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[Ispil]

Ispil, we live, today, in a highly automated society.  90% of the population is no longer chained to the production of food for immediate survival.  This is a post-work society.

I'd also fundamentally disagree with your explanation of a market economy.  "That one’s share of the distribution of the goods of a state is proportional to the contribution one makes to the state."

That's not the definition of a market economy.  It's the definition of a non-market economy.  The basic principle of a market economy is that the value of something is equivalent to the price one pays for it, which means that the economy is driven by the forces of supply and demand, not the forces set by state actors.

After that, having defined a market economy as a non-market economy, I find the further points lack force.  You could easily state that a command economy in a workless state would dispossess people as being non-contributors, and then label the forces that would lead to those effects as a result of the defined 'market economy.'  Or relable your description of a planned economy as a market economy, because under that plan, people are valued by their contribution to the state, just with different definitions.. you could say you're paying people to not create problems, for instance.

With that particular definition, which admittedly is rather broad, there appears a rather curious conundrum- socialism somehow became a subset of capitalism, at least under how it was described. Hence, it might be better to refine our definition: what we have described above is not capitalism per se, but a market economy.

Or they could be two different things, but the wrong definition was used for one of them, making them seem identical.

Now, I generally have a metric of how attached I am to an argument that I made the night before by how much of it I remember when I wake up, and given that I hardly even remembered that I made that post at all, I can say that I'm not too attached to what I said there. For instance, when I argued about the nature of a market economy, it's rather clear that I had rather missed the point about what I was even talking about. All a market economy does is say "fuck it" to figuring out appropriate means of distribution and lets markets handle it.

Well, so much for whatever point I was trying to make.

[wierd]

There is something to be said about a market economy though (presuming everyone HAS something that somebody else wants, anyway... That thing used to be labor, but with automation that is no longer the case, an is why the market economy is poised to fail): It is possible, with some cleverness, to get anything you want.

In a more controlled economy, natural scarcities and government favoritisms will prevent certain goods or services from being available to all persons or parties, which will stifle innovation. (What do you NEED those femtosecond laser parts FOR, citizen? We can put those to work at a respected university instead of letting you purchase them!)



The issue with automation is that the universally desired service-- labor-- is no longer desired.  There is nothing that a good chunk of the population can trade, which effectively cuts them out of the market.  Once automation reaches its peak (where labor of any kind is no longer necessary or cost effective to hire), that is more than 90% of the population out of work, AND ostracized from the market.  If you are a wealthy plutocrat who makes money by having money, you don't sweat it. Hell, you might even ENJOY that the only people in the market are people like yourself, since now all the offers are tailored for you and those like you.  That wont make the starving masses any less destitute or hungry.

We either need a replacement for labor as a universal thing that anybody can provide, but which is in seemingly endless demand (that is naturally tied to that person), OR we need to introduce an artificial one, in the form of UBI. (Where each person has an allowance that is guaranteed, and which everyone is seeking to get a piece of, enabling bargaining positions.)


Otherwise, there will no longer be a mass market. There can't be.

[thompson]

I think we're still a very long way away from automation reaching those levels. Your points are valid, given a long enough time horizon. Short term I think improving labour conditions needs to be the priority. Unemployment can be addressed through infrastructure spending - we'll need that anyway to reduce carbon intensity and whatnot. Once that's all finally done the world will be a very different place.

There's also a case to be made for reproductive regulation. Probably not necessary given birth rates in most developed countries, but that could change if you go all "post-scarcity" on everyone. The "tragedy of the commons" cannot be fixed with technology alone. Human behaviour also needs to change.

[Egan_BW]

If labor is no longer desired, we just have to find universal values for something else that everyone has! I propose blood.

[Reelya]

We also have to think that a lot of in-between steps are going to happen in that scenario. For example, consider that Coca Cola could automate all production, thus minimizing the costs of Coca Cola. However at the same time, all other companies are also automating everything, thus also minimizing the number of Coca Cola customers ... they'd end up with this huge automated factory making Coca Cola that there isn't any market for. Which just implies that they wouldn't have built that factory in the first place. The scenario of vast automated factories and nothing else thus won't happen, because there will be an equally vast lack of any customers.

It could be viewed as a Prisoner's Dilemma situation however. "Cooperate" is for the company to hire workers to make your product, where "backstab" is for the company to automate everything. The problem is that from any one company's point of view, automating everything is the way to go, but from a big-picture view, when all companies automate they crash the entire economy: no customers, no market, very few actual automated factories in existence. This may be how communism actually comes about. All the companies stab each other by shedding labor and automating in order to get a relative advantage, only to find nobody has a market anymore at the end of it, and the economy gradually becomes more and more dependent on direct government stimulus.

[Eschar]

If labor is no longer desired, we just have to find universal values for something else that everyone has! I propose blood.

... giving new meaning to the term "blood bank."

[scriver]

If labor is no longer desired, we just have to find universal values for something else that everyone has! I propose blood.

My blue blood is worth a little more than yours

[Naturegirl1999]

If labor is no longer desired, we just have to find universal values for something else that everyone has! I propose blood.

My blue blood is worth a little more than yours

Yep, blood is indeed something everyone has, and can regenerate given enough time when the person is alive, though a blood based economy would be dangerous for obvious reasons. Maybe animal blood? but what animal blood is worth more than the blood of other anmals? And what of hemolymph? The "blood" of arthropods?

[Egan_BW]

If we didn't use human blood, it wouldn't be a resource that everyone has. This also means that whatever application we find needs to only work with human blood.

[wierd]

horseshoe crab blood is worth a fortune. but already suffers tragedy of the commons type problems with collection.

also, some people are barred from donating blood. (certain cancers, some diseases.. etc.)

[Egan_BW]

They're currently barred from donating it to humans, but they still have blood. Really, this is all pointing towards  a demonic sacrifice based economy.

[Frumple]

If labor is no longer desired, we just have to find universal values for something else that everyone has! I propose blood.

My blue blood is worth a little more than yours

Yep, blood is indeed something everyone has, and can regenerate given enough time when the person is alive, though a blood based economy would be dangerous for obvious reasons. Maybe animal blood? but what animal blood is worth more than the blood of other anmals? And what of hemolymph? The "blood" of arthropods?

Horseshoe crab blood is apparently like current!diamond tier in value or somethin', yeah. Stuff's near worth its weight in gold, way more valuable than human blood.

Which is a problem, because predictably this has led to us fucking with horseshoe crabs fairly fiercely, but that's a different discussion.

Also ninja'd, but it's way too early to ignore the siren call of sunk cost posting, so here we are.