[riphay]

We're seeing more and more of these types of articles coming up, but they're all talking about different aspects of the same issue: inability to share growth with wide swaths of the population. In the west, our quality of life has never been higher and products/services have never been cheaper. This has been caused in large part by automation, lean manufacturing, globalization, etc. and each one of these is net positive for society. The problem seems to be that it's become difficult to share these gains with labour in the classical sense; and our society, taxation system, social contract are all based around this meaning of labour.

When I see articles about: - Austerity, - Wage growth, - Universal basic income, - Death of middle class, - Rise of right-wing parties, - Anti-free trade lobbying, - Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders; I read all of them with same lens. I know my knowledge of economics is medium at best, but I'm starting to look twice at ideas such as UBI. Maybe there needs to be a rethink of the Western social contract around labour.

[ethbro]

The biggest problem, when I look at the American labor market, is that it seems physically unjust.

The sweat of a person's brow and the wear and tear on their body should have some intrinsic value above and beyond what the market will bear.

That someone working as a farm hand, mover, framer, or roofer gets paid a pittance compared to what I earn for sitting in a climate controlled office, moving my fingers, and thinking? I can't reconcile that with any definition of "fair."

UBI is perhaps one way to address this. Wealth transfer to increase robotics usage and physical mechanization / automation application is perhaps another.

But no one should end up with a broken body at 65 just because we stopped aspiring to do better by each other.

[eli_gottlieb]

>That someone working as a farm hand, mover, framer, or roofer gets paid a pittance compared to what I earn for sitting in a climate controlled office, moving my fingers, and thinking? I can't reconcile that with any definition of "fair."

We all know manual labor isn't that productive, so there's an upper limit on how much the laborer can be paid (the marginal productivity). The problem is the exploitation: the wages unorganized workers receive are far, far below their marginal productivity.

[djsumdog]

Economies are based around scarcity. In the fictional economies of Sci-Fi like Star Trek, there is no scarcity. If you can replicate a Rembrandt, atom by atom, it essentially loses its value.

Today is all about me creating something, convincing you that you need it, and getting enough "yous" to contribute that I make enough to produce said thing. When you really start to break it down, money is like the Ghz speed of a processor or the Calorie measure used to measure energy in food. It's a poor measure of worth. We see people with millions of money, just because they convinced some poor smoo their life wouldn't be complete without this shitty knife.

If you believe in Glenn Renolds version of reality (Army of Davids), technology is what will level the scale. But he wrote that a decade ago and it hasn't really held true. There are Kickstarters and crowd-funding, but it's all still based around the same failing model.

We need some pretty big technological breakthroughs: truly mastering the atom. Right now we can only blow shit up (and by we I mean the ones with the money, resources and power to build atomic bombs) or generate power by breaking apart that atom to boil and pressurize water.

Humanity needs to solve the energy problem: both producing large amounts of power in non-polluting ways and storing power more efficiently.

Humanity needs to truly master the atom: to be able to manipulate atoms with a reasonable amount of energy to easily synthesize things (3D and chemical printers on steroids)

Humanity needs to move beyond money. Once you eliminate scarcity, money will essentially become worthless; an archaic idea.

This might all seem crazy and well beyond even the realm of what's possible. But I really feel like if it's not, humanity may only have another 3,000 ~ 5,000 years left. It's pretty much the simulation theory argument: we either continue to evolve and develop to the point where we could partially simulate enough of our world that the simulations would be self away (feel real) ... or we go extinct... Even if we go back and fourth between the stone age due to war/conflict ... eventually one of those two outcomes is inevitable.

I really feel if humanity is here 5,000 from now, money will be an ancient concept that people will have difficult comprehending.

[caseysoftware]

Forget about the content of the articles and instead look at the themes.

The current system is fundamentally broken and levers that governments have to "fix" things aren't working as they (claim to) want.

Everyone is looking for someone to blame instead of debugging what's there and seeing if there is a way to change things before they go (more) catastrophic.