Theme: Incentives

WILL FUTURE ECONOMIES DEPEND ON SOCIALIST GOVERNMENTS, AS TECHNOLOGY MAKES HUMAN LABOUR REDUNDANT?

(repost from 2017)

Good Question, but You Might Not Like the Answer

Socialism means central management of property and production. Socialism is dead. It cannot exist, ever, any more than communism or anarchism can exist – for obvious reasons, that I won’t go into here.

Almost the entire world works on a mixed economy. A mixed economy means that private property, money, and prices are used to provide calculability, planning, and incentives for individuals, yet the proceeds of their unequal productivity are captured, and redistributed.

The means of this redistribution varies from the investment in research, in industry, and infrastructure, to the subsidy of retirement, unemployment, general income, and the provision of health care and justice, military and defense.

the uncomfortable truth is that the lower classes (dumber, more impulsive people, with lower industriousness) are far more costly than people who are intelligent, thoughtful, and industrious can compensate for, so the countries that are the most advanced and have the highest redistribution are those that have eliminated their underclasses through attrition during the middle and late middle and early modern ages. In other words, the best way to increase your wealth and unemployment is to force one or zero children to people who require redistribution.

Moreover: There are limits to energy consumption available on the planet.

Moreover: There are limits to productivity using energy available on the planet.

Moreover: Humans are *extremely* expensive organisms.

SO:

THE OPTIMISTIC VERSION:

We impose worldwide one or zero child policy on those people who cannot engage in fruitful employment and over about four generations raise the median ability of humanity about one standard deviation, eliminating most demand. Meanwhile we impose a law that says that any job that CAN be done by a human without repetitive stress injury, shall be done by a human. And that would solve most of the problems.

THE STATUS QUO VERSION

Since that would be untenable for the third world the vast majority of their populations being ‘surplus humans’, and impolitic for the first world, given that the state is empowered by women and the lower classes through voting I expect what will occur is no change, until the existing system of credit collapses (which should occur somewhere in the next generation if not this one.) And we will

THE SCARY VERSION

The vast importing of underclasses into the civilized world in order to attempt to compensate for the impossibility of maintaining these levels of redistribution in a world that is no longer economically and institutionally backward, nor pervasively superstitious and illiterate, will reverse 3500 years of reduction of the underclasses, and reduce all but say the japanese and Han chinese to worldwide malthusian poverty, since it is DIFFERENCES that make productivity possible.

Regardless of what economists like to promote the carrying capacity of the planet looks as if the current standards of living cannot be extended to the full population extant.

That’s my understanding of the choices.