The repercussions, ethics, and morality of a post-scarcity society

It's not directly addressed in those terms, but that's pretty close to the topic of some of the videos linked in the first page. This whole thread is about ending the idea that your employer should be able to effectively blackmail you with starvation.

Apologies if I say something offensive by accident, I'm still a bit new at this.

Am I missing something, or is the idea of post-scarcity innately kinda anti-employer, at least in the sense of desiring to take power away from employers? And so, will be read as anti-corporate and possibly anti-capitalism?

In that it takes away the power of an employer to determine whether an employee can have enough food to eat and a home to live in, yes, it is most definitely "anti-employer".

We've spent some time here discussing ways to make post-scarcity compatible with a capitalist ethos, and the best we've come up with is to guarantee a minimum standard of living for all people regardless of station or circumstance, and have work grant the ability to obtain luxuries.

What constitutes a luxury depends on the level of post-scarcity.

edited 31st Mar '14 6:53:24 AM by Fighteer

Well, considering that I've slogged through a lot of the worst that employment has to offer, and currently work for a company that's fairly unsubtle about starvation and eviction being the only reasons that anybody would be motivated to work for them... Bluntly, they'll go out of business if people didn't need to work to not starve.

OTOH, interactions with coworkers have probably been the best things for the evolution of my worldview, except maybe the internet. I had a work friend who'd lived in Baghdad under Saddam. Apparently there was a rice ration that everybody was issued, regardless of if they worked or not. My coworker was an artist, so he just lived on his rice ration and did his artist thing.

Good. Really, that's an excellent outcome, as far as I'm concerned.

That's easy to say. What's harder is living in a world without supermarkets, fast food chains, and other such enterprises.

The problem with saying, "Down with all businesses that are akin to slave labor!" is that they provide a lot of services that many of us take for granted.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:01:36 AM by TobiasDrake

Except we've seen evidence that such businesses can survive just fine paying employees a living wage while still offering affordable goods. We have examples all over the place.

They can, yes, but they don't want to, and greedy entrepreneurs are always looking for ways around it. Look at the manufacturing industry. We outlawed child labor, which doesn't mean we stopped doing it, just that we started outsourcing our child labor to foreign countries. We still love us some sweatshops, even if our citizens can't be the ones in them.

Major corporations don't have to improve when taking their business somewhere more lucrative is an option. You say employees have to be paid $10 an hour, I move my operations somewhere I can still pay them $2, and your citizens become unemployed.

How long can post-scarcity society thrive in an atmosphere of mass unemployment, until it rediscovers scarcity? We're all taking "post-scarcity" to be a toggle that, once you hit it, you can never fall back out of it again. That it will remain post-scarcity without any maintenance or upkeep on anyone's part.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:08:19 AM by TobiasDrake

You can't offshore shelf stockers and cashiers. It's simply not possible. There are some forms of labor that we'll always need.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:07:23 AM by Fighteer

Sure, you can. Amazon.com manages just fine without either.

EDIT: ...I argued the example instead of the point. Apologies.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:09:37 AM by TobiasDrake

From the General Economics thread, the current trend is actually jobs coming back in to the country, not going out. Currency valuation changes and supply chain issues in some of our third world manufacturing countries are causing a reverse trend.

Anyway, you're missing the point. If increased automation provides labor savings, then it means we will see a shift from labor to capital expenses, with corresponding change in profit margins. We tax those profits to provide a minimum living for the people that are no longer directly employed.

Most of the jobs "lost" in such a shift are menial, anyway, and not the kind of thing someone takes on because they want to make a career out of it. We don't really lose all that much by getting rid of them.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:17:05 AM by Fighteer

We lose an opportunity for an up-and-coming workforce to gain experience, learn responsibility, and get their feet wet in the working world. Many of those menial tasks are supposed to be First Jobs for kids, acclimating them to the working world.

With today's economy, those positions have become careers because employees are desperate to find work anywhere, but they aren't supposed to be careers at all. You're not supposed to spend 20 years running a checkstand; you're supposed to spend 2-3 years there while you finish up college, and then move into your career with an understanding of what will be expected of you in a professional environment.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:22:16 AM by TobiasDrake

You're still missing the point of post-scarcity. In the world we're talking about, those issues are immaterial because nobody has to do menial work unless they want to, whether for access to luxuries or as a stepping stone to more desirable work.

There's no reason why an "apprentice" job has to pay shit wages anyway, other than employers being able to take advantage of their market power.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:24:58 AM by Fighteer

Apprentice jobs pay shit wages because employers have to strike a balance between paying as low as they can - this will always be a desire for employers, no matter what happens to the marketplace - and paying a wage that people will accept. Even if these apprentice jobs have a quantifiably higher wage, they'll still be relatively low paying. A teenager running a checkstand will never make as much as a doctor or a lawyer, because they're much easier to come by and far more easily replaceable than someone with a PHD and 15 years of experience. Even if employees don't have to have jobs, employees who want jobs are still more easily replaceable than employees who want jobs and also have a PHD and 15 years of experience.

Employees are, themselves, subject to scarcity. The more scarce an employee is, the more valuable of a resource they become, and the more employers will pay. Taking away the scarcity of food and shelter means these bottom-level drone employees will have the option of not having a job at all, but those who want to work to obtain luxuries will still need to get in on the ground floor.

Even without having to pay to survive, nobody's going to jump from unemployed to performing heart surgery without gaining a lot of education and experience along the way. ...unless they do, in which case, this is a society that's going to destroy itself pretty fast if random, uneducated civilians are performing all the tasks necessary to keep everything going.

I see no reason why being able to quit your job and live off government rations in community housing would have any more impact on the job market than being able to quit your job and live in a homeless shelter eating charity food.

edited 31st Mar '14 8:41:20 AM by TobiasDrake

Food, housing, and healthcare security are some of the most critical needs keeping poor people from having class mobility. Anything we can do to make those better will only help things. The rest follows naturally: if everyone has those, then what motivates work?

It will help things, yes, but it won't make retail employees suddenly become highly-valuable resources, especially not on the level of doctors or lawyers. All jobs are subject to that same point: what motivates work?

And won't it mean that there are some jobs that nobody will want to do, or times nobody will want to work, yet it still needs to be done?

That just means you have to incentivize those jobs more by offering them pay commensurate with their desirability.

There will always be jobs nobody wants. That's why those jobs are the domain of people who can't get jobs anywhere else. Someone has to be a shit-shoveler, because if nobody does it, then the shit just piles up.

Janitorial staff, for instance, provides a very valuable service that most people wouldn't do if they could be a doctor or a video game salesman instead, but someone has to, or it doesn't get done. It's not a lucrative career because it's a task that an uneducated 14-year-old could perform adequately. Literally anyone can be hired for the role, so the paycheck isn't gorgeous.

Why would this change in a post-scarcity world? It's just as vital a task as in a scarcity world, but the job requirements are just as unskilled. Sure, a janitor could choose to quit his job and live off government supplement, but not everyone wants to live in a shack eating crap food; and keep in mind, those terms are relative. If you can buy better housing and better food, then even a mansion with fifty rooms that serves caviar every day is living in a shack with crappy food. Scarcity is a major influence on how we qualify our living conditions; even in America today, many of our povertous live and eat better than middle-class citizens of other nations.

Why would I pay you more when there's a 14-year-old right over there who can do the job just as well as you can, who really, really wants to be able to buy some new video games and eat at Pizza Hut three times a week?

edited 31st Mar '14 9:49:48 AM by TobiasDrake

If that 14 year old wants the job of shit sweeper so he can buy the latest edition of Call of Duty, then that's exactly the kind of incentive that I'm talking about.

If we remove the incentives of "feeding, housing, and providing medical care for your family", then other incentives must develop.

edited 31st Mar '14 9:51:30 AM by Fighteer

But those incentives don't go anywhere. Better food, housing, and medical care for your family would still exist.

Those other incentives exist today. You can live on the streets in the United States right now. I've done it. You can live in a homeless shelter, eat food that was donated to charity or eat at a soup kitchen. Medical insurance is the only one that wasn't free, at least at that time; I'm not sure what Obamacare's done for that one way or the other.

But the point stands: there already is a bottom line state for both food and shelter, but people are still working terrible jobs because they want decent food and shelter instead of that bottom line crap. Why would that change?

edited 31st Mar '14 9:56:32 AM by TobiasDrake

We're talking about raising the bottom line to what our society is capable of producing for everyone.

And my question remains: why would that change the number of people who want to live above that bottom line? No matter where you set the poverty line, there will always be a poverty line, and the people who live there will be povertous.

Poverty might be more comfortable, but it's still poverty. Just ask the American povertous, who are worlds better off than the poverty of Third-World Countries, but are still miserable.

edited 31st Mar '14 11:48:22 AM by TobiasDrake

It is quite possible to operate a society in which nobody is below the poverty line, simply by taxing higher incomes and inheritances over a certain value.