But note that the situation in Elysium doesn’t make sense either. Everyone on Elysium is rich, right? They live up on a space station and don’t have any reliance on the hordes below.
But the movie implies that the rich couldn’t be rich without keeping the masses in poverty. But that makes no sense. The space station is self-sufficient. Everything they need they already have. So what’s the point of oppressing the huddled masses?
In previous times, to live a comfortable life you needed lots of workers supplying you with those comforts. You needed the whole Downton Abbey panoply of servants attending to your needs. Industrialists needed workers in their factories and plantations, otherwise the factories wouldn’t run.
What do the “rich” folks in Elysium need from the masses on Earth? Nothing. They aren’t siphoning off Earth’s wealth to consume for themselves. So why are the folks on Earth so poor? A serf is poor because his agricultural surplus is constantly taken away by guys on horseback, and if those guys on horseback get killed there are plenty of horsemen ready to take their place. So if all the feudal aristocrats bugger off to a space station, in a generation a new breed of aristocrats take their place.
So why, after all the rich people on Earth bugger off to Elysium, are the people on Earth still poor?
I am having trouble seeing your point. Say you own a fully automated factory that can make a popular product: DVD players. It’s really cheap for you to make those DVDs in your fully automated factory, but you still have to make enough to cover the cost of the production machinery and its maintenance over time, however low that cost might be. (Robots will be building your robots, I suppose.) So when you sell your DVDs, you factor in those costs, plus however much you need to make a profit for yourself and your shareholders. Say you need a dollar in profits for every DVD player. The parts cost five dollars, the production, 25 cents. So you sell your DVD player for $6.25, and because it’s so cheap and so good, you sell 300 million of them. You’ve made $300 million on that DVD player. You are not broke.
Others with similar factories might want to undercut you, but they’ll want to make a profit too. They might cut their profit margin to 50 cents and only make $150 million. Well you can whittle down the profits only so far before you are charging profits so small that least little production cost overrun will sink you. So there’s a natural limiter on how low profits can go. That’s Capitalism 101. So how are the factory owners not making money? The only way I see them not making money is if nobody has money to buy their products … and I DO see that as a potential problem – in fact, THE potential problem. All those unemployed in a conservative/libertarian society will not be buying even the cheapest goods.
But in real life all sorts of businesses go under because they can’t make a profit. So you’re selling DVD players, and making a $1 profit on each unit. Another guy decides to get in on your action, and undercuts you, making a $0.50 profit. Another guy jumps in and tries to get some of that, and his profits are even less. Pretty soon a guy tries to get into the industry, but it turns out that he made a mistake and takes a $0.50 loss on each player. Sucks to be him, but it also sucks to be everyone else trying to compete against him because the market is flooded, and pretty soon you’re giving away DVD players in cereal boxes.
Like, literally. I remember, and this was 20 years ago, that I saw a box of Captain Crunch, and the prize in the box was a digital watch. That’s when I knew I lived in the future. Yes, it was the cheapest, crappiest digital watch you can possibly imagine. No, cheaper than that. But still. Imagine in 1974 being told that a digital watch would the the prize in a cereal box.
And the point is, in the future world of the future, ramping up a factory to produce a widget is going to be easier and easier. The capital goods needed to produce arbitrary widgets will get cheaper and cheaper, and more easy to customize. It’s pretty easy to imagine a "factory’ where you just download the specs from bittorrent and you can churn out as many widgets as you have feedstock for. The hard part isn’t making them, it’s putting them on shelves and somehow convincing people to pay money for them.
In order to feel superior to them. You can’t be rich without poor people to be richer than. A post/semi-post scarcity society doesn’t have poor people for them to feel superior to or push around, so of course the wealthy will do everything they can to prevent one from emerging.
Deliberate manipulation of the economy by the wealthy, likely. In a class dominated society a major preoccupation of the upper class is to make sure that the lower class stays lower class, and has their lower class status rubbed in their face at every turn. Which is a likely reason for them to all move to a space station rather than something like an island or fortified enclave; it’s so they can literally look down on everyone else and sneer at their poverty and illness.
The poverty and lack of “healing beds” could be enforced by some form of sumptuary laws.
This was a whole genre of science fiction mostly British in the 70’s. While Harlen Ellison was refusing to print in California anything that didn’t have the F word in it there was a lot of stories about automation taking over and I loved it, lived it, and breathed it.
Late 70’s we were in the extermination business rats mostly was our specialty. Our basic charge was $25.00 per month for controling rats in a restaurant or such. Then came a branch of a company in Arkansas and they were doing it for $15.00 and a bit later someone decided to guarantee you you wouldn’t have rats in your establishment for a year for a one time payment of $25.00 We got out of the business entirely, but continued to get calls for several years.
It sounds like you think the future of factories will be not factories as we know them but something like a Star Trek replicators. That may occur, but I don’t think 3D printers are going to morph into Star Trek replicators anytime soon. I’m talking about changes that will occur in a handful of decades at most – Star Trek replicators, if they are even possible, are probably a century or three out there.
Actually, the Matt Damon character toils, with poor, unsafe working conditions, in a factory making robots for the corporation owned (or at least run) by one of the super-rich Elysium residents, who periodically comes down to visit, travelling in an armored car with robot bodyguards. But what I kept thinking about was the middle-manager type who wore a short sleeved dress shirt and tie. He bossed Damon around, but the CEO treated him like a peon who was apt to infect him with something (though why he’d be afraid of germs with that med-bed back home is another good question). That was the kind of guy I would think would have, as a job perq, at least access to a communal med-bed if he really needed one.
I was mostly agreeing with you until that last bit. I don’t see where the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson are wielding a ton of political power. They are trying, but so far not accomplishing much. And I don’t see GOP prospects in 2016 as any better than 2012.
Not only do the wealthy elites control American policy (while economically average Americans have little to no control) but it has been that way for at least the last thirty years. Don’t take my word for it: a couple of political scientists haveconducted a study that makes it very clear.
The facts are plain, regardless of what some political scientists spin things to say. The wealthy, antigovernment, anti-regulation, anti-tax libertarian types you keep referring to spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2012 and got jack-diddly for it.
There is a distinction to be made between policy (what laws are passed) and politics (who gets elected). It seems that no matter WHO gets elected, the man on the street does not get heard unless they are in agreement with the wealthy elites, who DO get heard.
Interesting videoon the ways IBM’s Watson is being used and its capacity expanded. It kind of demonstrates my notion that the current wave of joblessness is different from all the others, because the computers are flexible and can expand into new areas very easily. If I were a knowledge worker of any kind, I’d be nervous as hell.
I do think stuff will continue to get cheaper with more automation regardless of scarcity of materials. After all, the materials from the products we’ve used go somewhere. There are already plans to mine landfills for some of those materials and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at some point there would be robots sorting rubbish in order to recycle it. At some point in future we might reach a point where recycling would get us all the raw materials we’d need and it’d be cheap because robots would be doing it.
Good point, landfills will be mined and replaced by automated recyling centers. And of course, robots will replace miners as well, as it is one of the most difficult, dangerous jobs there is.