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0 pointssimonh5y ago0 comments

How have I put them out of business, what’s the mechanism. Did I sell more oranges to more people at lower prices? Then those people benefited. Fewer people will die of scurvy this year, they will be healthier and be able to work harder, and will have more money or goods to spend or exchange. Maybe they can use the surplus value to employ the old orange grower in a new trade.

Otherwise what you’re saying is increased efficiency creates no value.

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jay_kyburz5y ago· 2 in thread

Oh sure, increased efficiency is absolutely value, and I'm totally fine with somebody claiming the difference between what was before, and what they do as "created" value.

But I would also argue, that these efficiency gains are tiny. That most businesses spend 90% of their labor effort fighting for control of existing value, not creating new value.

When A robot automates somebodies job away, a shareholders business is run more efficiently and shareholder value increases. But the robots value to society is not realized until the unemployed person goes on to do something else of value. Sometimes they will, but not always. These displaced people could be either a benefit or a burden to society. The value of robot labor is ambiguous.

When Google and Apple make tools for us to work more efficient I can see a clear path to value creation. (Even if very small)

When Amazon sells us more cheap junk from China that we didn't need anyhow, the value creation is a lot less clear.

I guess we are starting to get into the realm where my definition of value is not the same as everybody else. Apologies if I'm rambling, It's an interesting topic and I enjoy thinking about it as I write.

simonhOP5y ago

The question of what matters to a society and why certainly is interesting. The value of value sinks for example like art or Bitcoin.

I’m a lot less worried about automaton than I used to be. There’s just zero evidence that it actually leads to any systemic unemployment in practice. Absorbing China into the labour market has been hard on low end wages, but that effect seems to over already. Increasing capacity and efficiency grows the pie for everybody and humans are very adaptable. When there’s under utilised labour, as long as the economy as a whole is healthy somebody will find a way to take commercial advantage of it and all of a sudden you’ve got full employment again. Sure there can be pain, I remember 3m unemployment here in the UK in the early 80s but we’re already back up to near full employment.

jay_kyburz5y ago

It seems obvious to me that a world where robots do all the work, and people spend all their time enjoying themselves, is better than a world where everybody has to work to survive.

I think it will be a huge step forward in human culture when we finally accept that that not everybody has to work, and the productivity of society at large will make everything so cheap that money is really not important.

The only question is how we get from here to there. That's not clear at all.

Can the government simply take from the rich and distribute it evenly to everybody? Can the government even distribute money without inflation eating the value of everything, leaving people feeling miserable and poor. Should the government provide food, shelter, medicine, infrastructure directly? Does the government need to own the means of production?

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