[allisthemoist]

This begs the question: as human productivity is increasingly usurped by machines, what will happen to the human manufacturing population? Will we finally figure out a way to distribute wealth in a agreeable way (through, for example, basic minimum income) or will we go back to the a feudal model of living?

Interestingly, someone has to purchase the goods that these systems create. Thus, giving people the funds to do so, regardless of where they come from, seems like a necessity.

[vidarh]

This was basically Marx starting point: The idea that capitalist competition will cause capitalism to eat itself - sooner or later there are no new markets to expand into for growth, and competition will force ever slimmer margins and ultimately the only place you can trim margins in in employment costs. Then what happens to your market?

His belief was that on one hand capitalism was/is absolutely necessary to create sufficient wealth to make redistribution viable (he made the point in The German Ideology that a redistribution before that point would do what we saw e.g. in the Soviet Union: simply spread poverty around, and restart the class struggle it tried to erase as people tried to et out of poverty), on the other hand it would in its end-stages lead to "overproduction" combined with mass unemployment as it would fail to reconcile the need to try to win more of the market with the need to cut employment costs.

The ways society could prevent this happening are many, including things like basic minimum income as you suggest. But Marx argument was that societal changes of this magnitude tends to instead result in increasing tensions until revolutions erupt for the reason that ruling classes rarely see the gravity of the situation until it is too late.

There are many ways he could be wrong about this, but I find it very interesting to observe the increase in frequency with which this issue of automation and its consequencs is now coming up again.

[ctdonath]

Marx didn't consider how capitalism, coupled with a lack of a satiating supply of survival staples (aka today "guaranteed basic income" aka welfare entitlements), necessitates raising the accepted standard of living and thus creating a renewing demand for labor (mundane included). Most of humanity past did not enjoy what we now consider poverty-level baseline necessities, much of which exist thanks to jobs of all kinds both creating and buying those products & services. He never dreamed of the poor needing & owning cell phones, indoor running hot drinking water, a/c, a car for every adult, TV, etc.

[throwawaykeno]

Actually, Marx foresaw exactly "a renewing demand for labor" (although foresaw is kind of the wrong word; directly observed would be more accurate.) See "Capital".

He also foresaw the shift from manual labor to intellectual property as the essential component in production.

[solotronics]

What happens is QE is used in a top down fashion to infuse the market with capital. Basically the opposite of a living wage. Its happening now on a large scale ie. Japan and the US.

[mason240]

QE benefits everyone who borrows money for anything. We bought a house with a 3.1 rate, something that would have been unheard of in generations past. Same with rates for auto and every other type of loan.

[marvin]

Doesn't benefit me a lot, five years behind you trying to buy an identical home for 30% more borrowed money.

[sgnelson]

Doesn't do much for savings accounts.

[Kadin]

The elites will share their wealth only insofar as it's cheaper to do that (bread and circuses) than it is to keep the proles at bay through force.

What Marx saw as an inexorable trend towards socialism may have in fact just been a temporary consequence of the industrial revolution, wherein labor was especially important and the power of an individual worker was large in historical terms. It's not impossible to imagine a sort of "Neo Feudalism" where a small minority of elites find it cheaper to maintain control via technological force-multipliers than to share their earnings such that everyone is actually happy or nearly so.

[digi_owl]

Not quite. He did note the increasing automation (and sadly either willfully or not fudges his numbers to make the worker more important) in his writing.

His message was less about how important labor was, but how labor got squeezed between the industrial capitalists owning the factories, and the rentier capitalists who owned the land, housing and issued loans.

[clarkmoody]

Alternatively, as massive increases in productivity in manufacturing lead to plunging prices of goods, much smaller incomes will be able to support an increasing standard of living.

[crpatino]

People still needs some income at all. Otherwise, they will either rely on welfare or resort to crime for survival. This is a explosive combination, specially in a society where the unemployable's fare is seen as just and self inflicted.

[bunnymancer]

Still no cure for $1300/month rent for a 2bed apartment two hours east of Cleveland...

[geodel]

Exactly right. I feel housing/medical expenses remain independent of all the gain productivity. With PEs buying large housing stock in markets and hospitals keep getting increasingly larger and integrated I do not see what would force them to not extract maximum possible money irrespective of the cost to them.

[shenanigoat]

Yup. Trinkets for everyone. Health care and nice digs for the elites only.

[arethuza]

Wasn't feudalism mainly a hierarchical means of controlling land and the people that worked the land? If you don't actually need peasants/serfs to do anything then you wouldn't need feudalism.

[hodgesrm]

One of the drivers for feudalism was the prevalence of cavalry in warfare starting after about 700AD. Mounted knights are expensive to maintain, hence the solution of providing land grants in exchange for military service. It's a medieval version of the military-industrial complex.

The connection between mounted warfare and feudalism is controversial [1] but it's common enough that societies adopt social structures optimized for defense. There were almost certainly multiple reasons for the prevalence of feudal relations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stirrup_Controversy

[bwanab]

Not exactly. Feudalism was rent seeking from top to bottom. Local Barons obtained the right to get rent from peasants who lived on their land. In turn they paid to their local Earl who paid to the local Duke and so on up the ladder to the King. Without the peasants at the bottom their would have been no feudalism. Of note, the peasants alone were generally forbidden from bearing arms.

[neutronicus]

I mean, you can have hereditary control of land and a military apparatus _without_ letting anyone live on the land.

[gnopgnip]

This has already happened. The US has a service economy. Healthcare increasingly employs more workers than manufacturing.

[knieveltech]

Yeah...how's that working out for folks?

[nametakenobv]

Why do you think we need to do that? The economy will sort itself out as it always has. The job market will just shift. Some jobs will stop being, others will be more in-demand, which will create entirely new ones.

[unprepare]

This is hand waving.

60,000 jobs were just destroyed by automation, this isnt hypothesizing anymore its reality.

Where do these 60,000 people go now? What are the new jobs that these robots have created?

[cosmolev]

Jobs like creating, progamming, maintaining those robots?

[unprepare]

So if i replace 100 workers with 1 robot, and it takes 1 programmer and 1 maintenance technician to maintain said robot - I've created 2 jobs by destroying 100.

This is what you are proposing as the solution to the problem of job shortages?

[zardo]

The economy will sort itself out and efficiently provide goods for those with the means to trade for them. For those without something to trade, the economy will provide nothing.

[st3v3r]

And what will the people who's jobs stopped being do?