I am both against capitalism and socialism, what I’d like is if humans didn’t have to work at all (or at least minimally) and that they were replaced in jobs by machines.
Of course on the first look it looks sci-fi’ish, but for driving related jobs, more or less all vehicles can already be replaced, there are self driving cars, trucks, planes, trains,etc, many manufacturing companies use more and more machines that didn’t exist 20, 50 or more years ago and so on.
Switching from humans to machines would also multiple productivity by a huge amount, there would be no need for pauses, no slacking (except in a case of machine damage, but that happens today too), no shifts, so machines could work the entire day, several times more effective.
The economy itself could perhaps be based on the current basic income system idea, where everyone, employed or unemployed, gets a certain amount of money that is enough for food, bill’s,etc. and people would be free to do what they want, travel, spend time with friends, do whatever their hobby is, instead of having to spend their entire lives working, just so that they could be free when they get old, when they need crutches to even walk, so is there a term for this? At least the main part without the basic income idea.
There is (or should be) a big debate about how to deal with a future in which there will be less and less work for people to do. This is likely to increase the divide between the wealthy and the rest, with only a relatively few, highly skilled workers being needed to keep all those autonomous trucks, cars and factories running.
Utopia is just a fancy word for ,perfect world" I think, so that depends on the person, you can have a communist utopia, capitalist utopia,etc depending on your view, but there’s got to be something that describes automatization of jobs, I currently call it ,robotism", but I doubt that that’s a real word.
Robots doing all the work is not an economic model. It’s a technological stage.
90% of the population used to be employed in agriculture. Now robots/machines do most of the labour. There’s nothing inherent in Capitalism or Socialism that prevents robots from doing all the work.
The real question with regard to your scenario is: Who owns all these robots?
Late add. My first attempt was a little content-free. :smack:
Ultimately, if the pubic at large is to be able to participate in the economy they must receive money somehow. Absent that you get economies like is some especially poor third world countries today where folks in the cities live and work in a modern economy while folks in the countryside scratch at the ground with sharp sticks and barter for food and handicrafts with each other.
In the absence of large scale labor in the economy, the public at large can either receive money from owning the capital that creates the goods. Or by controlling the government which extracts taxes from the owners and sends it to them. Or some blend.
A relevant story: Years ago the CEO of Ford Motors, Mr. Ford, was showing off the very first production line robot to the then-president of the United Auto Workers union.
Mr Ford: “Good luck getting this thing to join your union.”
Mr. Union Prez: " Good luck getting this thing to buy your cars."
It takes both producers and consumers in reasonable balance to make an economy run. The clear and present danger is that the capital owners can live very well for a couple of generations as the rest of the public sinks into scratching at the ground with sharp sticks. So they’re highly motivated to retain tight ownership and low taxes on capital until it’s very late in the game.
I’ve often heard this as a reason to adopt basic income - i.e. as more jobs get replaced by machines, we’ll need fewer workers overall, and basic income is a simple way to support the non-workers. Here’s one example.
In Québec we have the Pèlerins de Saint-Michel (French-language link), commonly called Bérêts blancs: a few senior citizens wearing white hats and driving around in white cars. I read one of their flyers in the 1980s. They profess Catholicism and a form of social credit (we should let machines do all the work and just distribute money so everybody can relax). Also, if I remember correctly, a few conspiracy theories about a computer numbered 666, etc. They have slogans like “Income tax is robbery”, but not in a Libertarian view.
I’d be curious what you think the words “capitalism” and “socialism” really mean. I’m going to bet you’re quite aways off what those terms mean to economists and political scientists.
I personally am not content to just sit and earn off of the work of others for the basic needs of life. I have a desire and motivation to create and earn my potential. And I’m not alone. There are many people like me. This motivation has resulted in what our society call the income gap. Under the OP’s proposal, this gap would only get worse.
Under the utopian society designed by the OP, who decides how capital should be allocated? Should there be only one toilet paper manufacturer? Should the rolls all be economy rolls, or double ply? Should there be only one beef producer? Should there be only one cable company?
I don’t think the OP truly understands how markets work.
I think post-scarcity is the best answer to your question so far. For one idea about how to get there, check out transhumanism (not an endorsement) :Transhumanism - RationalWiki
Omar Little: under the OP’s proposed system - as I understand it - markets wouldn’t be necessary to allocate resources. The plentitude of TP, beef, or whatever wouldn’t necessitate competition among producers to produce goods more efficiently. Machines would be making whatever we want.
My personal name for it, and I came up with this one myself some years ago is “mechanized social-capitalism”.
Essentially, it bypasses the principle failing of the communo-socialist model, which is that free individuals will not labor long and effectively for some abstract “common good”, (Oh, they’re willing enough when they can see the result, but that limits you to something not much larger than a kibbutz.), and the principle failing of the capitalist model, which is the accumulation of wealth, and concomitant power in the hands of an ever shrinking oligarchy.
Call it utopian if you want, but it’s worth the attempt to attain.
Imagine a country where nearly all transport is fully automated; where vast distribution warehouses can operate with only a few employees, and most of the there to maintain the machines. Imagine the banks no longer needing staff below policy making level (and janitors). Imagine stock exchanges that operate entirely by computers. How about shops with no checkout fully automated fast food outlets and bars.
How much can such an economy generate in cash returns to provide what level of basic income? In the UK it’s argued that some measure of whatever success our creative industries have is down to the way in the 1980s upheavals unemployment benefits were still just about enough to support musicians, artists, IT start-ups and the like until at least some started to make it big, and that you could frame a basic income as an incentive to earn more by some sort of work because you wouldn’t have it means-tested and therefore withdrawn at a rate that would be considered excessive if it were income tax.
On the other hand, where is the incentive to social cohesion if there is no measure of contribution (whether in cash or kind, by tax payment, or insurance contribution, or community participation) and some people are perceived to be dossing around at everyone else’s expense?
How would the returns on all this plenty be regulated to prevent the top managers scooping the lot, and can that be done at the level of the nation state? (That, BTW, is one way to look at the source of this year’s political turmoils, so this question is even more live now than it ever was when Lenin asked “Who Whom?”)
To the extent there’s an accepted term, snoe is correct that you’re probably thinking of a post-scarcity economy.
That said, one area in which I’ve found post-scarcity economics unconvincing has to do with the OP’s suggestion that people could just opt not to work, while the government provided a basic income somehow. I confess I’ve not done a deep dive into this, but I’m not sure where the basic income would come from, nor where the resources to operate the automated production facilities would come from, without some sort of market forces regulating them. (See, e.g., the tragedy of the commons.) My students often suggest things like “Well, if people just weren’t assholes[sup]1[/sup]…” as a solution, which I find similarly unconvincing.
As PatrickLondon suggested, social capital may not be scarce but it’s subject to the economics of private information. Since talk is cheap, convincing someone of your good intentions is difficult, and I’m not currently satisfied that there’s a sufficient costly signaling mechanism that will allow social cohesion to work as the backbone of a society. This would be fine if resources were truly unlimited, or if people “just weren’t assholes,” but I don’t think either of those is a fruitful avenue.
[sup]1[/sup]I promise this is a conversation I had with a student, and not a strawman.
I’ve been calling it a “post-labor” economy because the fundamental difference with the past is that human labor is no longer a valuable commodity.
Post-scarcity is probably implied by this kind of setup, but you could have a robot-powered economy that still suffered from scarcity, especially if there is war, drought, embargoes, etc.
However, neither term says anything about whether it is socialist, capitalist or communist. As others have said, that’s a question of who owns the robots. In a capitalist setup, individuals and non-government corporations would own the robots and the wages paid to non-working people would be some kind of welfare or charity system. In a communist setup, the people (via the government) would own the robots, but the end result would look pretty similar from the average Joe’s perspective.