Economic Utopian Plan

Economics Economics Questions
61

You are exactly right. In the late 19th century a city official in new york city, who used to go around in a white suit, demanded that every city street remain clean of horse dung, sewage and garbage. He knew it bred disease.

He (I forget his name) is now credited with raising the lifespan of people even more than vaccines. It put an end to constant plagues and was then adopted by every city across the world.

But to bring this back to the manifesto, a city in europe is launching a test of robots that go throughout the city 24/7 picking up all garbage. It also separates the garbage between trash, compost and recyclables and they dock themelves in charging stations when their batteries run low. Human street cleaners are no longer necessary.

Street sweeper trucks that drive autonomously are already developed. If we can pass regulations that set rules allow them to operate safely in public, we can launch automated vehicles in mass, eliminating the need to do menial transportation work and liberating 8.8 million people in the US from those jobs.

We also have begun robotic surgeries, probably the most sophisticated task a robot will do. We are just at the very, very, very beginning. In 2008, the South Korean government published a report that said surgeries will be routinely peformed by robots by 2018.

I guess you haven’t studied the history of capitalism. You don’t need a socialist redistribution plan to have innovation. If anything, redistribution slows innovation.

62

Matt said: “I guess you haven’t studied the history of capitalism. You don’t need a socialist redistribution plan to have innovation.”

I have studied history and I agree you do not need socialist redistribution to have innovation.

But you do need better use of our existing taxes in order to create a society where nobody is poor, 100% of workers are wealthy, people have the freedom to pursue opportunities other than working a job and a policy that pursues full automation of every single menial, mundane job that nobody has any interest in doing.

“If anything, redistribution slows innovation.”

Every time you make a purchase you are redistibuting wealth. When you decide you no longer want to eat at Burger King and now will get your fries from McDonald’s, you have redistribued wealth from BK to McD’s. Efficient distribution leads to the best outcomes and does not at all slow innovation.

63

MaikU said: “what if a person likes being a doctor, or technician and someone likes to sweep streets? What’s wrong with that? There is a saying, after all, that if you find a job that you like you won’t have to work anymore. So it kinda becomes a hobby of sort..”

You got it exactly right! The goal is for everyone to spend all of their time in activities the equivalent of a hobby, what we call a productive leisure activity.

Jobs like making music, making movies, writing books, raising a family, furthering basic science, finding cures to diseases, playing baseball, building robots, reverse engineering the human being, programming open source software, studying the night sky, designing stuff and developing new inventions are all things people like to do during their free time. So they are leisure activities. But they are a special kind of leisure activity: they are productive leisure activities.

And productive leisure activities is where everyone should be spending their time, not spending it in some job. Productive leisure activities are the kinds of activities that get people up in the morning. It is what gives people a reason to live, they are where we find our purpose and happiness.

So the goal of an automated economy is not to create a nation of slackers. It is to create a society that puts an end to the job (activities nobody wants to do), so that the only work people do are productive leisure activities (activities everyone wants to do even if they weren’t getting paid).

The goal of an automated economy is to liberate everyone from jobs so that they can live a life of leisure.

Some of your time will be spent in unproductive leisure activities. And some of your time will be spent in productive leisure activities. But very little of your time will be spent at some job, perhaps even none at all if that is what you decide.

The goal of an automated economy is to give you full control over your time so you have the freedom to work full time, work part time, work in your spare time or not work at all. And the only work you do is the kind of work you would do if you didn’t have a job to go to.

The automated economy could be regarded as humanity’s emancipation proclamation. It will free people for the first time in human history from the imposed routine of mandatory labor. It could enable you to realize Aristotle’s Greek concept of leisure, where slaves did most of the work and the privileged had time to cultivate their well-being. The only difference is that now everyone is privileged, we each command more than a million slaves and the slaves are all smart machines, not people.

But this version of an automated economy will only come about if we implement policies that make it that way.

If we do nothing, the automated economy will just mean we will continue to go down our current path where the majority of people waste their lives in make-work jobs that add no additional value to society (like cashiers even though we automated cashiers a long time ago). This path will force more and more people into more useless jobs, continue to increase our rates of poverty, continue to increase the widening gap of income disparity, continue to force people to struggle financially, and continue the outdated, 18th century industrial model where everyone runs the rat race from paycheck to paycheck.

64

If the economy is going to be centered around robots, what guarantee do you have for the people in your utopia that the robots won’t rebel against you?

65

“If the economy is going to be centered around robots, what guarantee do you have for the people in your utopia that the robots won’t rebel against you?”

Part of the overall plan is to prevent, at all costs, from Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming President.

66

Your very charming, but that was a serious question. The AI required to do the things you want would have to be very advanced, whats stopping them from taking over humanity?

67

If the economy is going to be centered around robots, what guarantee do you have for the people in your utopia that the robots won’t rebel against you?

^ A question I have pondered for years. There is an obvoius answer. It scares the bejeezus out of many, it gives me chills in excitement.

Cyborg/Androidism

68

I have a better idea (Feel free to use it as yours). Tax all people with net worth >$Xm once and give $1m to each adult. You’d save tons on computers, software, and administration.

[EDIT: The above may not be a bad platform for a political party established solely as a mockery of democracy: Millionaire Party! I bet it could get quite a healthy chunk of the 220m adult vote.]

[EDIT2: Fixed the calculation above.]

Z.

69

You actually do not need advanced robotics or AI at all in order to automate 80% of the jobs people do not want to do. You just need existing technology.

You just need structured automation. A machine within a structured environment does not need much intelligence.

A train is like an automated truck. But it doesn’t need advanced AI in order to steer it around. It follows a rail. Although DARPA has made huge leaps in getting cars to see their environment in 3-D and able to make out landscaping and road features and road signs so that it can steer autonomously along a road, you do NOT need that kind of AI in order to have fully automated transportation.

You can just have the cars follow a line in the road. That’s it. That is just a little more advanced than a train.

A dishwasher is another example of structured automation.

The internet essentially automates all of retail which is the second largest industry and employs 15 million. A company uses robotic arms, that have been used in factories for decades, to cook food and automate restaurants. That is our 4th largest industry with 11 million employees. Transportation employs just under 9 million. There are already fully automated warehouses that use an army of carts that just follow magnetic strips in the ground and employ simple collision avoidance that can can store or retrieve an unlimited amount of inventory, that’s 4+ million jobs.

Simple, existing technology, not AGI from the singularity.

70

I have studied history and I agree you do not need socialist redistribution to have innovation.

That is good, but why talk like your plan is necessary for innovation or eliminating unnecessary jobs? A carriage driver is pretty unnecessary, but some people like riding in them near Central Park in NYC. There aren’t many of them in the world today, but apparantly some people like doing that job and enough people want to ride them that they can make a living. Do you propose that we eliminate all those jobs because they are menial and inefficient according to your subjective standard?

Using our existing taxes “better” is a pretty menial way to improve society. By far, the most effective method would be to eliminate taxes altogether.

Every time you make a purchase you are redistibuting wealth. When you decide you no longer want to eat at Burger King and now will get your fries from McDonald’s, you have redistribued wealth from BK to McD’s. Efficient distribution leads to the best outcomes and does not at all slow innovation.

I was talking about redistribution of income which is what you are proposing. It takes away from the more productive to give to the less productive. Not exactly an incentive system I consider to be effective at increasing production and wealth. However, your example does hit on why the market economy is so good at producing the best outcomes in an imperfect world. When people make choices according to their self-interests, like buying a hamburger, they distribute their money according to what they desire most at that moment. They are essentially communicating that they desire eating a hamburger over holding onto the cash or using it for something else.

71

“That is good, but why talk like your plan is necessary for innovation or eliminating unnecessary jobs?”

We still employ cashiers but yet we have been able to automate that job a long time ago. Why do you think that is so? Do you think it is because some people love to ring up sales? It is because employers have a very large labor pool to tap into who are desperate to take any job they can get in order to survive.

The same goes for transportation, sales, waiters, cooks, clerks, landscapers, stockboys, maids, cab drivers, I could go on and name 55% of all the jobs we do in this economy.

People don’t daydream about becoming maids. Wealthy people, who have the opportunity to do anything they want with their life, do NONE of those jobs. They do creative work (like design clothes), do important work (like launch their own business or run for office), do non profit work (like volunteer for some organization whose mission is to solve some social problem and not to make some private owner wealthy), or do intellectual work (like lawyer or doctor).

They do productive leisure work, they do not work jobs.

That same opportunity should be extended to everyone. Everyone should have the freedom to live a life of leisure. Getting a dividend that enables you to survive without having to take a job that you do not want to do gives you real freedom over your work choices.

A carriage driver is pretty unnecessary, but some people like riding in them near Central Park in NYC. There aren’t many of them in the world today, but apparantly some people like doing that job and enough people want to ride them that they can make a living. Do you propose that we eliminate all those jobs because they are menial and inefficient according to your subjective standard?

All we are doing is paying people a dividend. We are not telling people what jobs they are allowed to have. You can work any job you want. And most people, who want an income higher than $20k but have limited job opportunities, will take those kinds of jobs.

The additional $30k dividend assures those workers, even though they are working menial jobs, earn a high enough income to live a first-class lifestyle.

Using our existing taxes “better” is a pretty menial way to improve society. By far, the most effective method would be to eliminate taxes altogether.

I completely disagree. The purpose of taxes is to redistribute income so that nobody is poor, 100% of workers are wealthy, there is less income disparity, people have the freedom to pursue opportunities other than working a job and we can adopt a policy that pursues full automation of every single menial, mundane job that nobody has any interest in doing.

How do you accomplish that without taxes? You can’t.

I was talking about redistribution of income which is what you are proposing. It takes away from the more productive to give to the less productive. Not exactly an incentive system I consider to be effective at increasing production and wealth.

You realize we are talking about human beings and not factory machinery? Taxes do not in any way take away the incentive for people to be productive. And there is no more effective way of increasing your wealth than getting a yearly $50k dividend.

72

I can see we are going to go round and round the circle. It appears it has already been done in the comment section of this page too - http://blog.mises.org/13725/venus-needs-some-austrians/

Have a look if you will.

73

I can see we are going to go round and round the circle. It appears it has already been done in the comment section of this page too - http://blog.mises.org/13725/venus-needs-some-austrians/

My plan has nothing to do with the venus project. What does that post have to do with this?

Venus wants to eliminate money, eliminate markets, eliminate property, have the entire economy run by volunteers and have the entire allocation of everything everyone gets done by peer review. That is nothing like what I propose and what we have been debating here!

74

The advances in technology has certainly made life easier over the last 50 years and it’s true that because of this certain jobs will disappear. But can you claim that there are less jobs now than 50 years ago? It is the opposite, more opportunities exists because of the advances in technology. 80% of existing jobs might disappear sometime in the future, but only more jobs will be created as a result.

75

Also, those jobs that disappeared did so because they were no longer valued. In your system, how can you make sure that there are enough jobs that are valued by the market and less of those that are not valued?

76

Dustin Jussila:

The advances in technology has certainly made life easier over the last 50 years and it’s true that because of this certain jobs will disappear. But can you claim that there are less jobs now than 50 years ago? It is the opposite, more opportunities exists because of the advances in technology. 80% of existing jobs might disappear sometime in the future, but only more jobs will be created as a result.

There will always be work for everyone to do. What this plan addresses is the kind of work they do.

There are two kinds of work people do:

  1. Job: work nobody has any interest in doing and only do because they need a paycheck.
  2. Productive Leisure: work people want to do, that they do in their free time, even if they weren’t getting paid.

The goal is to eliminate Jobs with automation, so that 100% of the work people do is Productive Leisure, the kind of productive activity they do on their free time, that they naturally have an interest in doing, that they would do even if they weren’t getting paid.

Achieving this will improve everyone’s quality of life and make the economy more efficient.

The majority of jobs in the economy are make-work jobs. They are a complete and total waste of human time and effort and a tragic waste of people’s very short lives.

Human beings are the most advanced machines in the known universe. Using people, that nature spent the last 14.5 billion years developing, to perform mundane jobs like shuffling papers in an office, asking people what they would like to eat, moving a plate of food in a restaurant from the kitchen to the dining table or driving around in trucks all day is a comical waste of the most valuable and precious resource we have.

Instead of wasting people’s lives in jobs that machines can easily do, they can be put to better use like designing better goods and services, inventing new goods and services, solving problems, completing our quest to dominate nature and pursuing happiness. These are the leisurely things we would be able to do more of if we didn’t have a job to go to.

We have the ability to eliminate 80% of jobs TODAY, not in the future. And if you give people a $20k dividend, they will have the freedom to never work a job again. With less people willing to work menial jobs, business will be incentivized to start deploying existing automation

77

To have an efficient economy, an individual must produce what other need or want. You characterize this as being a problem, and individuals should instead be able to have work that gives them pleasure to do so. You solve the problem of “producing things that others want” by having machines create the things that people want while letting everyone have a carefree life of luxury.

  1. If machines have the ability to create products that will end the laws of scarcity, what jobs will be left to do other then maintaining the machines?

  2. If people have the ability to create products that they want, what will happen to the products that are created but are not valued by other members of society?

  3. How can you make sure that there are enough jobs that are valued by the market and less of those that are not valued?

78

To have an efficient economy, an individual must produce what other need or want. You characterize this as being a problem

I don’t think this is a problem. If you offer something in the market, it must be something someone else wants. What is a problem is people having to work jobs they don’t wanna do when we already have a way of automating it.

  1. If machines have the ability to create products that will end the laws of scarcity, what jobs will be left to do other then maintaining the machines?

Production = Materials + Labor + Know How

Automation will not end scarcity. But it will make Labor less scarce.

Automation also allows us to put every human from Labor and into Know How. So the work people will do are: making music, making movies, writing books, raising a family, furthering basic science, finding cures to diseases, playing baseball, building robots, reverse engineering the human being, programming open source software, studying the night sky, designing stuff and developing new inventions.

  1. If people have the ability to create products that they want, what will happen to the products that are created but are not valued by other members of society?

The economy will continue to work exactly as it does now. But just like we no longer have blacksmiths and milkmen, we probably will no longer have cab drivers, cashiers, etc.

If any company has problems selling their goods and services and becomes unprofitable, they will go out of business just like they do today.

  1. How can you make sure that there are enough jobs that are valued by the market and less of those that are not valued?

This plan does not interfere with the hiring decisions companies make. Companies will only hire employees they value.

79

mattm said: I can see we are going to go round and round the circle.

So are you saying that an extra $50k is not going to make a real improvement in your life? Why would you not be in favor of a plan like this?

Because it requires taxes? That is completely irrational!!

That is like someone saying they don’t want to win the $1 million lotto because then they would have to pay $300k in taxes! It makes no sense.

Can I get you to vote for a plan like this? If not, why?

80

I just realized this:’

If everyone will now have atleast 20k+ a year, wouldn’t this bid up the price of goods and services? And if the equality of income was increased (for to give the 20k to the one’s who don’t make 20k, or the 30k to those who have a job) you woul have to tax the rich high enough to have enough dollars to give to everyone. Now, if the rich are the ones who tend to invest the most money, and the poor use most of it, but as they do not have many dollars have minimal effects on prices, wouldn’t this do 2 things:

  1. Raise prices (making the purchasing power of the 20k-50k less)

  2. reduce investment, which increases the amount of goods, and lowers the price or improves quality for the same price or both (computers are an example of both)

To me I didn’t see this anywhere, I may be wrong, but…