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'The man who wants to take your jobs'



Rich Braun wrote:
|
| Unfortunately there are no easy answers.  To me it looks like what we're
| witnessing is the failure of capitalism to distribute wealth equitably:
| society should be able to come up with a system for providing ample food,
| clothing, shelter, medicine and transportation for the 6 billion people in
| this world.  No '-ism' has been able to achieve that thus far.  Capitalism has
| lasted longest--a couple of centuries--but over the next decade or so of
| consolidating fortune-500 power I think it will become obvious to everyone
| that it won't work.

I've seen another cute parallel that illustrates one of the  problems
we're facing. Some economists have pointed out that, according to the
standard definitions of "productivity" that we use today,  the  early
decades  of  the  1900's  saw  a huge increase in the productivity of
horses.  That is, the amount of work divided by the number of  horses
at work went up very rapidly.

Did this benefit the horses?  Well, not exactly ...

This was an intro to the suggestion that what we're starting  to  see
is  a  similar huge increase of productivity in humans.  That is, the
ratio of goods produced to human workers is going up  rapidly.   Will
humans  benefit?   Probably no more than the horses did a centry ago,
and for the same reason.

Most likely is that, as with the horses, the end result will be  most
humans  unemployed,  while  the high productivity of the new machines
will benefit only the owners of those machines.  The rest of us  will
be  thanked  and  put  out  to pasture.  (The pasture will be private
property, so we'll be trespassing.  ;-)

I've occasionally seen the claim that most of the manufacturing  that
has  moved  to  Asia  recently  is  not done by low-paid workers, but
actually by robotic factories maintained by a very  small  number  of
high-paid workers.  In particular, electronics and auto factories now
have very few people present, none of them doing physical labor.   It
would be interesting to see some actual data about this.

And, of course, H.G.Wells wrote about this process 120 years ago,  in
The  Time  Machine.  I assume everyone here is familiar with Eloi and
Morlocks.  If not, let's see ... Yep; here it is:
  http://www.gutenberg.net/etext92/timem11.txt





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