From: Brendan Coffey (bmc@section9.net)
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 14:14:13 MDT
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 01:42:23PM -0700, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> >>> American society has no way to deal with a situation where half of
> >>> the workers are unemployed. During the Great Depression at its very
> >>> worst, 25% of the population was unemployed. The robotic future will
> >>> be twice as bad, and it will be permanent."
> >>
> >> ### You might want to apply Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage,
> >> and also briefly think about the price of robots in relation to the
> >> average income of the unemployed. If you add these two simple
> >> considerations, you could conclude that there is no need to "deal"
> >> with any situation here, and especially not deal as in the New Deal,
> >> which resulted in losses to the economy which continue to this day.
> >> The robotic future will be many times better than you imagine, as
> >> long as you don't spoil it by "making jobs".
> >>
> >
> >
> > Precisely how do you envision those without jobs making it in such a
> > scenario?
> >
> ### They go to the store, buy a robot, and ask it to work on their behalf.
> In other words, they invest their capital, instead of their labor. Since the
> return on their capital is higher than the return on their labor (obvious -
> they can't sell their labor because it's too expensive compared to the labor
> of a robot), they end up being richer than before, in absolute material
> terms, at least as a first-order effect.
>
> Where they get the capital to invest is a different issue altogether.
>
No shit. So what is your suggestion?
-bmc
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 25 2003 - 14:25:02 MDT