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Comment by toddmorey | Hacker News Reader

So here's what I don't get: The United States is the world's largest consumer market. From what I can find, personal consumption expenditures (PCE) account for about two-thirds to 70% of total US economic output. We live and die on consumer spending and confidence.

So next we automate the bejeebus out of this economy with AI robots and Elon believes it grows 3x in under five years. Splendid. But if a consumer-driven economy has no payrolls, it eventually has no buyers. It just seems to me that ultimately, billionaires and investors cannot decouple themselves from the masses... but maybe it's a game of get mine before the system collapses?

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Today, around 50% of US consumer spending is by the top 10% of wealthiest households. (per Moody's)

The end state of this looks like how humanity looked before the industrial revolution: A single-digit percent of the population has the vast majority of the wealth and virtually all real estate and luxury goods. Between 90% and 95% of the population has just enough to live on, and never enough to build generational wealth or have any class mobility.

I think those in poverty have an awful lot less ways to supplement bought food these days, they are largely legislated out of foraging in any meaningful way. So I think actually a large percentage will starve to death or be in prison.

Food banks. Church pantries. Welfare programs. Meals with family and friends. Eat way less meat. Get hardcore into meal prep. https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook. People will find ways to eat as long as there isn't an active warzone.

I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.

Food banks depend on the largesse of the people that can afford to buy food though, which, well... if the only people remaining in that group are the ones gleefully saying how they're going to create a permanent underclass...

I've done social-work–adjacent stuff and I know a lot of NGOs in my country are quite strained (of course, probably housing more than food, so I don't disagree that might be more of a concern). I imagine it wouldn't be too different in America.

in America they are literally creating laws that it's illegal to feed the homeless

No, there are laws against distributing food without a permit because (1) there are people who give poisoned food to homeless people and (2) there are rules about food safety.

People will take food without paying for it before dying. You don’t have to forage when you can loot grocery stores. At a point when a large percentage are going to die and the food is there, it will be bedlam and the police won’t be stopping it because their families will be part of the riot.

The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.

> People will take food without paying for it before dying.

Yeah, I don't know why people seem to not understand this.

There are so many guns in America.

If the shit really hits the fan economically and a significant amount of people can't legally afford to buy their next 3 meals, there is likely to be a lot of excess deaths, but many of them will not be from starvation.

there will be even more drones

the guns will be user to kill each other, not the elite

in a way, doing the elite work, no need to kill the underclass, they will take care of pruning itself

there will be no grocery stores

It wouldn't actually cost that much money to feed everyone in the world. Global hunger could be wiped out today. More likely everyone will get just enough food, but luxury foods like meat (especially beef) and premium items will be uncommon. Like pre-industrial diets.

That works for about a week.

Then they simply starve to death.

The "preppers" are some of the worst too. They'll be shooting people before that week is even done. Meanwhile their absurd "stash" only actually pencils out to about a month of supplies, then they also starve because they never seemed to notice that you have to start farming at some point, and therefore, have to be friendly and supportive with your neighbors instead of shooting them at the first sign of trouble.

The system never has to rebuild. Stable points aren't always at global inflection points. Feudalism can go back to reigning for the rest of human existence.

Pre-industrial societies were built on agriculture so whatever happens will be different. Recommended reading:

Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411

If billionaires have all the money then there's nothing stopping them from buying all the stuff the economy can produce and leaving the rest of the population to barely get by or starve. Certainly, higher income people might currently spend less than their share of total income (at least between 2017 and 2021, see BLS paper, Garner et al., 2024, Gini of 0.3ish vs what I believe is 0.4ish for post-tax income) because poor people need to spend more of their income on things like food or rent, but there's no reason why the share of spendin by the top x% can't increase. In fact, as I understand it, it already has, according to [2] who themselves cite Moody, the top 20% accounted for 59% of spending in Q3 2025, which was a marked increase from the 40% in the BLS paper.

Now, the top 20% certainly aren't billionaires, but we also have to remember that the Luddites also benefited significantly from the automation of spinning before they themselves were replaced by automated weaving and subsequently suppressed by the state. There is no reason to think our current crop of labour aristocracy immune from the whims of capital when the time comes.

[BLS 2024]: https://www.bls.gov/cex/a-distributional-approach-to-us-pers... [2]: https://www.empower.com/the-currency/money/life/k-shaped-eco...

THIS, so much this... but let's use an analogy

if a really powerful mafia got installed into your city, a very small violent group of people demanding people to pay to stay safe... how long before you start organizing? how long before they notice and do something about it?

Well, Elon thinks we'll all get a Universal High Income. Holding aside the irony of him thinking the future is socialism, that money has to come from somewhere. If all companies in the future depend on a handful of AI and Robotics companies, I guess that the money has to come from Elon. Seeing as the layoffs have started, what is he waiting for?

There’s only like 400M folks in US. The rest of the world would consume if prices came down even more without labor

When they have enough robots, they won't need the rest of the system. I think Musk must have meant something like that when he said money won't matter.

as Elon says, soon money will be worthless. what will matter is how much compute and how many robots you have

so yeah, billionaires without compute or robots will join the permanent underclass

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