a hijack, it seems directly relevant to the discussion for the simple reason that the resource issue is an entirely new paradigm in human history that is affecting our collective and individual wealth and well-being. Up until sometime around the 20th century technology alone has been the factor driving our lifestyle changes and those have been almost exclusively for the better. Now for the first time we are hitting limits on resources, and that’s becoming a growing negative factor almost everywhere you look: the air is getting polluted and laden with CO2, habitable land is scarcer and much more expensive, clean water is scarcer, the oceans are being overfished, wildlife is going extinct, etc. Some paleoecologists are concerned that these ecological imbalances alone are worrisome, completely aside from the resource and environmental issues.

I don’t disagree with anything you said in the last post, only with the optimism of the timeframe. NASA may be trying to capture an asteroid for study but there is a very vast difference between doing that and finding, out in the vast reaches of the solar system, all the major resources we need to live and then, having found them, economically bring them home so that we can continue to enjoy the indulgence of boundless economic growth without any further exacerbation of all the other issues.

24

Well that’s the trick, isn’t it? Not everyone in the world currently has access to the technology and infrastructure of the industrialized world. There are people in Africa, China and even the US who are probably just as poor as any 17th century peasant. Maybe they won’t die from consumption or some other old timey disease, but their access to health care, education, and meaningful work is just as limited.

And if you look at a Brazilian favela or Mumbai shanty town, you have huge swaths of people who are probably as poor, if not poorer (or at least more crowded) than their eighteenth century counterparts.
But on average, if you are in an industrialized (or industrializing) nation, standard of living does tend to improve over time.

As our life will suck from the perspective of someone in the year 2514 with their flying cars, sex robots, hot and cold running fusion and whatnot.

That’s the benefit of technology:

  • Your automobile or public transportation lets you live in an (on average) 2600 sq ft home in a wooded suburb somewhere.
  • Your army of servants has been replaced to a large extent by a dishwasher, microwave, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, Google, Amazon, Uber, Seamless, OpenTable, email.
  • Industrial farming and modern supply chains allow you access to all the grain (and other goods) you could want.
  • You don’t need a smithy because FedEx will deliver any part you could ever need from anywhere in the world.
  • Land is expensive (or maybe you just prefer urban living) so maybe instead of a house, you live in a 30 story residential condo tower with concierge, maintenance staff, maybe even a cleaning lady who comes in once a week and a nanny who takes care of your kids during the day.
25

Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way. In a fully-automated, post-scarcity society, many or most material needs will be provided by civilisation for free, since it would be unnecessary to charge for them, and no-one would have to work to earn the money to pay for them.

One analogy for this sort of value-free consumption is the oxygen we breathe; this oxygen is created for us by automatic biological systems, which replicate themselves and provide us with something vitally important. We are basically ‘mooching’ off the plants. If anyone feels guilty about receiving goods and services for free, they would not like living in a post-scarcity society, where we might all be ‘moochers’, with no money to our name.

However I don’t think that everything in such a society would be free, or that it could be. There will still be goods and services that people value, often because they are crafted or performed by humans, rather than by robots. Those who want to could become artisans or artists, musicians and performers; some or may people would want to watch human acrobats, or listen to human musicians, or buy hand-crafted goods that have not been made by robot hands. Heinlein once described a society where hand-made goods were more valuable than automatically fabricated goods, despite being of ‘inferior’ quality.

Citizens in a post-scarcity society could make a little pin money, or more likely acquire social credit, in order to purchase the little things that make all the difference; a reserved seat in a restaurant or theatre, or hand-crafted items of imaginary value.

26

Why couldn’t it be an order of magnitude less? Maybe future people of the future use transportation systems that are a lot more efficient than exploding vaporized fossil algae distillate in metal chambers to spin a metal shaft to spin rubber disks to propel a multi-ton metal box down a flattened stone surface?

The point is, energy is used to accomplish tasks, like moving objects from one place to another, or powering electric devices, or transforming substances from one state to another. But devices of the future are very likely to be much more efficient than those of today, simply because energy is going to probably be much more expensive relative to today. So instead of burning more and more coal to keep our giant drafty castles warm, we build insulated houses that require less energy to run. Instead of driving hours a day in cars we work from home, or stay home without working. Instead of shipping piles of goods from one continent to another we manufacture them in our own homes, and when we’re done we toss the discarded materials back in the hopper.

It is certainly very likely that certain things that are pretty cheap in 2014 are going to be relatively expensive in 2114, just like there were some things that were cheap in 1914 (like human servants) that are relatively expensive in 2014. But that doesn’t mean we won’t have substitutes for those goods and services that are better. It would be extremely expensive for me to hire a woman to come to my house and do my laundry every week using 1914 methods. But I can toss clothes in the washer and drier, and get better results. I don’t have the psychological boost of being able to order around another human being as my servant, so that’s a pretty severe cost if I’m into that sort of thing. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about the dryer stealing the silverware when my back is turned.

Other things that we think were cheaper in 1914 than they are in 2014 aren’t actually more expensive, they’re more or less the same, it’s just that other things have gotten so much cheaper that they seem more expensive. It isn’t any more expensive to get solid silver dinnerware in 2014, but you can get stainless steel dinnerware for so much cheaper that the silver silverware seems like a ridiculous ripoff. But only rich/upper middle people in 1914 could afford silver dinnerware. And our conception of “middle class” is different, in 1914 “middle class” people were a small minority, most people were working class.

So unless someone finds a silver-rich asteroid, probably it’s going to be relatively expensive even in 2114 to have a giant collection of silver silverware. But it’s going to be really really cheap to have regular non-fancy dining implements made of whatever materials people find handy then. And people probably won’t hoard much of this sort of thing, because getting more will be easy and cheap.

By then consumer electronics should have matured, and we’ll be using the same old phone and display hardware that our parents used, maybe with shiny “of the moment” content, but devices will be smaller, use much less power, and last for decades. Lots of our current problems will be solved, not by throwing more equivalent inputs into the problem, but by finding alternatives that accomplish the same tasks but with better scalability.

27

I think the biggest factor, as has already been mentioned, is that there are things available today that were unavailable at any price even a short while ago. The example the comes to mind is that Crussus, an ancient Roman, may have been the wealthiest man to have ever lived, but he would never has tasted chocolate or corn or potatoes in his lifetime, things that even the most destitute people in America have probably had once. The future will be like that, too; things that we can’t even comprehend today will be available cheaply tomorrow.

Because we’re near theoretical limits already. Combustion engines are around 20% efficient with a maximum efficiency of around 37%. And given that despite having invented the combustion engine over 100 years ago, we still don’t have anything with comparable energy density, we’ll almost certainly still be using combustion engines in the future, too.

Also, shipping things is relatively cheap energy-wise (at least for energy dense products like plastics; less so for food), and it may very well be more efficient to produce cheap junk in a highly specialized factory overseas than in a wildly inefficient 3D printer at home.

28

There are very great savings to be made in energy use, as Lemur866 says. Many people in the future could work from home, avoiding a lot of power-hungry commuting.

Communications around the world will become even better, so the world will become a global village (this board is an example of global villageisation). Maybe this will also reduce global travel, since you don’t need to meet people in person any more; but it might also induce more people to travel for leisure, to see people and places they have only seen online.

If people don’t have to commute any more, I would imagine that suburbs will become redundant, or perhaps expand until they cover vast regions of country at very low density. This is a nice prospect, except that it increases the amount of travel required for leisure time.

Lots of people will want to use the countryside for leisure pursuits, placing stress on the landscape. The scars from mining will need to be repaired wherever possible, and pollution remediated; this is possible, but will have an energy cost, as will recycling rare elements and other useful commodities.

So, some uses of energy might be reduced, while others will be increased.

29

This meme comes up a lot on the Dope, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

If most people cannot afford what robots produce, then most people will do what they are doing now; trade their labour with each other.
For robots to be disruptive to the economy, then at least the products of robot labour should be affordable to most people, if not the robots themselves.

30

Absolute material wealth will increase overall with technology barring catastrophic disaster. Some things we take for granted, like easy access to water, and the booming cheap agriculture that brings, may become more scarce in the future. But the general trend of technology increasing productivity and availability of resources will continue.

But does absolute material wealth dictate how rich you are? To me, the control you have over your life and how much you need to dedicate towards working is at least as big a factor. Futurists of yesteryear told us that we’re going to be so much more productive once we start automating tasks with robotics, increasing efficiency with computers, etc. that we’d be able to work half as much and produce more.

And that actually happened. We’ve become so much more productive. We use computers to design better and cheaper products. We use automation to increase production and decrease labor requirements. We’ve gained a thousand technical ways that make us better at doing all sorts of work.

So are we working less and enjoying our lives more, due to this increased productivity? No. Are we enjoying an explosion of wealth because we’re so much more productive? Sort of, but not really. The fact that we’ve become really good at making things makes them cheaper to us, and so we can surround ourselves with greater material wealth, but we’re not really gaining a greater ability to have control over our lives. We’re working as much, or more, as we ever have, and we’re more productive than we’ve ever been, and yet our share of the fruits of our increased labor are not enjoyed by empowering or rewarding the average worker. People work long hours, women joining the workforce have increased the number dramatically, and yet in terms of how it affects our ability to own a home, go to school, pay our debts, etc. we’re worse off than we were in past decades. Yes, we have awesome 46" HDTVs instead of a 20" black and white TVs, and that is some kind of wealth, but in terms of having control of our time and our lives, we’re not doing well. Almost all of the gains in wealth brought on by this productivity are going to a very small group of people.

And I think that’s a big part of the issue in question. I think there are people who define themselves by how much better off they are than other people, not in absolute terms. They’d rather be a noble from 400 years ago than a moderately wealthy person today, even though they would obviously have more in terms of absolute wealth today, because the disparity between them and the rest of society would be that much greater then. They’d get to be better off than other people to a greater degree, and they’d have more power to push people around.

If aliens came to the planet and said “we can use our technology to raise your standard of living dramatically, give you everything you could want, you’ll never have to work again nor lack anything you need, but everyone else also gets this same treatment, is that alright?” - any rational, decent person would say “of course, that’s a win/win, why wouldn’t I want to have that, and for everyone else to have that too?” - but there are some people who would hate it. They would be elevated, and yet everyone else would be elevated equally. How do they win at life if everyone has it just as good as they do?

And those are the people who go out and become magnificently wealthy, and have a disproportionate effect on society, creating influential businesses, having greater power over workers, setting trends, controlling legislators, and otherwise stacking the deck in their own favor. The people who have real control over the way society goes are taken from those who want to define themselves by the gap between themselves and everyone else.

And so the people who have the most influence over how society works do not seek a society in which everyone is rich. Can that cycle be broken?

I suspect that if AI and robotics becomes so advanced that it creates a large class of people who simply cannot find productive work, potential collapses of society will threaten those in power enough that they buy those people off with some sort of basic guaranteed living standards. We may actually see something like a basic income within a century if automation displaces enough people that you might have crowds with torches and pitchforks coming for the super wealthy. Then, potentially, if you have control over your life, how you want to do your work, or whether you work at all, while AI and robots give us the greatest economy we’ve ever seen, where all our needs are met, then perhaps you can say that we’re all rich.

My view may be colored by the American experience. I get the impression that other places, Western and Northern Europe in particular, do not share this cultural trend to the same degree, and actually place a higher value on the quality of life of the individual. Some economies even capitalize on increased productivity by sharing it more equitably, and giving people more control over their own lives by creating a culture in which working less is the norm. But in the US, this trend is going to eventually lead to disaster.

31

Being rich means having control over other people’s time and resources. It means, for example, going out to eat, where other people serve the food. Coming home to a house, that someone else cleaned. Or flying 1st class, so you get on first, and get off first, and everyone else has to wait.

32

Are you saying anyone who could do these things is ‘rich’, or only people who do them? Because eating out, having a maid service and flying 1st class are things a large number of people in the US/West could do if they wanted too, while they aren’t something that a lot of folks who would ACTUALLY be considered ‘rich’ do all the time.

33

It doesn’t mean having a car, if your car is the shittiest one on the road. It doesn’t mean having clothes, if they’re all from Goodwill. And it doesn’t mean having food, if you’re buying it with a WIC card.

The fact they didn’t have cars or Goodwill or WIC 500 years ago doesn’t matter.

34

Well you’re rich if you could do all those things, if you wanted to, without going broke. And most people can’t, or else everyone would fly 1st class, and no one would serve the food or clean other people’s toilets.

35

Now it doesn’t, because “rich” is basically a relative term. The point many people have been making here, is that this is rich relative to most of human history. And, indeed, rich relative to most of the earth’s current inhabitants. But of course they do not feel rich because many people in their immediate environment are far wealthier than they are (and, as humans, we’re hard-wired to care immensely how we are doing vs the people we see every day).

Not sure what your point is.

I think you missed XT’s point, that it depends what we mean by afford. Lots of people could afford to do those things rarely.
If we add to the list “own a $500 smart phone” we would have no trouble finding examples of relatively poor people that nonetheless are prepared to pay that price.

36

So, I could do all of these things. Does that make me ‘rich’ then? I think most middle class people could do all of these things (and, in fact, many or most middle class people do some of them all the time…such as eating out, for instance). Seems a rather arbitrary definition of ‘rich’, and one that plays more into the we are headed to a day where ‘everyone’ will be ‘rich’ theme.

:stuck_out_tongue: It’s all relative. If you never had a car at all and had to walk everywhere (something I doubt you’ve ever had to experience), then having even the ‘shittiest one on the road’ is a huge step up. If all you’ve ever had were rags for clothes (again, something I doubt you have ever experienced) then wtf difference does it make if they came from Goodwill as long as they aren’t rags and are serviceable? I mean, to YOU who probably buy all your clothes new that might seem like a big deal and something you obviously turn your nose up on, but I can tell you from experience that clothes from Goodwill wear just fine. And as for food, if you ever experienced what it’s like to not have enough to eat then you would understand that regardless of how you paid for it, it still eats just as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

You are right…it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the poor and even what little middle class that existed didn’t have the access to clothes, food or vehicles/means of personal transportation 500 years ago, so if you took them from that to today they would very much feel they were ‘rich’. Hell, if you took a lot of people living in the 3rd world today in some of the very poor countries out there (say, your average North Korean citizen) and gave them all the food they could buy with WIC, clothes from GoodWill and the ‘shittiest car on the road’ THEY would think they were ‘rich’. It’s only you and folks like you who turn your noses up and look down on these things because, frankly, you’ve never not had them and it seems such a put down to you that the poor have to live with them while the ‘rich’ don’t.

37

Then you’re rich.

Well, no. If you look, when you’re on a plane, you’ll see that most people are sitting in coach. Only a handful are sitting in first class. The ones sitting in coach are mostly middle class. The ones sitting up front are mostly rich.

The ones who can’t afford to fly at all are mostly poor.

Doing some of them is your definition, not mine. And I’d call it silly, not arbitrary.

It is all relative, but that’s not my point here. My point is the rich depend on the poor: to do the work they don’t want to do; to wait in line so they don’t have to; and to keep prices low, so the rich don’t have to worry about how much things cost.

We were talking about the rich and the poor. You’re talking about the poor and the destitute… also, you don’t know me.

Again, you don’t know me.

People like to talk about how crappy life was 500 years ago, as if the poor today should be grateful they have anything all. It’s bullshit. The people who should be grateful are the rich.

38

Agreed. Oh, there’s literally no jobs for most people, because automated systems produce those goods cheaper and more conveniently than any possible human laborer? And so people without jobs are obliged to sit in the desert and starve to death, because there’s no possible way for them to create goods and services for themselves or others that can’t be done cheaper by robots.

And this makes sense…how? Every person has a body and brain, if they can’t get a “job”, they can still accomplish tasks that put food in their stomachs and clothing on their backs. Robots take over farming, which makes food so cheap that human farmers can’t compete, and now the humans can’t afford food? Oh, then it turns out that automated food production is actually quite expensive. Human beings can work as subsistence farmers and hunters and gatherers and scratch a living out of the dirt, but now an African subsistence farmer can’t do that because it would be much cheaper for him to buy food from an automated farm than to do it himself? Except he doesn’t have any money because he’s useless, and so he does in fact have to grow his own food as a dirt farmer. Wow, suddenly he’s producing food cheaper than a robot, since even though the robot charges $0.01 for a pound of wheat, he doesn’t have that penny.

So actually, since he doesn’t have that penny, he has to produce wheat for less than a penny. It turns out that the subsistence farmer produces food for less than a penny. He somehow undercuts the automated farm. And since there are lots of other starving people out there who can’t afford automatically produced food even at the cost of a penny, he can sell his food for less than a penny to those starving people. Maybe he won’t use money–he doesn’t have money, he’s useless remember–so he has to use some other medium of exchange like barter. So he exchanges his wheat for clothing made by another guy, the clothing is made out of discarded fast-food wrappers and leaves and twigs, but at least it’s cheaper than the 1 penny clothing made by automated clothing factories.

Of course, none of this has to happen if the ultra-wealthy mega-rich owners of the automated systems that produce all these ultra-cheap goods and services give away a few cents worth of food and clothing to the starving naked useless people huddled on the sidewalks. I mean, they’re mega-trillionaires, so feeding children for a few cents a day shouldn’t make any difference in their fortunes, right? Except, owning an automated system that can produce goods and services for a few pennies doesn’t make you rich, because you’re only making a profit of a few hundredths of a cent on each item, if that. I mean, anyone can set up an automated production system to undercut you, so the profit earned producing your goods and services is arbitraged to near zero.

Guess what, your shiny automated factory is worthless since you can’t use it to make money. Might as well throw it in the trash, or give it away to some homeless dude.

And hey, if in America we worship money and power and the rich would literally rather see the poor starve to death than provide them with any help at all–never mind that in 2014 we already provide “the poor” with tons of free goods and services like food, housing, public safety, medical care, and on and on–well, maybe there’s one guy in, say, Sweden, who’s willing to spend a couple hundred bucks a year to keep 300 million American perma-unemployed parasites from starving to death? And the American super-rich will scream, “No, no, all this wealth and power is ashes in our mouths if we can’t see the poor literally dying in the gutters!” and take steps to stop him?

39

Lemur: Yes, it’s silly.

And it’s based on a turned-around idea of how an economy works: that it’s somehow people who need jobs rather than that there’s work that needs to be done.

If there’s no work to be done, I guess we’ll all be “rich”. But so long as there’s someone somewhere who wants something he doesn’t have, someone will have a job.

If there’s millions of people who want stuff they don’t have, then there will be millions of jobs.

40

[QUOTE=LinusK]
Then you’re rich.
[/QUOTE]

Then, as I said, your definition of ‘rich’ encompasses a huge percentage of the population and is basically meaningless.

People choose, because of budgetary reasons, to fly in coach, not because they couldn’t do so for the most part. And the ones flying up front aren’t always ‘rich’, either…maybe are flying on upgrades, or flying for business and have upgrades, or decided to splurge for a vacation or become of convenience.

So, your concept of rich, poor and middle class is based on your perception of when, where and if people fly? :stuck_out_tongue:

So, if a person does all of them, they are ‘rich’ by your lights, but doing some of them means nothing and doing none of them means ‘poor’. And this is the metric you use. Gotcha. Yeah, silly AND arbitrary.

And you don’t know me. What I DO know, having been extremely poor, is anyone making the types of comments you made doesn’t have a fucking clue what it’s actually like to be that poor, or you wouldn’t be disparaging things like Goodwill or WIC. I’ve been on and used both…have you? My family didn’t HAVE a car until I was around 6, piece of shit or otherwise. You?

Nope, I don’t, nor would I probably want too (I’m sure the feeling is mutual). But I can glean a lot based on your responses both in this thread and in the past.

Who said anything about grateful? That’s YOUR fucking strawman, as I’ve heard no one say that at all. Nor was that the gist of what anyone was saying, either.