All the more reason why we cannot treat low skilled and unemployed people like shit.
Until we figure out how to adequately use this abundance of labor, we can't be intentionally trying to punish people so they will go yank up their bootstraps and become a CEO of their own Fortune 500 company.
The problem lies in using starvation as an incentive to work. We'll inevitably have more people than work required to produce goods (which in reality we're already in that situation) and sudden genocide of the population isn't going to fix or help that. We've transitioned to a manufacturing/agricultural economy to a service based one, and even that is being outsourced.
Its a boogeyman of a word but we're leading towards a Post-scarcity economy. Not only will production but even service will be automated. I mean hell look at most burger flipping jobs or barista jobs. People are being literally paid to have a machine make coffee, and then then pass that coffee to a person. Is a non-job. It's busy work. It's a piss poor way of treating labor. But they have to do it because if they don't they'll starve. Most jobs out there can be done automatically. Hell, we're even having people check out their own groceries for the past 10 years.
When we reach a point where the majority of manufacturing or even service has become automated, what is the rest of society supposed to do? Just kindly die off? To me it seems thats what a lot of people want the goal to be.
There's gotta be a change in how we view work. Take farming. Say you're born on a farm and you're told by your folks that you need to work on the farm because if you don't we'll starve. That's how farming worked for thousands of years. Now with technology we have machines and methods that can produce yields thousandfold what a farming family could ever produce. What incentive would you have when told, "Hey you need to work on this farm and do this job, because its what we do." We live in a society where we're told, you have to work, because thats what we've always done.
Well what happens when you live in a society where most of the work is automated, yet you're told that you still need to find work, because even though we've got the production and service handled, you still need to work or die?
Show me a graph since the 1900s where high amounts of unemployement has ever shown a reduction in productivity. No matter what happens to the workforce, productivity marches on going up and up. This shows we're reaching a point where there will be more people than jobs available. And when that happens what do we do? Just let people die because there's too many of us? Of course not, all those people need to "buy" things to keep the economy going.
So whats the solution? Well we need to change our view on how the culture of what "work" means. It's pretty simple but culturally its very repugnant. We no longer use starvation as incentive to work. We feed our people, we clothe them, we shelter them. If they want luxuries then they can work for them. The fact is we KIND of do that already. We call it anything but welfare or a living wage. We have to find "reasons" to justify why we're giving money away with our tax dollars. We call it SNAP because food is important. We call it disability because people aren't all physically the same. We provide money for children because kids be important, yo. We provide Medicaid because its good to heal the sick.
But of course that opens questions, "what is a luxury?" I guess I'm not smart enough to decide what constitutes as a luxury or not. But maybe as a whole we can agree upon that.
The thing is people are pretty fluid on what the definition of "good enough" is. Some people want more things, some people just want to make sure they have a meal every day.
If everyone had the same footing in terms of basic necessities: shelter, food, clothing. Do you think that it would destroy us economically? That nobody would be incentivized to "bootstrap" themselves to a higher position to aquire higher end luxuries? Of course not. There's always going to be people that want more, and they'll work for more. But that doesn't mean there aren't people that are satisfied, and if they are satisfied then so what? Does everyone have to follow the same path in life? You take care of everyone's basic needs and then that will free up the market for others that want "more"
Of course this is all incoherent rambling utopia talk. But the bottom line is, jobs will become more scarce as productivity becomes less scarce. We can either just keeping people starving and doing busy work to get by or we can take care of those needs and let the people who want more do more.
