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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:52AM
Thus, either you revert to forced labor or decide to give the rabble enough so they continue to work for you "on their own accord" (rather than hunt you with pitchforks). If the later, someone will have to pay (give away some wealth). So who's the one to pay?
The oligarchy pays directly to people who are still useful to them. The ranks of these are shrinking, as more and more R&D is moved abroad. Just owning a building in a US city costs you millions per year in property taxes. You could sell this building, stop bleeding money, and instead hire people in India or China. Same output, but far lower expenses.
The government pays to the people who are NOT useful to the oligarchy. The purpose of those payouts (also known as "social security") is simply to render them harmless.
This system filters the labor pool by age, competence, experience. Those that are useful get employed, and they are paid far better than the other. For a while. Then they are cast away, and new workers are hired, younger and with more recent education. Those that are not useful anymore... they are left to rot, in every meaning of the word. Drugs and crime are *necessary* ingredients in this scheme; consequently, strong and violent police controls those ghettos.
This happens not because oligarchs are inherently evil. They are not. They would gladly hire a man from a ghetto if they can make a buck on him. This happens in sports all the time, even though those athletes retain a piece of ghetto within them, and it often bites them. But team owners have to deal with this, as it is their job.
The problem occurs because oligarchs simply cannot use most of those unwanted persons. A bank does not need a hundred clerks if ten clerks + 10 ATM + Internet are sufficient. What those 90 unwanted clerks are to do? New, high quality cars require less service. New TV sets are so cheap that repairs are impractical. Industrialized farming has no use for men with scythes to harvest the grain. Assembly of modern electronics cannot be done by hand - the parts are too small to see. This is happening everywhere. Too few people can actually be productive today, just as a Neanderthal would be not very much in demand in America of 1900's. The government, on request of oligarchy, chose to kick the can down the road by taxing the still working people and sharing their labor with those who do not work, for one reason or another. Better than euthanasia, I guess...
If we extrapolate the process, we will end up with an island where a few people live surrounded by their robots. They do not need humans to service them, outside of very few special jobs (medical, for one.) Just like Solaria [wikipedia.org] of Isaac Asimov:
What will happen with other 5,999,999,000 people that currently live on Earth? I guess we better not ask, since there is no place for them in that Paradise. If they are lucky, they will be shoved underground [wikipedia.org], fed with yeast, and safely confined there as they develop agoraphobia. If they are not so lucky, they will simply disappear as a waste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:09PM
You forgot to mention the horse and buggy whip makers....
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:43PM
You forgot to mention the horse and buggy whip makers....
The whip makers were lucky, for a while, that their woodworking and leather handling skills were still useful in other industries, like furniture. But how many furniture items do you have today that are NOT made at a huge factory by huge particle board presses? I do know of few sellers of handcrafted items, and I do buy from them from time to time - but they can provide employment only to one ex-whipmaker out of a thousand.
For hundreds of generations human societies developed without much need for advanced intelligence. Everyone was smart enough to be employed. The first deviation from this happened during early industrialization. It did result in destroying ancient trades (guilds) and creating the proletariat. We are now in another state of industrialization, where the very ability to perform useful work depends on worker's intellect and education. Employers have no use for monkeys who pull a lever whenever a light goes on; and they don't need hordes of those monkeys, one per machine. The new worker has to be smart, well educated, and very flexible, as it's unlikely that he will be working at the same factory from cradle to grave. The demand for such workers harvests only the best and brightest from the labor pool. Since the demand is limited in volume, employers have no need to dip deeper into that pool. The unclaimed labor remains unclaimed.