Capitalism's race to the bottom continues unabated.
Capitalism's "race to the bottom" has made us rich beyond the wildest imagination of the people of the past. Our children do not have to work. Most jobs are indoors, in climate-controlled buildings. The rich may drive nice cars, but many of the poor have cars too. In the past, the rich rode in carriages and the poor trudged through the muck with no shoes.
Automation is what allowed us to go from the vast majority of Americans working in the fields to agricultural employment being 2% of the labor force -- and we produce more food than ever.
The government has been hiring the bulk of PhD-level researchers for the purposes of war (and surveillance). Imagine what those minds would have done with their ingenuity and initiative in the private sector the last 70 years.
One of the few things that probably would never have been created by the private sector is nuclear weapons, since there is no profitable use of such devices.
As of now, maybe. They're going to be quite useful once we get around to asteroid mining.
I'm pretty sure you could afford a bare subsistence level diet today, with no heat, running water, electricity, modern medical care, etc. (i.e, a !Kung-level lifestyle) by working less than 15 hours per week.
And you wouldn't have to put up with Guinea worms, either.
Let's see... rice costs about $1.00/pound, and has about 600 calories per pound. Let's be really generous and say 3,000 calories per day. So $5/day for raw calories. Add in $0.89/head for iceberg lettuce (for fiber), $3.00 for a chicken breast (protein) and a few cents for a multivitamin pill and you're looking at around $9.00/day. Maybe an hour and a half at minimum wage, or roughly 10 hours per week.
Would this be a healthy diet? No. Would it be an enjoyable diet? No. But you could survive on it for quite a long time.
I'm trying to figure out whether that was posted in 1840, 1890, 1920, 1960, 1990, or 2016. Because it has been proclaimed non-stop since the free market began ushering in the greatest boom in prosperity humanity has ever seen. It was no more true in the prime days of the industrial revolution as farming jobs were rapidly being wiped out than it is today.
We should try communism with modern IT infrastructure and AI. The big problem with many command economies was the inability to collect and act on the data. Call it a "just-in-time command economy" if you prefer.
Corporations become corrupt too, but there is more than one and you can start new ones. In a command economy like you allude to there is only one corporation and if it becomes corrupt there is no recourse.
HN posters are so goddamned predictable with their stupid comebacks.