
The consumer driven economy is for people who don't naturally automate things - DickingAround
http://obvioustothecasualobserver.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-consumer-driven-economy-is-for.html
======
cwhy
I am from China, and I can share a bit of what I have learnt about Marxism in
my secondary school:

1\. As technology advances, machines will do more and more things that what
human originally do.

2\. As a result, less people will have jobs.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment)

3\. At the same time, people (organization) who owns (not develops) machines
will take this income.

4\. People (organization) who owns more machines can more easily to buy
another one.

5\. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.

-. Capitalism has bugs.

In the future (my crazy thoughts):

(If machines keep getting smarter)

> More and more jobs are handled by humans, thus things like labor strike will
> have less and less impact on machine owners - since machines can still work
> for them.

(If machines are smarter than human)

> People who cannot develop machines will have no competition with machine
> owners, since they have machines which are smarter

(If machines can developer machines)

> Even people who can develop machines (maybe the last group of people) will
> be unemployed. People who own machines will have endless expansion. And
> people's life will be depending on how many machines they have and how
> advanced the machines are.

About new jobs the machine enables:

Other than machine generator/operators, most of them are entertainment which
are generated needs. This portion of job looks unlikely will be replaced by
machines. But who knows.

I know my logic may be flawed and all objections with reasons are extremely
welcome.

I only proposed a problem with no solution, as I cannot imagine one (and
definitely not pure centralized socialism), and I like machines.

~~~
noonespecial
>5\. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.

I'm going to go ahead and call you on that one. What you probably mean is that
rich people will get a lot richer comparatively. There will be a wider gap on
paper.

Those same machines have a tendency to make that paper gap more meaningless as
time goes on. Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Even the
poorest people in developed countries live lives unimaginable to the rich of
the past.

The question is: Would you rather be a poor man in a rich society or a rich
man in a poor one?

This isn't to say that we don't need a better token of societal value than "an
hour of labor" to face our own strange future, but I don't subscribe to the
"Elysium" point of view.

~~~
malandrew
Totally agree, but I think the question that capitalists need to ask is given
the current level of abundance in X and scarcity in Y, what should every human
being be privelaged to?

When food was scarce, it would be unreasonable to think that anyone but those
that produced the food were entitled. However, now that we can produce as much
food as we currently can, how can we justify that some people in the world can
exist in such dire straits that they must still endure hunger.

Today, we have enough abundance in key areas of human necessity that should be
able to ensure that no human goes hungry ever again, yet many still do.

~~~
atrus
Isn't most hunger due to distribution issues, not supply issues?

------
AndrewKemendo
The thought is generally good but it overshoots the solution I think in one
key respect: consumer priorities. I think for this post you are conflating
consumer spending with luxury spending.

If indeed there were a single minded "consumerism" that strictly identified
more or less meaningless items (luxury goods) as the key consumption then I
would agree.

The fact is however, "consumer driven economy" simply is distinguishing an
economy that predominantly privately spends more than it publicly spends,
saves or invests.

To that point, I agree that we should be automating more things to free up all
of our time. I hope someday to automate food production so that it can
actually come full cycle, so there is definitely something there.

~~~
DickingAround
But don't we already have a society that only has 2% of people working on food
production? If that is considered the only non-luxury/required good, then most
of us are working to get more luxuries.

~~~
vbuterin
Food is basically a solved problem. Priority #1 is medical care IMO. Housing
is expensive, but really Japanese-style closet hotels can solve that problem
for ultracheap if needed (as I understand it's mostly zoning laws preventing
it right now). If we can get medical care to the point where, say, the 1970s
standard of care is as cheap as food is, then we're basically at post-
scarcity.

~~~
ehsanu1
_If we can get medical care to the point where, say, the 1970s standard of
care is as cheap as food is, then we 're basically at post-scarcity._

How so? Post-scarcity implies, to me at least, that nobody has to work to
live: _everything_ is abundant and free.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
scarcity_economy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy)

~~~
vbuterin
People will always work; some people just want to do stuff for fun. If we can
get the need for employment down to that low percentage, then we're de facto
there IMO. At that point, there are several ways to fill in the missing
pieces; a government-funded (or even ideally endowment-funded) basic income,
food becoming a gimmick to attract customers rather than a commodity the same
way water is today, the equivalent of public libraries and bookstores for
housing, etc. Money probably won't be an issue in any case; if work is done by
that percentage of people who want to work, they won't necessarily need a
salary; I can see money being limited to a mechanism for regulating large-
scale resource use.

------
jkramer7
Can someone clarify? I'm not sure what end goal the article is driving at. Are
we aiming for more free time?

If that's the case, then I fail to see how automation helps. Companies have
incentives to hire as few employees as possible -- it cuts down on
administrative overhead, like the necessity of sending out a check to each
employee. The result will be as many full-time employees as possible. The
workers displaced by automation then move on to make other goods (perhaps
napkins) or provide other services, with the same incentives to work full-
time, and nobody has any more free time. The end result is just more goods to
purchase, which the author seems to have disdain for.

~~~
gilgoomesh
The article is poorly written.

The article starts by talking about pointless consumer spending (convincing
people to buy things they don't need). This is a net loss to society.

However, the article doesn't make any kind of distinction between pointless
consumer spending and wise consumer spending and instead runs off on a totally
unrelated tangent about automation (which certainly helps but isn't related to
the macroeconomic effects of consumption).

The article totally ignores the fact that "wise" consumer spending is a
significant benefit to everyone – i.e. when consumers are buying things they
need or where the benefit of the purchase _exceeds_ the effort input to
earning the money. It also helps progress the economy when consumers are
buying products that are new and innovative and make technology or business
model improvements.

------
iSnow
I cannot see how increased automation without some pseudo-socialist
redistribution of income is going to reduce working hours.

We had lots and lots of automation over the last generations - and all it led
to is still the same long weeks, overnighters, checking in to the company via
smartphone. The jobs made redundant have been replace by bullshit pseudo-jobs
like commnity managers and social media experts.

~~~
jamesaguilar
It's a shame you think community manager is a bullshit job. Do you want to
work the forums two hours a day rather than code? That's what the "community
managers" at my workplace do, and I really appreciate it.

~~~
iSnow
I do something like this in my spare time (not two hours a day of course) and
would not ever consider it an occupation.

But it's not community manager per se - I could have chosen grocery packers at
the checkout too. I was trying to pick on fluff jobs that are only marginally
useful and can only exist because they cannot easily be automated and add just
enough of marginal value that companies decide to pay for it. I doubt anyone
would notice if they were gone and replaced by an inferior automaton longer
than 2 weeks.

The point is: we are not reaping the fruits of 150 years of fierce
rationalization, but fight for the 10% indispensable employees, keep the
majority employed whether it makes sense or not - and pay the rest just enough
that they don't starve. Seems dysfunctional to me.

------
aaron695
>Fewer are willing to admit the culturally-exploratory, finding-yourself
vacation experience we read about on a travel blog has pretty much the same
level of benefit to society.

Totally lost me on this line. What's the point of being alive if you're not
going to have experiences like travel. That pretty much only leaves work as an
option to fill you're time.

~~~
peterkelly
While I'm mostly in agreement with the rest of the article, I think on this
point that cultural exploration does actually benefit society to a degree,
because it results in people who are better educated about the world and less
xenephobic/racist. If you spent a gap year in a particular country and have
friends there, you're much less likely to support a war against that country.

~~~
DickingAround
I'd agree that cultural exploration can benefit society by making people more
accepting of each other. But I'd like to distinguish it as still being a form
of consumption/production since no production is permanently improved. For
example, if the person who did the exploration dies, unless they've done
something clearly permanent to teach it to their kids or enshrine that
learning, the experience will die with them. I feel like many vacations end up
in that category, though obviously it's not a universal situation.

~~~
peterkelly
I consider it a combination of consumption and education, rather than
production per se.

The balance between these two factors depends a lot on the person; someone who
goes abroad just to party will have a little bit of cultural immersion but
mostly just consume. Someone who goes abroad to seriously learn about a
country, learn the language, spend time living there and getting to know the
locals, will have more of an education.

But I agree it can't be classified as production.

------
yzhengyu
Article comes across to me as a very preachy, high falutin, very warped
perception of what constitutes a modern economy.

If the end outcome of increasingly rapid automation means that a significant
percentage of humanity ends up being unable to participate in economic
activity due to an inability to acquire currency, then we are in big trouble.

~~~
contingencies
Maybe, as some people suggest, we need to redefine the nature of currency
using social and environmental welfare as factors? The problem is, SWIFT, SIX
Interbank Clearing and the ISO don't support this, banks don't support this,
and national governments don't support this. Instead, IMHO, they pay it just
enough lip service (eg. carbon credits) to keep it from having a truly fair
go. With the technology we have available today, alternate and more broadly
informed currencies are entirely feasible as potential instruments of trade
for large portions of the economy, at least in the developed world. The kicker
is, it will detract from nationalism, and governments have a PR problem with
taxing the facilitation of social or environmental good.

~~~
rapala
How would these social and environmental factors be featured in the new
currency? How would they differ from the current situation where things like
moral value of goods are reflected directly in the price (green energy costs
more because it has more value)? I'm having difficulties seeing how this new
currency would work.

~~~
contingencies
I'm no expert, there is an entire field here. However, basically, anything
people agree to value can function as an asset to be traded as nationally
issued fiat-currency (debt) is today. There's essentially no difference,
though the latter has the historical benefit of being demanded as tax and
supporting by a large army, theoretically though the governments cannot wield
these against the hippy next door for, you know, growing trees (environmental
credits) or sharing spliffs (social credits).

People wanting the currency (debt) is based upon trust; ie. the trust that the
debt society owes you, symbolized in the form of your possession of the asset
in question, will be redeemed at some future point by someone else for
something you want. (Note that due to inflation and the creation of money in
current era systems this debt notion is flipped; typical money must be repaid
- with interest, at speed - or forfeited. But that's a tangent.)

A path forward will probably include convincing one or more governments to
adopt some alternate assets and begin to effectively provide rates of exchange
through government tax incentives or similar. This could kickstart a modern
renaissance in multi-asset accounting and localized economies. Not holding my
breath on speed, but anything's possible. Part of the challenge here is that
social and environmental concerns typically cross borders and election terms,
and developed countries' political decisionmaking is heavily blinkered against
these two classes of issue.

Recommended reading: _Debt: The First 5000 Years_.

------
joe_the_user
Actually,

I would suggest that to "improve ... humanity in general" you actually need to
redefine the production process, the consumption process and what gets
consumed.

If you keep the keep the same assumptions and automate more, all you wind-up
with is people lose their jobs and become homeless because there's no new
activity for them to do. And his example of increase production shows how that
doesn't necessarily improve things. Of course, any increase in production
_does_ redefine all this stuff, it has to. The question is whether it
redefines them enough.

------
shadowOfShadow
One sized straw man =/=> all.

------
xlayn
first than nothing, discussion about the topic is great as most of the times
is @hn, but I have this felling about this post:

why this kind of post keep appearing in HN? is this also going to go the same
way of decadence as slashdot to end up being another Yahoo answers?

Let start to dissect the post: The tenet is:

"Consumption doesn't improve economy or humanity in general. Neither does
production. If you want to help, start automating things."

first thing first, where is the cold, hard data supporting this, or is this
another "I would write some fancy stuff on my blog and get it re-blogged, I'm
so tweet-in"? this is starting to be a trend, in which people throw a lot of
poorly supported stuff to their blogs so they look "in".

Poor argument, emotion driven conclusion, at the beginning of the second
paragraph is stated: "Imagine" but he later concludes: "At this point, both of
them are getting fat from their excessive consumption and working harder pay
for it all." what the heck does being fat has to do with the idea behind it
all? is this a slimfast supporting post? what does the fat analogy means? was
an analogy?

"Both are now working harder for things they don't need" why they both should
work harder? if they did not want ice cream or cookies the example is flawed
in first place, economic should start with things that are required and go up
to things we want a la Maslov.

"Of course, if they were intelligent people they'd try to improve the
production of cookies and ice cream" it's called "competition" and it does
already exist, it force you to create new technology to make the process
cheaper and have better income from the same products allowing you to get your
prices low (because you have better earning marging) and still be profitable,
it's what prevents you from start making average tennis shoes, or cookies or
ice cream because someone else is already way better at doing that; PLEASE do
not come to the argument of "if they were intelligent" explain why is better.

"Is it true that we will only automate the processes we're working on once
we're <<working long hours for things we don't need?>>" at this point I'm
starting to think this is about a existential problem/phase of the author.

and I'm pretty sure you can start dissecting any part of the post with
arguments pro and against it, as with anything else, it's the lack of any new
light that bothers me, please don't tell me this will start to be the "throw
some random stuff so I can show I'm cool" place.

