If the farmers work altruistically, and the mechanics that build the tractors don't, then there is a problem. How do the farmers pay the mechanics? I suppose they could work without some of these tools, but considerably less efficiently.
Tractors? What, are we in the 1900s?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farmingFor
example:
I don't know how basic income works.
The basic premise is that every citizen receives a check whether or not they're working and regardless of other factors. If you have a job, the basic income check is unaffected, and your income from the job is unaffected by basic income.
First question is usually "who pays for it?" To which the answer is: we cannibalize existing benefits programs, and eliminate all the bureaucracy and means testing associated with them. Welfare, unemployment, social security, medicare....you get rid of all of those, divide the money spent on them by the number of people over age of majority in the country and write checks.
In the US, that number works out to about $5000/yr. If you want more, get a job, you still get the $5000/yr, and without the tax disincentive to work that currently exists with welfare systems: as is, if you're collecting welfare then get a job...you lose the welfare income. So, the number is high enough that nobody needs to starve, but low enough that people still would probably for the most part choose to work if they can. But the point is mostly to address the inevitable shortage of work due to technological obsolescence, and the smooth the transition to an eventual post scarcity economy. Yes, we can reduce work hours like
you suggested, but for example...what happens when
driverless cars and
delivery drones destroy the taxi, shipping, bus and trucking industries?That's going to be quite a few million people rather suddenly out of work. And unlike previous instances of technological unemployment, there's not necessarily going to be a new factory job created by it for those people to transition to. Even if you reduce work hours to compensate, there would be a transition period while people retrain for new positions during which they still need to eat. Basic income is a possible solution that smooths out those bumps.
Why has no one mentioned scarcity yet?
Largely because scarcity is an illusion. This isn't high school economics, and we're not playing Starcaft where there's only X crystal on the map and once you mine it, it's gone. For almost everything we care about resource scarcity isn't a meaningful concern. Unless you simply want to be pedantic and talk about entropy, the vast majority of all materials we use will last longer than we can reasonably expect humans to exist as a species.
Most obvious example being oil.
When "peak oil" was originally theorized in the 1950s, it was predicted that we'd reach peak oil sometime between
1965 and 1971. Yet, here we are ~60 years later and known oil reserves are still being predicted to last decades. Part of this is a very basic misunderstanding of what "known
oil reserves" are. They're oil...that we know where it is...and that is
economically viable to process under current market and technological conditions. So we right now know where decades worth of oil are. And for decades we've known where decades worth of oil are. Why? Because when you already know where decades worth of oil there
there's no reason to keep looking for more.
So let's go looking for an actual numbner. Here we go:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/06/28/the-world-was-533-years-of-oil-left/11528999/"enough oil to last the world 53.3 years at the current production rates. "Right now, we know where there's ~50 years worth of oil that's financially viable with current techology. But you have to understand that the oil that we're producing right now was considered unviable in previous decades. But pay more per barrel and there's more available. Improve technology and there's more available.
For example:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-oil-find-holds-oil-opec/story?id=17536852"...if half of the oil bound up in the rock of the Green River Formation could be recovered it would be "equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves."""...in all of human history -- we have consumed 1 trillion barrels of oil. There are several times that much here,""We're not going to run out, because long before the prospect of actual physical resource limits become anywhere even close to an issue...
we're not going to be using it anymore. Do you really think society is going to depend on gasoline combustion engines in 50-100 years?
When "peak oil production" hits, it's not going to be because there's no more oil. It's going to be because we've simply stopping using it. Remember there are synthetic oils for lubrication. the modern petroleum industry is only
about 150 years old, and we're not still going to be burning fossil fuels in 150 years any more than we use horses to pull carriages.
Anyway, to speak more generally than the specific example of oil, scarcity is an illusion. The universe doesn't work like Starcraft. Remember that the water your body is composed of has been around for millions of years. Things don't get "used up" when they're used. They simply move around and change form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy"...energy of an isolated system cannot change—it is said to be conserved over time. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed,"Worrying about "running out of stuff" is silly. Scarcity is an illusion. Yes, like somebody pointed out earlier in the thread, things like front row seats at a specific concert exist in scarcity. Yeah, ok. And? While we're at it, the sun might become a red giant in a couple billion years. Neither of these need to be policy concerns.
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Topic: The Concept of Money (Read 17967 times)