Increasing wealth concentration in certain desirable areas where prices will continue to skyrocket because the people there can afford it (those that receive the most return on capital vs. those just working on return on their own labor). Meanwhile the majority of the population decays alongside them, but at a distance that can be kept by well paid security forces.
There is the possibility of some philanthropy, perhaps. Maybe even some government policies that help change this, but I'm not sure if those are the most likely outcomes.
I guess there's always the guillotine / riot approach to bring things into check if it gets really bad, but typically that requires some sort of middle class to get things going. We also have not seen this occur at large scale in places where this already happens on earth.
EDIT: Please do not mistake my use of the word "labor" and "capital" for me identifying as some form of communist. Those are actual terms used by reasonable people (including economists!) I'd say most students of history and present day sociology might agree that this is a possibility for how wealth manifests in the future given large scale automation and no public policy changes.
'trickle down' implies a watershed, where water/wealth collects in small tributaries that come together to form a main River where wealth/water is most concentrated.
Actual trickle down economics is trickle up economics, so no shit it doesn't work. Let's just dump a bunch of water here at the mouth of the Amazon and watch it flow up into the Andes.
The 20/80 rule applies in all aspects of life. Like 20% of the soccer players account for 80% of the goals. So why wouldn't we expect it to apply to money as well? This is like a law of gravity. You can attempt to fight against it artificially but eventually it will come crashing down
And from there to fund already rich parties to continue to enforce control in a way that washes Bezos' hands clean of any wrongdoing. Outsourcing the task of maintaining inequality, per se. (Billionares funding millionares springs to mind).
Or, stated with less emotional rhetoric: Funding 1$ to the wealthy returns 0.7$ to the economy. So, from 'there' nothing, because Bezos' pocket is keeping it.
> Funding 1$ to the wealthy returns 0.7$ to the economy.
So going solely by that figure, as long as the gain in efficiency from automating a job is > 42% it's a net positive for the economy? And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
> So going solely by that figure, as long as the gain in efficiency from automating a job is > 42% it's a net positive for the economy?
No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy. It gets even bigger when you go into 1$ to education.
>And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
Well that's the thing. Even if you give money to wealthy people they're not going to invest more than a poor person will with it. A person in poverty has immediate needs to spend the money on where a wealthy person does not.
> No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy.
Okay, so >60% then, assuming the average worker at an Amazon warehouse meets your definition of "poor". Still a totally achievable figure.
> Even if you give money to wealthy people
We're not talking about _giving_ money to anyone here, we're talking about automation. Automation means efficiency gains for _Amazon_ (the corporation) not Bezos personally, so you can't just make the lazy assumption that 100% of any savings made by Amazon goes directly into Bezos' pockets (as egypturnash did earlier in this thread).
But even if you do make that ridiculous assumption, _and_ we assume your figures are correct, it still only takes a >60% efficiency gain for the economy to break even on the transaction, correct?
A >60% efficiency gain is not small at scale, and part of the reason why automation is succeeding but not exactly in all the spaces we expect. Even the article covers that jobs are being lost, but not many jobs as one would intuitively believe.
Furthermore, someone who is out of work as a result of automation will also be a loss in the broader economy (as they will need services, the government loses income tax where applicable). The math I assume gets very complicated very quickly. But claiming "and from bezos' pocket, where?" is a reductionist statement that can be met with an equally reductionist "nowhere because we know rich people don't invest as much in the economy as they take".
I think the reason automation isn't taking over as quickly as expected isn't because the efficiency gains are small, but because the capital investment required to automate is often large, and because many of the jobs that haven't yet been automated are complicated to solve in the general case. (This machine, for example, only handles boxing; it can't actually pick products off the shelves because that's a very general problem that's more difficult to solve.)
There are also numerous other economic effects to consider, such as the increased activity from capital spending on automation equipment and software, and (as you pointed out) the economic losses from higher short-term unemployment.
My initial question was only made in reply to a reductionist and intellectually lazy statement implying that the company owner is the only one who benefits from automation. I asked that question in an attempt to get the other commenter to think more carefully about their position (the answer isn't "nowhere" by the way, as the very figures you yourself provided indicate that 70% of it goes directly back into the economy). Unfortunately it doesn't look like they ever replied, but nonetheless I think I've made my point.
He will horde most of it. Occasionally he will spend on lobbying efforts, purchase insane luxury items (ie yachts), or vanity projects. Sometimes, he will splurge on a business that employee a few people. When he is feeling particularly generous, he may contribute to some project that makes home look good while putting his name on something (ie new opera house).
I believe something called 'communism' which addresses that.
Snark aside, automating shitty jobs is a Good Thing. Finding new and better jobs for those impacted should be a major political priority. Education is one aspect, but comes too late for those already on the workforce.
Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty..
> Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty..
An interesting aspect is that those jobs are low technical skill, but can require good to very good social skills to be done well.
Without joking, greeting an elderly entering a bank and guiding them to the section they needs to go, explain briefly what they need to do, is can be non trivial.
That’s not what people mean when referring to low skill jobs.
What you’re saying would be similar to saying a warehouse worker might be low in technical skill but high in strength skill, which just misses the point that people refer to low skill jobs as jobs that require little education or specialization.
I am not sure everyone shares that definition. Would sales or manager be a low skill job for instance ?
For a number of these positions you need little to no specific education or specialisation.
In some ways the very low social skilled worker is better at the job than the person with higher technical skills. I know some people with Downs Syndrome, their employers hire them for greeter type tasks because they obviously unsuited for anything: it makes thing move fast when the public realizes they won't get anything out of the greeter so they have to read the signs to figure out what they should know. The public likes to know that otherwise "useless" people have a productive job and so public opinion of them goes up. The greeter like the feeling of doing something useful, plus the money in their pocket. Everybody is better for this. Of course someone has available to handle trouble makers.
These "low skill" customer-facing jobs are also considered important and held in quite high regard in Japan, something we seem to have forgotten in the west.
The United States, is, in a sense, a communist country, given that most people own a good portion of major companies. However, like every other communist society literally ever, your diminutive share of ownership means little and there's still one guy in charge, except our guys differ by industry and vertical.
>most people own a good portion of major companies.
Are you revering to the stock market? I don‘t believe this is true. Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies. Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.
> Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies
Most people invest in mutual funds, which do own a significant portion of the largest corporations. This is fine; most communist systems in practice allow for private ownership of smaller businesses.
> Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.
This is true, but communism refers to the communal ownership of the means of production. In practice, communist societies typically end up with some small group of people having an outsized influence on the means of production. Although nominally, they own an equal share of them, this is in name only. By all metrics of control, they own a larger share. My guess is that the US (and free market systems in general with widespread ownership) is probably more egalitarian in that regard.
... If all the capital could be distributed.