Are robots and technology behind the income gap?

[gwynedd1]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

Your view of private business assumes all business is bad; that corporations are "natural monopolies"; where my view is completely towards a free enterprise economy; built from millions of very small, 1 - 10 employee, created within each local community; where the manager of the business owns the business and the local community owns 20% of the shares of the ownership of these businesses.

My view is that "private business" is contextually void and meaningless. I use the classical model of economics in that somethings is either a product of labor or a privileges descended from government. A Chicago parking lot scheme might be called private, but its all based on a government privilege. The competition for space is naturally inherently unique ergo natural monopoly.

As I see it; collectivisation is always a product of what I call a feudal mercantile economy where, as you correctly state, the private business becomes a monopoly and the employees have no mechanism to enable them to leave, set up their own operation, to compete against the monopoly.

This could be done with a trade secret, aka the Coke formula. That would be a private "monopoly". Coca Cola however is a registered Trademark , meaning its a government, legislatively created asset. Personally I think they should pay for the courts, police and legal authority that maintains this shinny asset. Thus once again it calls into question "private". Its clearly depending on a public privilege. Yet most people seem blind to this. Its also a "collective" agreement.

The problem is not the giant corporation; nor is it the equally gigantic government department; it is the lack of a system, set of rules, accepted by everyone with associated institutions; to enable a flow of free enterprise equity capital to enable competitive, local community prosperity to flourish, through competitive, new, very small, free enterprise business creation; leading to local community enabled job creation.

Again, not a fundamental guiding principle. "More or less" government simply does not form the kernel of a single principle to me. I believe in the fundamental principle of the virtuous cycle, like eating an apple helps me grow an apple tree. Since no poltical party has this principle, I am certainly in a good deal of trouble.

I call that job creation for the people, managed by the people. www.chriscoles.com/page4a.html
Free enterprise? - Free enterprise is founded upon the concept of the manager of the business owns the business.

It was founded by the Pysiocrates. Its reputation has been ruined by the "Conservatives" .
The founding principle is to untax labor and capital and to tax vice, privilege and collect user fees. That is what makes a free enterprise system, not one free to politically establish monopolies.

Notice how Turgot for example would run afoul of both left and right.

http://en.chateauversailles.fr/histo...jacques-turgot

He went after labor monopolies and landed privilege. The UAW and Donald Trump would hate him. And yet these people would be considered on opposing sides today?

Ownership is an inalienable freedom; the right to own your own life, work, home, thoughts, et al. In which case, freedom also applies to the inventive and industrious, as the right to own the product of their industrious intellect.



No different to an artist or writer; owning the right to their work.

Thus free enterprise is an inalienable freedom; the right to own the business they have created.
Just as employees are free to work, or not, in any such free enterprise.

So; why NOT try some new thinking?

Because its the wrong thinking and it isn't new. Most business, as I have proven ,are not merely of their own making. They "own land"( a legislatively created asset), patents, copyrights, trade markets, mineral rights etc , non of which are products of human labor therefore quite alienable under natural law.

I am An X-Conservative BTW. I hated Tip Oneal and loved Reagan as a teen. Its not at all new to me. The problem was my grandma's Great Books of the Western World collection where Adam Smith, Plutarch, Thucydides, Eward Gibbon , Marx , Rousseau etc exposed Conservatives for the ridiculous hypocrites that they are. I had it wrong. What I know now is new since i was raised a staunch right winger by my father. I was even a loyal subscriber to National Review at the age of 18. Do you realize just how enthusiastic one would have to be ? Its like asking someone who was in the Jim Jones cult to try something new like coolade.

But the WF Buckley was with me.

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/1...-georgist.html

[gwynedd1]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

I never said that was what I proposed, only the choice we will be left with.

To address the factory example, the old 19th century examples of technology helping hardly apply to the 21st century. Big difference between more efficient looms and electronic tecnology that can produce robots capable of delivering the mail and fighting wars. In the future only the best minds or the best connections will allow one to rise above the mass of displaced workers. People who will either have to be supported somehow or left to wither away. Or maybe they can just work for the government?

It will always and forever be an issue of monopoly. If robots make many things today for a song, then the competition will be brutal .
Thus the only thing worth much will be that which cannot be created by robots.


http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/dis...mtID=3&psid=85

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.

Funny thing is Marx said the same thing a hundred years later. American Industry lamented that home steads competed with low wage labor and new capitalists would form too quickly. It could not compete with British wage labor . With food and shelter what the threat? The monopolization of subsistence.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

My view is that "private business" is contextually void and meaningless. I use the classical model of economics in that somethings is either a product of labor or a privileges descended from government. A Chicago parking lot scheme might be called private, but its all based on a government privilege. The competition for space is naturally inherently unique ergo natural monopoly.



This could be done with a trade secret, aka the Coke formula. That would be a private "monopoly". Coca Cola however is a registered Trademark , meaning its a government, legislatively created asset. Personally I think they should pay for the courts, police and legal authority that maintains this shinny asset. Thus once again it calls into question "private". Its clearly depending on a public privilege. Yet most people seem blind to this. Its also a "collective" agreement.


Again, not a fundamental guiding principle. "More or less" government simply does not form the kernel of a single principle to me. I believe in the fundamental principle of the virtuous cycle, like eating an apple helps me grow an apple tree. Since no poltical party has this principle, I am certainly in a good deal of trouble.



It was founded by the Pysiocrates. Its reputation has been ruined by the "Conservatives" .
The founding principle is to untax labor and capital and to tax vice, privilege and collect user fees. That is what makes a free enterprise system, not one free to politically establish monopolies.

Notice how Turgot for example would run afoul of both left and right.

http://en.chateauversailles.fr/histo...jacques-turgot

He went after labor monopolies and landed privilege. The UAW and Donald Trump would hate him. And yet these people would be considered on opposing sides today?







Because its the wrong thinking and it isn't new. Most business, as I have proven ,are not merely of their own making. They "own land"( a legislatively created asset), patents, copyrights, trade markets, mineral rights etc , non of which are products of human labor therefore quite alienable under natural law.

I am An X-Conservative BTW. I hated Tip Oneal and loved Reagan as a teen. Its not at all new to me. The problem was my grandma's Great Books of the Western World collection where Adam Smith, Plutarch, Thucydides, Eward Gibbon , Marx , Rousseau etc exposed Conservatives for the ridiculous hypocrites that they are. I had it wrong. What I know now is new since i was raised a staunch right winger by my father. I was even a loyal subscriber to National Review at the age of 18. Do you realize just how enthusiastic one would have to be ? Its like asking someone who was in the Jim Jones cult to try something new like coolade.

But the WF Buckley was with me.

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/1...-georgist.html

First of all, the reason why all my own thinking revolves around the use of the formal systems of law and taxation that naturally envelope the small private business structure, is that I believe in the power of those structures to deliver law to the ordinary people; and tax income to pay for the underlying costs of those structures.

Where I differ from present usage, is that as I see it, the underlying problem is a lack of employment for those that would wish to better themselves through the opportunity to earn a living to support their wish to create a home and a family.

As an example, here in my village, I sometimes sweep the road and pavement clear of winter storm leaves and branches outside our village school where mothers drop off their children. No one pays me, I do not ask for payment. However, I could not live any form of life by such work; it is entirely voluntary. To be able to improve my lot, to enable me to attain the opportunity to do those things that come naturally to any man, home and family; I must have a means to earn an income. In which case, I must have someone that will pay me such an income; OR; I have to be able to sell something that I have created to someone else that has sufficient income to be able to pay me.

As I see it, that is the underlying structure of what one might describe as ordinary life. It has always been such. You describe the difficulties Turgot encountered; I would answer that they are exactly what I will expect to also encounter; except for one thing; the sum of human knowledge is now much greater. Many today recognise that we are on the wrong track economically; we thus have to change direction.

My use of the phrase Free Enterprise was never intended to also suggest that I had discovered it. Instead, all I am doing is re-introduce the idea into common usage. Again, I make it perfectly clear that I do not believe in what is today called capitalism, what I describe as feudal mercantilism. However, I do believe in true free market use of equity capital as the primary means of new investment into new means for the ordinary person to earn the living they must have access to to enable them to add to their own prosperity.

Patents and copyright are particularly the product of the human intellectual capacity, as is this response to your above posting. All such adds to the overall stock of our knowledge.

From the outset, you keep returning to the operations of very large corporations. So I ask; have you ever worked within a new very small start up company of, say, less than thirty people?

I suspect not. If you had, you would understand the very real adventure of discovery, by everyone in the small team as they all learn new ways to do things and the great fun to be enjoyed working in such a small team.

Without access to free enterprise equity capital; today; millions of people, world wide, are prevented from improving their lives. It is their need that I am most interested in.

[Southernguy]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

Capitalism vs. Democracy

JAN. 28, 2014






Thomas B. Edsall



Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism.
Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, does not stop there. He contends that capitalism’s inherent dynamic propels powerful forces that threaten democratic societies.
Capitalism, according to Piketty, confronts both modern and modernizing countries with a dilemma: entrepreneurs become increasingly dominant over those who own only their own labor. In Piketty’s view, while emerging economies can defeat this logic in the near term, in the long run, “when pay setters set their own pay, there’s no limit,” unless “confiscatory tax rates” are imposed.

Piketty’s book — published four months ago in France and due out in English this March — suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality. Piketty has also delivered and posted a series of lectures in French and English outlining his argument.

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Fig. 1: After-tax rate of return vs. growth rate at the world level from Antiquity until 2100. Thomas Piketty

Conservative readers will find that Piketty’s book disputes the view that the free market, liberated from the distorting effects of government intervention, “distributes,” as Milton Friedman famously put it, “the fruits of economic progress among all people. That’s the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.”
Piketty proposes instead that the rise in inequality reflects markets working precisely as they should: “This has nothing to do with a market imperfection: the more perfect the capital market, the higher” the rate of return on capital is in comparison to the rate of growth of the economy. The higher this ratio is, the greater inequality is.
In a 20-page review for the June issue of the Journal of Economic Literature that has already caused a stir, Branko Milanovic, an economist in the World Bank’s research department, declared:
“I am hesitant to call Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century one of the best books in economics written in the past several decades. Not that I do not believe it is, but I am careful because of the inflation of positive book reviews and because contemporaries are often poor judges of what may ultimately prove to be influential. With these two caveats, let me state that we are in the presence of one of the watershed books in economic thinking.”
There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book. One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.
According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression. The owners of capital – those at the top of the pyramid of wealth and income – absorbed a series of devastating blows. These included the loss of credibility and authority as markets crashed; physical destruction of capital throughout Europe in both World War I and World War II; the raising of tax rates, especially on high incomes, to finance the wars; high rates of inflation that eroded the assets of creditors; the nationalization of major industries in both England and France; and the appropriation of industries and property in post-colonial countries.
At the same time, the Great Depression produced the New Deal coalition in the United States, which empowered an insurgent labor movement. The postwar period saw huge gains in growth and productivity, the benefits of which were shared with workers who had strong backing from the trade union movement and from the dominant Democratic Party. Widespread support for liberal social and economic policy was so strong that even a Republican president who won easily twice, Dwight D. Eisenhower, recognized that an assault on the New Deal would be futile. In Eisenhower’s words, “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear from that party again in our political history.”
The six decades between 1914 and 1973 stand out from the past and future, according to Piketty, because the rate of economic growth exceeded the after-tax rate of return on capital. Since then, the rate of growth of the economy has declined, while the return on capital is rising to its pre-World War I levels.
“If the rate of return on capital remains permanently above the rate of growth of the economy – this is Piketty’s key inequality relationship,” Milanovic writes in his review, this “generates a changing functional distribution of income in favor of capital and, if capital incomes are more concentrated than incomes from labor (a rather uncontroversial fact), personal income distribution will also get more unequal—which indeed is what we have witnessed in the past 30 years.”
Piketty has produced the chart at Figure 1 to illustrate his larger point.
The only way to halt this process, he argues, is to impose a global progressive tax on wealth – global in order to prevent (among other things) the transfer of assets to countries without such levies. A global tax, in this scheme, would restrict the concentration of wealth and limit the income flowing to capital.
Piketty would impose an annual graduated tax on stocks and bonds, property and other assets that are customarily not taxed until they are sold. He leaves open the rate and formula for distributing revenues.
The Piketty diagnosis helps explain the recent drop in the share of national income going to labor (see Figure 2) and a parallel increase in the share going to capital.
Piketty’s analysis also sheds light on the worldwide growth in the number of the unemployed. The International Labor Organization, an agency of the United Nations, reported recently that the number of unemployed grew by 5 million from 2012 to 2013, reaching nearly 202 million by the end of last year. It is projected to grow to 215 million by 2018.
Piketty’s wealth tax solution runs directly counter to the principles of contemporary American conservatives who advocate antithetical public policies: cutting top rates and eliminating the estate tax. It would also run counter to the interests of those countries that have purposefully legislated low tax rates in order to attract investment. The very infeasibility of establishing a global wealth tax serves to reinforce Piketty’s argument concerning the inevitability of increasing inequality.
Some Liberals are none too happy with Piketty, either.

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Fig. 2: Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share U.S. Department of Labor

Dean Baker, one of the founders of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote me in an email that he believes that Piketty “is far too pessimistic.” Baker contends that there are a host of far less ambitious actions that might help to ameliorate inequality:
“Is it really implausible that we would ever see any sort of tax on finance in the U.S., either the financial transactions tax that I would favor or the financial activities tax advocated by the I.M.F.?”
Baker also noted that “much of our capital is tied up in intellectual property” and that reform of patent laws could serve both to limit the value of drug and other patents and simultaneously lower consumer costs.
Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, responded to my email asking for his take on Piketty:
“We’d take the perspective that this phenomenon is related to the suppression of wage growth so that policies which generate broad-based wage growth are an antidote. The political economy is such that the political power to enact those taxes also requires a mobilized citizenry and institutional power, such as a robust labor movement.”
Daron Acemoglu, a more centrist economist at MIT, praised Piketty’s careful acquisition of data, as well as his emphasis on the economic forces and political conflicts over distribution that shape inequality. In an email, Acemoglu went on to say:

“Part of his interpretation I do not share. Piketty argues that there is a natural tendency for high inequality in ‘capitalist’ economies (the term capitalist is not my favorite) and that certain unusual events (world wars, the Great Depression and policy responses thereto) temporarily reduced inequality. Then both earnings inequality and inequality between capital and labor have been reverting back to their ‘normal’ levels. I don’t think that the data allow us to reach this conclusion. All we see is this pattern of fall and rise, but so many other things are going on. It is consistent with what Piketty says, but it is also consistent with certain technological changes and discontinuities (or globalization) having created a surge in inequality which will then stabilize or even reverse in the next several decades. It is also consistent with the dynamics of political power changing and this being a major contributor to the rise in inequality in advanced economies. We may be seeing parts of several different trends underpinned by several different major shocks rather than the mean-reverting dynamics following the shocks that Piketty singles out.”

There is, however, significant liberal applause for Piketty.
Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard who specializes in inequality, unions and employment patterns, wrote me by email:
“I am in 100 percent agreement with Piketty and would add that much of labor inequality comes because high earners got paid through stock options and capital ownership.”>
Freeman and two colleagues, Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse, professors at the School of Labor and Management Relations at Rutgers, contend in their 2013 book, “The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy,” that they have an alternative to a global wealth tax. They argue that:
“The way forward is to reform the structure of American business so that workers can supplement their wages with significant capital ownership stakes and meaningful capital income and profit shares.”
In other words, let’s turn everyone into a capitalist.
Piketty does not treat worker ownership as a solution, and he is generally dismissive of small-bore reforms, arguing that they will have only modest effects on economic growth worldwide, which he believes is very likely to be stuck at 1 to 1.5 percent through the rest of this century.
Piketty’s joins a number of scholars raising significant questions about how the global economic system will deal with such phenomena as robotics, the hollowing out of the job market, outsourcing and global competition.
His prognosis is extremely bleak. Without what he acknowledges is a politically unrealistic global wealth tax, he sees the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption.
Final judgment on Piketty’s work will come with time – a problem in and of itself, because if he is right, inequality will worsen, making it all the more difficult to take preemptive action.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

All very well, except that Piketty does not tell anyone what to do with the tax raised by his proposal. Again, that his outlook is bleak. This is telling us we have a problem. It is certainly NOT presenting a solid well thought out solution.

[Southernguy]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

I agree with Piketty in the overall diagnosis. Capitalism (the name says all) shall always "naturally" tend to growing inequality.
I do not agree about the cause of the more egalitarian 20th. century years. I think the underlying reason was the Russian revolution in 1917 and after that the Chinese (and others). That lasted until socialism began to lose strength. First it was the "four modernizations" of Deng in China in 1978, then the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.
After 1917 a socialist consolidated (in the 20's and 30's) regime in the biggest territory in the world and, after that, a very powerfull Soviet Union emerging after WW II left no other possibility to the ruling classes than allowing workers to take a bigger share of the pie.
Both socialist revolutions reversed the "natural" development of capitalism sets itself.
As to the "solutions"....

[gwynedd1]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

First of all, the reason why all my own thinking revolves around the use of the formal systems of law and taxation that naturally envelope the small private business structure, is that I believe in the power of those structures to deliver law to the ordinary people; and tax income to pay for the underlying costs of those structures.

Well there is our problem. I am against all income taxes. So we have a fundamental disagreement.

Where I differ from present usage, is that as I see it, the underlying problem is a lack of employment for those that would wish to better themselves through the opportunity to earn a living to support their wish to create a home and a family.

Which is why I am against punishing them for working with income taxes.

As an example, here in my village, I sometimes sweep the road and pavement clear of winter storm leaves and branches outside our village school where mothers drop off their children. No one pays me, I do not ask for payment. However, I could not live any form of life by such work; it is entirely voluntary. To be able to improve my lot, to enable me to attain the opportunity to do those things that come naturally to any man, home and family; I must have a means to earn an income. In which case, I must have someone that will pay me such an income; OR; I have to be able to sell something that I have created to someone else that has sufficient income to be able to pay me.

If you don't have a lot, why bother? I wouldn't. If I were a Gen-Y I would be in a near state of rebellion. Good thing I suppose I am not of that generation, but I find myself in a perilous position to pacify them. As for now they just increasingly drop out of the system.

As I see it, that is the underlying structure of what one might describe as ordinary life. It has always been such. You describe the difficulties Turgot encountered; I would answer that they are exactly what I will expect to also encounter; except for one thing; the sum of human knowledge is now much greater. Many today recognise that we are on the wrong track economically; we thus have to change direction.

Then why not follow the 19th century moral philosophers who already figured it out? Why just pick out free trade only attacking the labor monopolies while leaving the others intact?

My use of the phrase Free Enterprise was never intended to also suggest that I had discovered it. Instead, all I am doing is re-introduce the idea into common usage. Again, I make it perfectly clear that I do not believe in what is today called capitalism, what I describe as feudal mercantilism. However, I do believe in true free market use of equity capital as the primary means of new investment into new means for the ordinary person to earn the living they must have access to to enable them to add to their own prosperity.

It is in common use today, only as I say, its only applied to specific monopolies. I don't really know what that last sentence even means. "Capital" is not a well defined jargon. I define it as a product of human labor. This is not the generally accepted definition. It now represents anything not labor. So Capitalism today includes, political access, land, privilege, cost socialization in externalities with private equity, and arbitrarily applied law.

Patents and copyright are particularly the product of the human intellectual capacity, as is this response to your above posting. All such adds to the overall stock of our knowledge.

No they are not. If you think so then we may as well move on because it not even reality. They are legally created entities. The only value that comes from them is through enforcement from government in granting a monopoly right. Now if we decide we want to protect invention in the private markets then at least it should be funded by the invention. However I have seen the dark side of this in software patents, public domain and natural ingredients like Stevia, all merely legal abuses. The biggest insult of all is to tax the general public to fund the legal system to enforce it. People that buy Coke should pay for the enforcement of the trademark. Hence the principle of the user fee for government services.

From the outset, you keep returning to the operations of very large corporations. So I ask; have you ever worked within a new very small start up company of, say, less than thirty people?

For 10 years I ran my own business, and nowhere did I say anything about the operations of large corporations. Small companies use trade marks. Startups get patent protection . So again this is an alternate reality.

I suspect not. If you had, you would understand the very real adventure of discovery, by everyone in the small team as they all learn new ways to do things and the great fun to be enjoyed working in such a small team.

Your patronizing arrogance is beyond belief. The conversation is terminated.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

I do apologise for the inference; however, we are on opposite sides of the debate and perhaps a period of reflection will be a good thing for the both of us.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

I do apologise for the inference; however, we are on opposite sides of the debate and perhaps a period of reflection will be a good thing for the both of us.

Apology accepted.

You may attack my arguments without prejudice. It is usually very simple to maintain a clean argument given the compilation of what are known as rhetorical/logical fallacies. If you follow those standards there is little need to reflect. Just stick to the argument without assuming a personal bias.

As for my personal life I am very creative . I just don't try to make a business out of it for many reasons. One of them is that the tax system has properly discouraged me. I will not bring it to market.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

Thank you.

[don]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?--Most Definitely!

floating down the Amazon . . .

[aaron]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?

Interesting article on how robots and technology (and quasi-monopolies therein via patents) might be responsible for part of the income gap.

So, robot and technology power is reducing the natural employment rate. But rather than our subsidising those who have lost jobs to technology, so as to spread that manna wealth that’s literally dropped onto the surface of the earth at no-one’s physical disadvantage, companies are using monopoly power to extort rents on the capital that is creating all that free wealth.
That’s why inequality is rising.
As technology proceeds in a patent-obsessed world, the fruits of innovation flow to the owners of the capital and invention, forming a whole new rentier class. The financial assets/debts that back the innovation technology, meanwhile, get disproportionally valuable as their purchasing power gets completely out of whack with the output they radically accelerate.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/12/1...rentier-class/

Nice old thread. Thanks Don for reviving it.

I will have to say yes. We are getting to that point where 10% of people will control the robots owned by the .01%/govt, that will produce enough for 100%.

How do we bring dignity (jobs or $) and wealth to the other 90%?

[Southernguy]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?

If production does not descend, on the contrary, productivity goes ever up, there is not a scarcity of goods. Wealth should be redistributed, taxes on capital, on estate, etc. On the other side higher minimum wages and universal income. Limiting the working day is also an alternative: if productivity goes radically up why should people be forced to work more time?

Nice old thread. Thanks Don for reviving it.

I will have to say yes. We are getting to that point where 10% of people will control the robots owned by the .01%/govt, that will produce enough for 100%.

How do we bring dignity (jobs or $) and wealth to the other 90%?

[jpatter666]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?

Nice old thread. Thanks Don for reviving it.

I will have to say yes. We are getting to that point where 10% of people will control the robots owned by the .01%/govt, that will produce enough for 100%.

How do we bring dignity (jobs or $) and wealth to the other 90%?

Ironically, this is one of the points driving arguments for a "minimum income" in the US.

It's a nice concept, but I find it impractical unless it could be applied on a planetary scale *and* in a context of virtually unlimited resources.

Which is currently impossible.

[don]

Re: Are robots and technology behind the income gap?

from the field . . .