Response to Automation: Universal Basic Income? Part 2
I made the first post on this subject last year. @empathy-n-reason brought up a good point in the comments of that post so I decided that the response deserved another post. This will be brief.
"There is one issue I have with automation that no one ever talks about: 'What happens when the lights go out?' What happens if the cost of fuel gets too high to fuel the machines? Yes, there will be new technologies for energy, but will they be destroyed like Tesla's Tower when there's no money to be made from it? What happens when human beings get so far away from knowing how to take care of themselves without the machines that they cannot survive without them?"
First question: When the lights go out, those who know how to make the lights go back on step in and provide the service. There will always be a profit motive to do so, and those requiring the service will almost invariably have something to offer in return. Remember that this includes barter and even companionship.
Second question: New technologies are never destroyed because they become cheaper. What happens as prices decline is that as the price of a good drops, downward pressure is created on firms' incentive to produce. The profit motive decreases (and/or firms begin failing under the pressure) and this pressure causes supply to drop accordingly as capital expenditures begin to decline. Either some market actor will find a way for the good or service to be made cheaper, and therefore profitably at the lower price, or supply will fall until such point that the price begins to rise. When profitability is seen again, capital will begin entering this market again, and any disruptions to supply will be restored. Without the coercion of the state (or other coercion for that matter), slavery is impossible, because profit for the one providing the good or service is always a requirement. Technological advancements will not change this.
Third question: People haven't been able to more-or-less "take care of themselves" since the dawn of man. Human beings are social animals, and with rare exceptions, individuals left out in the wild usually perish quickly. We have depended upon each other since the dawn of our tribal ancestry, and with each elaboration on the technology of civilization, that interdependency increases with each stage. Unless there's something I'm missing, I don't imagine that there's some upper limit to mankind's ability to care for each other. That's all technology is, I theorize, is the propensity of human beings to specialize and fulfill some want or need of their fellow human beings. They then record this and pass it on to others and as generations pass, further specialization is built upon the last set of technological advances.
To the rest of your post, I'll speak more generally. I'm not a boomer, but I think that I have had in my lifetime some true hardship (although I understand the distinction between that and the generational kind you're referring to). I've had close friends and family succumb to early deaths due to violence, automobile accidents and disease (all before I was out of my teens, and it didn't stop there). At different points in my life I was extremely poor, to the point that I almost died due to lack of medical attention when I was a child, and I often didn't have adequately-fitting clothes, and the often second-hand ones I was lucky enough to be wearing were sometimes in rags. I had to actually go out in public and experience that humiliation. Later on in my life I had a brief bout of poverty in which I was nearly homeless. I understand that it's much worse for people in the third world, or people living through wartime, but my life has been no cake walk.
Due to that hardship, I did initially find socialist ideas attractive for obvious reasons, but they never fully grabbed me. Throughout any of my troubles, those most helpful to me were doing so voluntarily, and the coercive state did very little to help (I am hard pressed to believe that the state didn't hurt more so). I like to envision a future in which we move towards more of that, voluntary interaction between human beings. I don't have problem if the rich get richer, I just have a problem if they do it by aggression (fraud, taxation, theft, war, etc.). The income gap in and of itself should not be alarming if everyone's real income is always increasing, which I believe will happen under a completely voluntary system.
Image Attribution: HypnoArt on Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/time-travel-black-hole-singularity-1777767/
Thank you for your response. I just want you to know I've read it and am in the process of writing you a response. It will take me a little more time to finish than I have right now, and I will get back to you soon.
First off, let me note that I was not trying to imply people don't have individual extreme hardships today. It sounds as though you've had your fair share. Hopefully you've come out on top of things. I , myself, have been through some soul-shattering and rebuilding periods in my lifetime. I also think I am blessed to not have grown up in a continually war-torn country or been on the verge of starvation as some percentage of the world is every day. What I was refereing to was the country as a whole going through an extended terrible period, where there really aren't those who can help you because they're expending all their resources to try to care for their own. That aside, I'll address your points in order.
First Question: I can think of many examples where there is not a profit margin to do so. If the cost of the repairs in a disaster zone exceeds the point where a future profit can be made, the repairs won't happen. In other words, I disagree with that sentiment. For example, without the U.S. government stepping in to fund Katrina cleanup, New Orleans would be in dire straights still.
Second: I understand the fundamentals of economics relatively well, as I majored in it in college for about a year. There are things like monopolies on necessities such as utilities where all the rules change and the people are forced to pay because there is no competition. There is price-gouging by established large companies used to drive the competition out of business. Although these things are technically illegal in the U.S., we still have mega-corporations in a few areas that seemingly go unchallenged. Gas is a limited commodity. The price will go up as supply becomes less, or demand becomes greater to due to automation. Granted, mankind will potentially need less for driving cars if a lot fewer people are driving to work, although I cannot see that coming close to offsetting the automation process in full force.
As for the third point: It seems to me that people had been taking care of themselves (plural, meaning themselves and each other) from the dawn of man until the industrial revolution. People lived in small communities or tribes with extended family. According to Wikipedia, in 1870 at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S., half of the people in the U.S. were farmers by trade. They knew how to grow and preserve their own food, cut wood for heat, build homes, hunt, scavenge, etc. Today, around one percent of the U.S. population are farmers. Few know how to grow their own food. Many don't even know how to cook. Few people know how to butcher an animal and process it so as not to kill themselves when they do eat it.
I am not trying to just be argumentative here. I truly feel it is unwise for us to be completely dependent on anything when it comes to survival. Disasters do happen. At some point in time (who knows when?--could be 1,000 years from now, could be much sooner), the magnetic poles will shift. We know that. We know there are also meteors that wizz by, sunflares, EMP's, etc., that have the potential to gravely affect such automations. I'm not saying that any of these things will definitely wipe out the machines. But if they did, and humans lost the prior knowledge and experience of their ancestors in knowing how to feed and shelter themselves, they would not survive.
Thanks for your tempered response. My pointing out of my hardship was more-or-less to show that I'm not just some inexpert at hardship while lecturing others about hardship. I've paid some dues and I think I have some insight into the supposed beneficiaries of social programs that many commentators on policy know nothing about. I wasn't under any confusion about what you were saying, but I wanted to add that economic hardship can be local, and that it may not matter to the individuals experiencing it whether the rest of the world is partaking in the same misery.
I'll just bullet my responses to your points with numbers for brevity:
I'm of the opinion that the Katrina situation in New Orleans is a product of the government's continual willingness to subsidize people's poor decisions. Every year I hear about some group of people who live in floodplains across the country getting stuck in floods, sometimes dying, and failing to have adequate insurance (or any other preparations for that matter) to recover from what they should have known was inevitable. Every time they get bailed out and rebuild in the exact same places. New Orleans during Katrina is no exception. Those people shouldn't have been living there in the first place. Without the repeated bailing out of those poor people by the government, they just simply wouldn't live in that place. If there's no profit to be made by rebuilding New Orleans, it's because nobody's willing to pay for it, and I see nothing wrong with that. That might sound callous and cold, but that's not where I'm coming from. I think those people probably suffered more because of their choices, and I believe that if they hadn't been bailed out at some earlier time in history (as is evidenced by the failed levy system that was built by the Army Corps of Engineers), they wouldn't have experienced such hardship. I don't wish that on anyone. I don't think we should be setting those people up for the same failure again, which we surely are in the process of doing, because New Orleans will flood again.
I didn't major in economics at any point, but I did take macro and micro during undergrad, along with environmental economics, and I had to repeat macro for my MBA coursework as well because the credits wouldn't transfer (among other related coursework). I think in some ways, that may make me less qualified to think critically about economics, but then again I've always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to authority, so I'm not docking myself too much for it. As you might have guessed, I'm not much for the appeal to authority arguments.
To your points though, those kinds of business practices are not sustainable. If you show me a monopoly that was present at one point in history, I'll find you the market forces that eventually dismantled it. That is, unless some government program intervened on said firm's behalf. The exception being natural monopolies that the government hasn't done much to curtail anyway. Regardless, I'm having trouble seeing how the formation of monopolies could refute my points about the downward price pressure of automation, and how this doesn't suddenly remove the incentive for the goods to be provided in the marketplace. I still think my point holds unless I'm missing something in your response.
I actually spent most of my youth in a rural area and did my share of farm work. It's actually how I put myself through college. I know how to hunt, raise animals, butcher meat, grow food, preserve food, etc. The thing about all of that though is that those rural people are not islands. They interact with each other economically speaking, and with people from urban areas, and their lives are immeasurably improved by that type of trade. It would literally be the stone age out there without economic specialization. No iron plows, no internal combustion engines, no metal of any kind for that matter. Simple stone and wood tools, probably self-made, that's it. If you took someone like me, a rural person, and plopped me in the middle of an uninhabited wilderness with just the clothes on my back, I would almost certainly die within a few weeks or months. I think I may fare a little better than most because of my background, but I think even a person from the Stone Age would face a similar fate. Ejection from the tribe was a death sentence even then. Look at that guy Survivorman. Even his repeated survival strategy is to simply get back to civilization before nature kills you. Fact is, we need each other, and we always have. I don't see it as particularly alarming that we continually further specialize and make our relationships more complex, because the number of people who live relatively comfortably on this planet couldn't even be alive if it weren't for that specialization.
Suffice it to say that if we have a complete economic and technological breakdown, almost everyone will face certain death. But then again, they would have faced that anyway even if it had never existed in the first place. If we face an event like you're talking about, the complete breakdown of civilization, technology and economic fluidity, almost all of us will die no matter how much preparation we do. Yeah, maybe some people who have bug out shelters and large stores of supplies and tools will last a little longer than the rest of us, but I think the odds are against long term survival there too. Our best bet is to keep things moving in the positive direction they've been going for some time now.
I do get the merits of self-sufficiency however. I just think that self-sufficiency for human beings includes our proficiency at negotiation and trade.
You made this response very easy. I agree with you 100% on point #1. I don't think it's callous. I think it's common sense. Number 2: I really wasn't trying to imply that you weren't qualified to talk about economics. Perhaps I misinterpreted that you were trying to teach me something about it. As a side note:, I believe monopolies can certainly be sustainable so long as they are allowed to be. I don't really feel like arguing that point now though. It's starting to get a bit tangential. As for point # 3, I will simply say this: my entire premise is based on the idea that the less overall knowledge that people have, and the less that they have to do things on their own, the lower their ability to problem solve--especially in emergency situations. I think I'll leave it at that, unless you have something to add. ...and once again, thank you for your response.