Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 94. (Read 288375 times)

My understanding is that the rationale for a resource based economy is precisely what you are pointing at: distributing scarce resources under rules that are not bound by monetary rules.
The caveat going with this scenario is that a global governance, being the only alternative to the governance of a globalized finance system, is not immune to the risk of a totalitarian shift.

I think his reasoning is:

"Technology destroys employment. Both are incompatible, but luddities were wrong on the solution, we don't have to burn the factories. Machines have proven to be good, then work is necessarily what should be removed from this earth.

If the employment is sustained is only because of the growth of useless jobs. And those useless jobs don't stole from the production of useful jobs, they're just sustained by the increase in productivity caused by the machines. They could be just digging holes, because they don't need to produce anything, they just need money to pay the few real workers that exist and the machine owners."

Now I can see clearly the roots of the cornucopian fallacy: it's just a modified version of the luddite one. They just made a small change:

"Machines/technollogy/knowledge will make work impossible unnecessary".

Thank you hugolp, for mentioning them.

Ok, answer this then: why is it that in our monetary system, technology has progressed exponentially in the last 150 years, replacing millions of jobs with automated systems, yet the unemployment rate has held steady with an average of 4% to 6% (not including market crashes)? Do you believe that this is because the number of janitorial and financial jobs has increased?

Also, is the point of your argument that:

Automation/technology is BAD because it destroys jobs, but only because, due to money, jobs are needed to survive, so to fix this issue, we need to get rid of money, but continue to allow automation/technology to destroy jobs?

You need to check Europe again. Europe is not socialist. Murwa, compare Europe to the USA and you will see that they are not very different in the range of command economy-free market.

Its funny that a lot of USA people think that Europe is some sort of socialist paradise, when the European socialists say that Europe is a capitalist explotative place.

It is a constant argument that EU is socialists ( because actually it is , especially the oldest parts + Scandinavia. ).
I never spoken word "CHINA" by Asian countries i meant like Singapore and the like which are again a constant argument of free market "prosperity"

Is this some kind of joke I dont get or are you serious?

Since when are we europeans socialists? And since when is China a free market?

Honestly, I had doubts about answering you. If this is the level of answers you keep giving, I will just pass.

I work 9 hours a day (not on weekends) in "socialist europe" and I'm not the only one who would prefer to work 7 hours and earn less.
The fact that in "free market china" they work more to take less is caused by many factors.
One of them is that we (occident) accumulate debts to them from our Balance of trade. That's not sustainable and won't last forever.

In socialist Europe that is indeed happening average working hour is less than 8 per day , while in "free market" asian countries it is more than 10.

I would consider "free marketers" to be be treated as mentally retarded.

In the ludite debate, I believe you guys are forgetting something. If we get to a level of productivity that allows us to produce so well that people dont really want to buy more stuff, we could always work less hours. In fact, this is already happening, since 200 years ago they had to work a lot more hours a day to survive and have a much more miserable live.

Remember jobs is not an objective. We want to produce stuff to survive and even be able to enjoy live (a modern phenomenon for a big part of the population). If we could produce all the stuff without working it would be great. What a live that would be. Unfortunately, thats not posible and we have to work to produce. But the more efficiently we produce, the better, because it allows us to either consume more or work less.

Luditism should be treated as a mental illness.

I am not aware of those inventions thus i cant comment.


Your wants are limited if only by fact you can consume finite number of goods and services in a 24hr period. You are bounded by the law of time.
Also we have limited space on our planet there is only as much things as we can build on it , we are bounded by the law of space.
Add to this finite resources.

Unlimited wants is a fallacy. Term only used in propaganda to uphold Status Quo.


In current contexts yes , it keep economy going so useful jobs can continue to produce . But in the large picture they should be scrapped as soon as such a possibility will appear.

I go back to one example of a technology that I think will bring us far more new jobs than it will destroy: Arduino and the Google ADK.

And again, your "this time is different" is only a belief: is based on faith and you can't prove it.
It is based on the belief that the potential wants of humanity are limited. We will value things that don't value or know today just like has always happened.

One question, do you think that those useless state professions are good because they fight unemployment?

They could in the past because it was different technical reality but right now technological unemployment advanced at much faster rate then creation of new useful jobs.

Also artificial need for jobs is is holding us back since  new technologies that threatens entire industries are fought off by them ( self-preservation instinct kicks in). There is few very well documented cases in history like life of Edwin Amstrong.

In a monetary system, they can either die or do increasingly menial, repetitive, unproductive, demeaning or otherwise slavish labor in their own or foreign land.

Ok, we replace 1000 farmers for 50 farmers and 5 engineers .
Can't all these 945 people do anything of value for those 55?

common.. You don't compare the number of engineers to the number of farmers replaced by one harvester. You compare it to the number replaced by thousands of them.

 

I will not even go into detail of you argument because the situation is much more complicated and reasoning is flawed.

But imagine world with 6 bllions of thinkers/designers ?

How do you see everyone will have an opportunity for job to survive ? Useful jobs i might not not useless like marketers bankers or lawyers.

Get real . It is happening right now even in predatory monetary system. Plenty of open source projects in advanced technologies like informatics and engineering.

Actually, one important point on this. Luddites fear that machines/automation will kill jobs. After all, a single combine harvester with a single driver takes the job away from dozens, maybe hundreds, of farmers.
What they don't realize is that automation and machines creates way more jobs that it destroys. Those jobs just move into different areas. That single combine harvester replaced 100 farmers with thousands of engineers, steel workers, chemists, botanists, mechanics, oil producers, etc. Automation will just take this a step further, replacing manual laborers with more thinkers/designers. The work will be easier, but there will likely be a lot more of it.

Any amount of automation will ALWAYS require someone's labor behind it. Even if you have machines that can use 3D printers to print out more machines and can fix/maintain those other machines, you still need someone to take the time to invent, design, and improve those machines. 3D Cad design and engineering is A LOT of work, and requires a lot of different specialized education. You would need people who have specialty in electronics, physics and engineering, software development, chemistry (to create new stronger materials), architectural design, and for robots that grow food, biology and botany. After all those people get together, you'd also need specialists in 3D engineering design and CAD software design, as well as resource and operations management to make sure all materials for these machines can be acquired and are used correctly. Getting specialized in these fields takes A LOT of time and work. Why wouldn't these people ask "Why am I busting my butt, spending YEARS to learn this stuff, just to provide these goods/services to people so that those people won't have to work or learn, and have everything they want provided to them?" Sure, there will be a few (maybe a lot) of people who are interested in these fields, but why would they want to do this work for others without asking for anything in return? And what if there is a shortage of people to do these things? Will someone have to force people to work on this?
I think THE ONLY way RBE is even possible is if machines replace the only type of work they still can't, which is creative thinking. But, once machines are able to think and invent as well as humans, our race becomes obsolete, anyway (especially since machines will likely figure there's no point in spending their resources on us)