What new system, though?
Everyone has a great confidence in the so-called "market system". Prices are set by the balance between supply and demand. Stock prices fluctuate in such a way as to attract new capital to places where it is needed most. This creates an efficient economic machine which benefits everyone except the lazy and the handicapped. The apparently unparallelled workability of this system has created a political landscape in which almost everyone is in favor, even formerly skeptical peoples like the Europeans. There's plenty of flaws, and plenty of lies told about this market system, but nobody is really disposed to consider them significant, in the whole scheme of things.
We're heading in a direction where it might no longer work, though. And I mean "work" in the utilitarian sense of bringing the greatest benefit to the greatest number. If you extrapolate current trends, you can see the emergence of a small class of Neobarons together with a large global mass of Neopeasants. The robot thingy I talked about a couple of posts ago. Here's where I'm going to start sounding like a Marxist: eventually, the Neopeasantry will decide that this is not a fair way of allocating income, and they'll rise up and tell the Neolords to get stuffed. There's plenty of good stuff to read on this subject, my favorites being Paul Craig Roberts and the Princeton economist, Robert Frank (Winner Take All, and Luxury Fever).
Following Marx, Socialism was supposed to be the answer to the inequitable distribution of income. It just hasn't worked, though. In Russia, redistributing the "means of production" to the people just meant replacing the landowning/capitalist shit-heads with an elite of so-called "communist" shit-heads who, like their forebears, just went ahead and grabbed everything for themselves. With slightly less dire forms of socialism, involving fewer executions and less overt property theft, as we had in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, it just resulted in economic chaos.
The question of what went wrong is complicated, but a good part of the problem was the removal of incentives. If you could make a living by doing nothing, then you probably would. The state would take care of you whether you worked or not. So a lot of people chose not to work, which, really, was just like the previous system except that the people who didn't bother to work were from the so-called "working classes" rather than the chinless wonders with inherited wealth.
In the days when labor was more important to production, that certainly mattered more than it would now. If we eventually reach the Robotic State, I suppose it wouldn't matter as much, and maybe socialism would begin to work. After all, if robots do all the work, then people could chooose not to work with no negative economic consequences. But maybe not.
Let's just say that our guiding principle is utilitarian: we want to create a system which brings the greatest benefit (= income, in our somewhat warped view of life) to the greatest number. How do we do it? Self-evidently, the market system won't do this. We badly need something to replace it.
We're heading in a direction where it might no longer work, though. And I mean "work" in the utilitarian sense of bringing the greatest benefit to the greatest number. If you extrapolate current trends, you can see the emergence of a small class of Neobarons together with a large global mass of Neopeasants. The robot thingy I talked about a couple of posts ago. Here's where I'm going to start sounding like a Marxist: eventually, the Neopeasantry will decide that this is not a fair way of allocating income, and they'll rise up and tell the Neolords to get stuffed. There's plenty of good stuff to read on this subject, my favorites being Paul Craig Roberts and the Princeton economist, Robert Frank (Winner Take All, and Luxury Fever).
Following Marx, Socialism was supposed to be the answer to the inequitable distribution of income. It just hasn't worked, though. In Russia, redistributing the "means of production" to the people just meant replacing the landowning/capitalist shit-heads with an elite of so-called "communist" shit-heads who, like their forebears, just went ahead and grabbed everything for themselves. With slightly less dire forms of socialism, involving fewer executions and less overt property theft, as we had in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, it just resulted in economic chaos.
The question of what went wrong is complicated, but a good part of the problem was the removal of incentives. If you could make a living by doing nothing, then you probably would. The state would take care of you whether you worked or not. So a lot of people chose not to work, which, really, was just like the previous system except that the people who didn't bother to work were from the so-called "working classes" rather than the chinless wonders with inherited wealth.
In the days when labor was more important to production, that certainly mattered more than it would now. If we eventually reach the Robotic State, I suppose it wouldn't matter as much, and maybe socialism would begin to work. After all, if robots do all the work, then people could chooose not to work with no negative economic consequences. But maybe not.
Let's just say that our guiding principle is utilitarian: we want to create a system which brings the greatest benefit (= income, in our somewhat warped view of life) to the greatest number. How do we do it? Self-evidently, the market system won't do this. We badly need something to replace it.
posted by econoclast at 12:58 PM
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