Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you
techcrunch.com
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Distributism has evolved a lot over the years. There are a lot more non-Catholic distributists these days (I am a Heathen, for example).
The definition I like to give is this: Capitalism is the system where people with capital buy land, build facilities, buy tools, and hire labor in order to start businesses. Therefore Capitalism necessarily reduces to ownership of the means of production by the financier. This leads naturally enough to control over production. Since, as Belloc noted in 1914, control over economic production amounts to life itself, Capitalism means that the financial class ends up controlling life for everyone else. This concentration of power is unhealthy.
Of course the Marxists think we can solve this problem by taking away that control from the financiers and placing it in the hands of an even fewer number of bureaucrats (something Belloc also pointed out in 1914), and Belloc was mostly right in what he saw as the consequences of that.
What we need to understand is that what is necessary is the option of self-employment being open. We have vast amounts of policies from complex tax frameworks (SSTP) to means testing in welfare which prevents this.
The Distributist narrative is different:
Businesses are built collaboratively by workers working and those with capital financing what is necessary. Workers are the business although financiers should have some interest in things too. The best business is one where the workers and the financiers are on the same team. The ideal businesses are the family businesses.
Anyway such a move would require a lot of rethinking our current approaches to economic inequality. The estate tax should be considered harmful because it privileges corporations over unincorporated family businesses. Other tax approaches should be used instead. Our anti-poverty programs are ways to chain the poor to low-paying jobs and a way to subsidize cheap labor, and we should redesign them along different lines.
(Interestingly enough, venture-capital-stage startups are more distributist than large corporations because the employees tend to have a larger share of ownership in the business, and a greater level of personal empowerment to change things. The only problem is with exit strategies ;-).)
For example, part of your above argument goes: control of means of production => control of economic production => control of life itself; control of means of production => control of life itself.
Ergo, whosoever invented the very first means of production controlled the lives of everyone else in the world. Or, our definitions are incomplete. Or, one or more of the above assertions is fundamentally incorrect regardless of reasonable definition.
The reason why control over economic production is the control over life itself is that we humans cannot live absent such production. We don't live naked in the trees without tools. Heck we now know even chimpanzees have tools so we can talk about a material culture beyond our species, and the same means this is means of production. But we are more dependent on more complex means of production than chimpanzees are.
From what we know of hunter-gatherers, there is no employment so there is no unemployment. Even today we would not say a self-employed individual with no work is unemployed. Until you get to the point where people have currency, you don't have a possibility of a division between worker and employer. Instead you have other sorts of economic arrangements.
The Marxist mistake here is to assume no social and economic stratification. There is such from what we know but it is not along employee/employer lines or the like.
This part is particularly rich:
If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in
the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if
it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you
do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so
much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is
qualitative, not just quantitative.
And while I'm venting, the problem with giving the homeless a JavaScript course is that the problem the vast majority of the homeless have isn't a lack of an employable skill. Training is a useful and effective tool to help people who actually have the problem of not having the experience they need to get a new job.
The problem is that, to be honest, the overproduction crisis can only happen when there is too much income inequality. Otherwise, society has ways to utilize that surplus. For example, a public sector taking up 40% of GDP or thereabouts, is a way of using that surplus.
The problem with exponential growth is that it cannot continue indefinitely. Resources are limited and so is energy use. Additionally I suspect, following Joseph Tainter's works, that exponential growth eventually leads to social collapse because that surplus ends up going towards complexity-related costs until those costs cannot be borne anymore.
We aren't headed toward a Butlerian Jihad[1], but rather toward a future where everyone either makes something that other people want, or they work to sell, explain, teach, and help other people.
When everything is 3d-printed, who will make the blueprints that tell printers what to print and how? How will people know about new, better items they could be printing out? Human society will never not need demand from other humans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Edit: "Robots took our Jerbs!!!" ;)
The risk I think is that this extra complexity may pose problems down the road due to automation paradoxes and so forth.
Maybe not one-for-one, but one lawyer with a state of the art data mining warehouse can probably do the job that used to require multiple lawyers. Tools like automated e-discovery or linguistic analysis have shown to be useful here. Here is an article on that topic from a while back:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagew...
Ex: We paid for clerks to transcribe a previous hearing. That could be replaced by software.
I don't think we would be looking for a decrease in demand for the service as much as we should be looking for a decrease in demand for people to provide the service (likely due to increased efficiency by the service providers).
How will people know about new, better items they could be printing out - presumably like now through well designed websites, or in the future perhaps 3d animations, voice interfaces or robotic demonstrations. Or automated home delivery of items for trial purposes.
Even if we can't replace the creation of marketing materials and new designs with artificial intelligence entirely, it's not clear that there will be significant demand for workers. The risk is that those people doing jobs nobody wants to do eventually will not even be able to do that to earn a basic income. At that point you have increasing pressure to provide welfare benefits for these people, which is unpopular among those who don't fall into the disadvantaged categories that you list.
Most humans will perform any kind of task to avoid starving/abject poverty. If there are no constructive tasks available then destructive tasks, such as crime and insurrection, will be created. Depending on the strength of the state, the end result will be either decreased mass security (parts of Mexico, for example) or a burgeoning prison population.