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I am very saddened that human beings (whether rich, poor, or anywhere in between) are restricted to lives based on how much money they make. In fact, I knew a Princeton student who dropped out and moved to an Inca village in Peru with no electricity, no running water, no buildings, no cars, no concept of money. The simplicity of it all brought her a sense of fulfillment that life in the developed world just could not.
Even as a person with a very high income, I am appalled at the fact that someone who makes a fraction of that income is only given a fraction of the life opportunities that I have been given. In fact I renounced my belief in God after witnessing the poverty on Indian reservations when I was traveling.
Perhaps you are a young person who hasn't yet realized that human beings are not perfect. They have flaws. Some more than others. Idealism sometimes sounds good. Unfortunately, it isn't practical.
That's not quite true. In a post-scarcity society, necessary goods would be freely available without any need for money.
The elderly doesn't need goods, they need service. There is no economic advantage to provide healthcare or assistance service to retirees if they can't provide an equivalent reciprocal service. With only consumption and little production, retirees are economic black holes.
I am NOT advocating welfare. Rather I am advocating a system where jobs are given out just as freely as money is given to welfare recipients in our current society.
well... if you want no money, i got a lot of free jobs you can work for no pay, i might provide meals... how is this different than slavery?
Unemployment and wealth inequity is a necessary condition of capitalism.
If we want to eliminate unemployment that we could go back to Feudalism - in that system, people were valuable in and of themselves. Contrary to popular belief it wasn't that bad of a system.... Everyone had a job, a place and the nobility was responsible for making sure the peasants (the working class) were fed, clothed and taken care of so they could work. The work was harder because the society was agricultural & mostly local, but feudal peasants actually got more leisure time and holidays off than your typical office cube worker today.
There were various problems it created, but it did last for almost 1000 years as an economic system as compared to 350 years and counting for capitalism, 450 if we count mercantilism as a kind of proto-capitalist economy. Unemployment was almost unheard of, not even a word people back then would have used.
Under capitalism humans are worthless. They are only valuable as some kind of input to the system as managers of capital, labor or consumers. As a matter of course, at any given time a certain number people will be drains on the system or totally irrelevant to the system, thus unemployment is a necessary condition.
Even in well-managed capitalist economies like northern Europe... they just accept that some people are drains on the system and simply deal with it.
So if we want 100% employment capitalism is not the answer.
The elderly doesn't need goods, they need service. There is no economic advantage to provide healthcare or assistance service to retirees if they can't provide an equivalent reciprocal service. With only consumption and little production, retirees are economic black holes.
You've peaked my curiosity. Tell us all about this post-scarcity society where goods are freely available.
Well, it's a theoretical but fairly simple concept. The idea is that at some point, productivity will surpass demand, such that anything that anyone would want is freely available. Modern economies exist to allocate scarce goods, but if all goods are available to anyone who wants them, our economics axioms break down. Our society is already transitioning from manufacturing to services, which 1) means we might already be halfway to post-scarcity, and 2) perhaps we will always have a scarcity of service and never truly reach post-scarcity. Of course, replacing cashiers with self-scan, replacing theater with TV, and perhaps eventual android waiters or other unimagined advances all point to the possibility of a post-scarcity service industry as well.
I think the real danger is a semi-post-scarcity society where 10% of the population can produce everything anyone would want, but still expect to receive compensation from the 90% who have no job in this society, leading to unimaginable inequality.
Popular science-fiction touchstones include the show "Star Trek" and the book "Robots of Dawn".
But he's right. If the concept of worth is bound in the ability to produce goods or provide service, the elderly then have no worth...but continue to require service. Freely available goods aren't such an issue either, because the elderly have the least need of "goods" of any group, but the highest need for service, especially in advanced old age.
So in all these conversations about who is doing what, it must be remembered that there will be a group of people with intense needs for service who are no longer producing either goods or service.
Well, it's a theoretical but fairly simple concept. The idea is that at some point, productivity will surpass demand, such that anything that anyone would want is freely available. Modern economies exist to allocate scarce goods, but if all goods are available to anyone who wants them, our economics axioms break down. Our society is already transitioning from manufacturing to services, which 1) means we might already be halfway to post-scarcity, and 2) perhaps we will always have a scarcity of service and never truly reach post-scarcity. Of course, replacing cashiers with self-scan, replacing theater with TV, and perhaps eventual android waiters or other unimagined advances all point to the possibility of a post-scarcity service industry as well.
I think the real danger is a semi-post-scarcity society where 10% of the population can produce everything anyone would want, but still expect to receive compensation from the 90% who have no job in this society, leading to unimaginable inequality.
Popular science-fiction touchstones include the show "Star Trek" and the book "Robots of Dawn".
I have enjoyed both "Star Trek" and Asimov's robot and Foundation novels. However, in the capitalist economy, when productivity greatly surpasses demand to the point that profitability suffers, the producers simply reduce production of that item.
And there really is not such a thing as a pure service economy; the basis of any economy is always production. If you want to look at what happens when the wealth production engine of an economy disappears, simply look at any western ghost town, or the "zombie" cities in states like Ohio.
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