Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Is Capitalism Flawed?
by
iram1011
on 01/08/2017, 13:29:23 UTC

This is what people typically say

They innocently assume that all this automation appears out of thin air like banks are creating money. But industrial production is not banking. All these robots have to be first designed and then manufactured somewhere, and I promise you that somewhere deep down the line there will always be quite a lot of human labor involved. To get an idea, look at the history of automotive industry. It seems like it destroyed quite a few jobs in some sectors but it created many more jobs in other sectors as well as created entirely new ones. It's the same with automation and robotics, they just move human labor to other fields, and since they are more complex technologies, this necessarily means that more human labor is required in other fields. In other words, you can't escape the complexity loop

But average people cant take complex jobs.

Not everyone can be an AI programmer, a mechanical engineer or a mathematician.

Most people are bartenders, supermarket clerks or similar king of jobs.

Here is the news for you, they are already phased out:

* https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/5/13842592/amazon-go-new-cashier-less-convenience-store


The simple jobs get phased out as fast as lightning. The complex jobs remain for the latest, but they will be phased out too. After all an AI is probably a better engineer than humans.

There is no solution to this than to just abandon this flawed system.


Offcourse there are threats to some basic jobs from automation. There is no deny to that. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute concludes that  5 percent of occupations are likely to be completely wiped out by automation. We just can't escape that.

There are flaws to all systems and so does capitalism. But the simple fact is that where open markets exist with competition, people get more prosperous. If we look at socialism/communism as applied in its most ‘pure’ applications, millions ended up starving in China, Russia and elsewhere because the system simply was inherently dysfunctional. Free market capitalism has its downsides but at least it consistently delivers growth.