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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:34PM
Then create new jobs. New classes of simple jobs that a plumber or a car repairer or a streetsweeper could retrain to do.
So your solution is make-work jobs? How about we set up a factory with two sides: on one side, people busy assembly wooden shipping crates. Then these crates are moved to the other side, where a different team of workers disassembles these crates for recycling. The wooden pieces are then moved back to the first side, where they're used to assemble wooden shipping crates. Repeat ad infinitum.
You think people should spend all their time and effort doing this?
This is why we need to just enact the Basic Income scheme.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:16PM
I have a better idea. Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods. It would be awesome for PR if a corporation publicly advertised that they were employing more people at better wages.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:30PM
Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods.
Ok, how do you propose that humans build microprocessors which have features only tens of nanometers large? No one has that level of fine motor skill.
Lots of things are made by automation these days because the quality is far superior to human-made stuff. You want to go back to hand-knitted fabrics, so we can all look like serfs from the Medieval days?
When has charging more for something of lower quality ever worked as a general rule? It might work for a few markets when you're catering to rich people who like to show off, but in general places like Walmart thrive because they have the lowest prices.
And finally, why should people spend their lives doing boring, monotonous work that a simple robot could do much better? How is that improving human dignity? It's not. We should all be benefiting from the labor of robots and automation (as long as we keep them dumb so we don't have a Butlerian Jihad). We should be spending time enjoying our lives and doing creative things, not toiling away at mind-numbing jobs just so we can survive. We have the technology to do this now; we should be enjoying the fruits of this technology we've built.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:36PM
You need not be so pessimistic. There's plenty of areas we could put more people into if society deemed it worthwhile. Care of the elderly and children for example. More people to keep our cities/town clean, more frequent garbage pickup, more people to fix the various decaying infrastructures we have etc. Hell, even relatively trivial things like home cleaning would be doable if we all had more cash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @08:18AM
He wasn't suggesting that jobs should be created purely for the sake of creating job, but to do things others would find beneficial. Take a look around, around where you live and where you work. Do you really not see things people could be employed to do, or is the environment you live and work in perfect already?
Although that said, it may be beneficial to impose a maximum work week along with a minimum wage, this would help distribute the available work more evenly and give people more free time which they could use to take care of their health (e.g. exercise and get a bit more sleep) or learn something, this would lead to healthier, happier workers who are less likely to need to take time off sick.
I don't think we are quite ready for a basic income scheme just yet, there is still plenty of work that needs doing, though someday, probably in the not too distant future it will be necessary. That isn't to say that people who are unemployed shouldn't get a basic income, but they should be trying to get work if they can work and can't support themselves.