Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.
But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor.
So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem.
In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society.
But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring.
Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them.
On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.
> Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.
No he didn’t. He suggested we’d have chosen to work fewer hours and have more leisure because we could afford both greater consumption and greater leisure than were possible when he wrote. Higher wages than now, with shorter work hours than now is possible only with growth in economic productivity so we can produce more (goods, services) with less (material input, labour). We can’t just decide to work 20 hours a week and maintain our current standard of living by fiat.
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Measured in 1960 US$ the UK’s GDP per capita was 1181[1]. In 2016 US$ U.K. GDP per capita was 40,341[2]. Even if we assume the 2016 dollar is worth half as much as the 1960 one because of inflation the average U.K. resident is 15 times better off. If people wanted to live in 1960s houses with what people in the 1960s would have considered a lavish standard of living they could do it easily by working half the year, or having a part time job. The 1960s were already a hell of a lot better than 1930, when the essay was written.
If you want to live in the paradise Keynes described you can. That’s what the financial independence, retire early subculture is about[3]. Work for 20 years and retire instead of 40 or 50. Or those people who contract half the year and spend half of it in Thailand. If we wanted to take more of our compensation in leisure we absolutely could. People choose not to. They need to keep up with the Jones.
We have made those strides in productivity and they all went to rent seeking and taxation/regulation of small businesses and personal conduct (see also $150 red light cameras and $350,000 school admin salaries)
$150 for going on red light I have no problem with, do it few times and have driver's license revoked temporarily (as in Switzerland, on top of massive fee). That's how innocent people are killed, be it pedestrians or other drivers, by arrogant/DUI folks.
I understand that on empty roads at 3am in the middle of nowhere there are no consequences whatsoever, but generally that's a big infraction. Just watch few car crash compilations, ignoring lights is like 50% of the reason and the results are often very grim
You might be assuming the cameras work as they do in Switzerland.
In the US a common scenario is a private company installs the cameras for free and gets to collect most of the revenue. They adjust the yellow timing downward so that you don't have time to stop between the light turning yellow and it going to red. Then they send tickets in the mail to people who ran the light. Then if you do a study proving that they adjusted the timing downward to unsafe levels as a state sponsored scam, you get arrested and fined for "unlicensed practice of engineering".
Is there really such a thing as a post-scarcity society? Certain things will always be scarce. Beachfront real estate. Penthouses. Apartments next to a park or downtown. Sure we can get arguably get to a point where energy, food, and maybe small to medium sized items are free but if Jill Smith wants 400 cars where is she going to put them? Even if we all beam into cyberspace there will not be unlimited storage nor unlimited computation. There will still need to be a way to either get more from the powers that be for special needs or it will be traded leading back to have and have-nots.
Parent (and the article, although it fails to clearly draw the obvious link) could more accurately be said to be referring to a post-labor scarcity society.
In other words, a society where there is more labor available than we actually need to fulfill demand (caveat: in high-productivity industries).
To illustrate, take the article's example: the shift from an agricultural to industrial economy. Someone walks off a farm, they get employment in a factor. That factory worker can make 10-100 widgets / hr based on their labor.
Now look at the post-industrial economy we live in now. In software and heavily automated industries, the same single laborer can make 10-1,000,000 "copies" of their work product.
It seems fairly obvious there would be a breaking point at which productivity is so high that it disengages from driving demand. One worker can only buy so much, and his or her fellows can't buy anything because they're not employed.
This gets even more "extreme" when we talk about digital artifacts ... once the initial labor of creating a piece of music, or film, or game, or program is expended, the cost of infinitely reproducing copies of those approaches zero in many cases.
But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor.
So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem.
In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society.
But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring.
Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them.
On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.