[Volpe]

> If you guys think that machines are going to decrease our standard of living-- that the separation of (production value)/wages is going to cause poverty

No we don't. We just have to show that the benefits only go to a select few, and the "workers" generally get screwed (as in paid a lot less than their value).

If you accept the above, then relative poverty is rather easy to show (99% vs top 1% etc)...

EDIT: To simplify my point, relative poverty has a massive effect on standard of living.

[asperous]

Workers are paid based on supply/demand of the value they can provide. If they were legally required to be paid based on their output, some people would make 10x as much as others for the same amount of time and education. It would basically just be based on luck, whoever could land the higher yield jobs. Does this seem more fair to you?

[ForHackernews]

> It would basically just be based on luck, whoever could land the higher yield jobs.

The honest truth is that it's already mostly luck that determines who gets the big payouts and who doesn't. There are so many factors beyond your control that play into your success.

From that perspective, a society where we were up front about that fact would at least be "more fair" in the sense that it would reduce lauding some for their unearned success while disparaging others for their equally happenstance failures.

[asperous]

There's a lot of luck, and a lot of factors beyond your control that is true. But it's based on Market Forces which drives value rather than 100% random (or corrupt) forces.

However to say people should be payed based on the percent yield. Most people consider only physical value in looking at labor. I imagine you would believe that someone working for a corporation carving blocks into a statue should be payed a percentage of that sale of the statue.

Yet it's obvious that that line of thinking (physical value only) is incorrect. How much would you pay doctors? Doctors don't create anything, but they generate value by instructing surgeons, nurses, etc on what they should do. By physical value only, coal miners would make hundreds, doctors 0.

Okay, so we concede that intellectual value should be also considered in the percentage yield owed to an individual.

Then that brings us a really good CEO. Per product, a good CEO might only cost a fraction of a cent. You can calculate finding a number of sales of a product and dividing into it the CEOs billion $ salery. A bad CEO might make an OK on a failed product that costs the company 5 cents a product. This costs him billions of dollars of his own money. A really good CEO might one day decide to test a method of production, or a new mass production strategy that decreases cost of making each good by 10 cents. He is payed hundreds of Billions. You might agree that based on this, it would make sense to pay CEOs based on output, but once you realize that the good CEO and bad CEO are the often same person, and once you charge a person hundreds of billion of dollars for their 5 cent mistake, they would have make the risk needed to gain the the 10c discovery, you might begin to understand that CEOs simply cannot be payed based on this method of value.

Okay so we try the opposite approach. It's based on luck so we should pay everyone the same. No one would want to take on the stress for a low-power, high risk, boring job like supervising a reactor core. Especially since that job pays the same as a fun job like stopping crime, or something more interesting and easy to get into. There would be a constant problem of not enough people in some jobs and too many in others. Redistributing people would be completely random and people would be placed in to jobs they hate, and paid the same amount as people doing jobs they would love. So here, much more people are unhappy, and incompetence is all around. (Then some guy says he's going to fix it and everyone rallies around him and soon dictatorship).

[Volpe]

I didn't say they had to paid based on output... my objection was the capitalist shouldn't be given ALL their surplus value.

Perhaps their surplus value should be shared amongst all of them? (Poor capitalist would lose out though... so that's a horrible idea, right?)