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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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