motley fool article arguing that machines have allowed increase productivity without employment or wage increases for last decade. Will continue to get worse.
The way we treat jobs that get replaced by machines is you are worthless if your job can be done by a machine. With progress measured by how many things we can get machines to do, we have basically said that machines have won. When they replace all work, we are not important or worthy. Are we this stupid? We pretend that we want machines to do the work so we can play. And that humans can always do “creative work”. but our policies say the opposite. Either we have to stop automating work or we have to recognize people’s worth by something other than work. Or we could just let the population decline to match the number of jobs that are required. But that seems difficult. eg, wall street traders. Those are not required jobs. Those are jobs that get the benefits of automation and productivity and play with it to increase its value. In any case, computers should take over most of those functions in a few years.
I created a scenario of a village with maybe 10 jobs and what happens when those get taken over by machines.
Should be able to create a simulation program that defines a bunch of variables measuring peoples happiness and economic health
Happiness
job worth or status
job pay
health
having adequate esentials like food, housing, medical care
independence
power
service or giving serving others
The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting: http://nyti.ms/vq7gs4
My econmoic theory is that given a free market, wealth will inevitibly get concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. That will also result in more harm for the many in return for more good for the few. Role of government is to temper that and redistribute wealth. Also, people will consistantly overreact to changes in the economy and exacerbate ups and downs by being too optomistic or pesimistic. Government is need to temper those excesses as well.
People make selfish decisions and can by their actions cause harm to society.
What I am always shocked about is when I hear a conservative complain about how our media and policies are so left and liberal and it is ruining the world. I am pretty sure I can find lots and lots of evidence for a continuing move to the right in the media and policies since the 80’s and that has resulted in increases in inequality, number of poor, incarcerations, debt both private and public and declining infrastructure and quality of life.