[cheschire]

I've been thinking along those same lines. Basically feels like we're returning to a form of feudalism, with a rather established aristocracy and nobility already in place.

I'm just waiting for the financially ailing counties to start selling themselves in their totality to corporations and those corporations begin providing employment in exchange for literal cradle-to-grave services.

[eindiran]

The seignorialism aspect of feudalism is now absent though: the lord needed peasants to work his lands. This new ruling class doesn't need the labor of the growing unemployed and forgotten class - only their consumption.

[Cthulhu_]

The lords need some work done, but they're making sure people earn as little as possible, have zero ties, and no transferable skills. I'm thinking of McJobs; zero-hour contracts, contractors, gig economy work, that kinda thing.

[bamboozled]

This is IMO more what I see, we're all working harder, for less, but we're all still working.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's the way of it, because automation makes things cost less, but only the things that get automated. But if things cost less then you can pay people less. So what happens is that all the money goes to the places with artificial scarcity.

We don't have meaningful scarcity anymore, not for the essentials anyway. There is a finite amount of land but not a finite amount of housing units, because you can build arbitrarily many of them on top of each other. We can produce more food than people have any need to eat and producers then spend rather a lot of money convincing them to buy more than that. Medicine is only genuinely scarce to the extent that it's limited by labor availability, which means labor should move there and drive down the price unless something is constraining it.

But if you can make something like housing or medicine artificially scarce, you can suck all the surplus out of everybody's paycheck. And that's the problem.

[bamboozled]

Can you name one industry where labor is truly no longer needed, where it once was (in recent times)?

Maybe an example of a person who makes a large some of money through having zero employees where they used to have many and where those people were replaced with automation and completely obsoleted.

Not challenging you, I'm just interested in your theory.

[AnthonyMouse]

Pocket calculators. Paper calendars. Film cameras and film development labs. Alarm clocks. Analog telephones, one for every room. Pens and paper and correction fluid and typewriters and typewriter ribbons and typewriter repair service, as physical things that required labor to exist.

A phone/computer replaces all of those, but it's one product instead of hundreds. It doesn't take anywhere near the labor to produce as all of those things once did.

[uzakov]

I would say IT is an industry that made itself, as well as other industries greatly reduce the number of employees.

Not quite zero employees but numbers were reduced greatly, ie accounting. Example: accounting, before you needed a team of accountants for a mid level enterprise, not sometimes even one is sufficient.

[puranjay]

> Example: accounting, before you needed a team of accountants for a mid level enterprise, not sometimes even one is sufficient.

If The Office was made today, you'd just have Oscar in accounting and Jim closing deals alongside a robocaller

[uzakov]

Essentially this!

[puranjay]

To be fair, Dwight was likely modeled on a robocaller!

[bamboozled]

Do you work in IT?

Because I'm constantly gobsmacked by inefficiencies and companies that have too many people involved in achieving simple goals?

[uzakov]

I do work in IT.

> Because I'm constantly gobsmacked by inefficiencies and companies that have too many people involved in achieving simple goals?

That is also true, by no means I am implying that. There is a lot of inefficiency in many companies, but at the same time what took X people in the past now takes X-Y people for many sectors, ie accounting. Another good example is website creation and development for Small-Medium Enterprise. In the 90-s/2000s you had to pay someone to create a website for you, where now there are countless website builders, some of which are really great.

[bottled_poe]

It needs their attention more than their consumption I suspect.