The inherent contradiction of RBE style philosophies
Anyone who thinks that automation will lead to nothing to do, has obviously never had enough of a good thing in their life. For what reason, I cannot imagine. But people will not want to do nothing, they just always would prefer to do less of the things that are unpleasant and more that are pleasant. Automation has a built-in capitalist incentive: one can, with some advance expenditure, dramatically amplify the amount of current product at a lower cost. In other words, bigger profit. Then, over time, everyone automates, to compete, and the profit margin gets a lot thinner. But so does the automation equipment.
In other words, whether you like it or not, once the genie of automation is out of the bottle, and sometimes in response to impossible prices for human labor like minimum wages, or just because it is cheaper, sooner or later the job can be done by less people.
The irony for me is that then the very same socialist RBE types jump up and down about technological unemployment. Yet they want full automation. Why are you so confused?
People just want to exploit and keep doing the same old thing because at root innovation is hard but it really is going to have to be our main profession in the future. This is where schools are currently getting it wrong in my opinion, I think that the education system is falling behind what is required to keep up with the current innovation cycles. However schools are only following the systems set out by the government....
That's a really good way to look at it. School should be, if anything, entrepreneur training, above all else. Value is not just money, it's subjective. A central understanding of the basics of operating a business, and understanding how one's entire life is precisely an economic decisionmaking process (will I watch the football or shag the wife, can't do both at the same time!). These are things that I think even a 6 year old child could grasp at a usable basic level, and be in the process of beginning to learn how to account and negotiate.
With this backbone to the education system, the rest should be driven by the student. If the kid loves polymers, psychotropic drugs, magnetism and fractals, that should be their subjects of study. This idea that children should not work has to be thrown out as well. The education process can be economic reward driven as well, part of the fees paid to put students into a school, is allocated to a pool that distributes according how all are staked in the system (A child could save their money to raise their stake) determines how their rewards are given, and encourages children to even teach each other things in order to mutually boost their results. Making school into a race to the number one position and get the biggest reward at the end, will end the boredom of school. Kids would be trying to one-up each other in the quality and originality of their work, forming little competing factions, all that.
It would be the awesomest thing that could happen to education. But I am sure it is coming because the mind-shift that is taking place.
That is a really radical idea, there are so many issues involved with implementing this kind of thing however. I would say that I don't quite agree yet with turning schools into a competition ladder, only purely because it seems very game-able for the more affluent kids. Continuing this thought, it seems that there wouldn't be much incentive for the more affluent kids to even go to school anymore, assuming their parent/s are better teachers and have a better learning platform than the schools. Inducting them into their business seems to make more sense.
After thinking about it for a bit I guess that this kind of system wouldn't actually be that bad as there is always ways to innovate on many different scales. The richer kids will probably be doing it on a much larger scale than others.
Yeah, it turns learning into a two way market. Students' costs are low and often they have a great deal of financial support. But their performance, if it is incentivised by winning money not just a great mark, it brings a lot more people into it. Even the 'i dun care about money' crowd will still aim at their own personal performance targets and get what they deserve regardless of what they think about the system.
The amount of money to pay the teachers also then becomes directly relatable to the performance of their students as well. A leaderboard for teachers will be part of it as well, and the more successful they are at warping the bell curve to the benefit of all, the more highly regarded are those who helped acquire the qualifications. It would be an incredible boon to education. It is something Steem could adapt part of its functionality to as well.
Um. The whole idea behind socialism/communism is that with automation & new tech it is possible to remove the need for boring/dangerous/etc work untill everyone is free to do stuff they'd like to. You know, post scarcity and all that. More or less what communism says, is that once you are in post scarcity capitalism is unnecessary, but capitalism could take us there (I think this is actually what Marx said o.0)
Full automation is the only way to achieve this. You know, there is even that term "cyber communism".
RBE is Resorce based economy?
Technological unemployment is only a problem when you have to depend on money for survival,and you get money from conventional work. If you don't have a source of income then unemployment sucks! :->
Yes, you are missing my point though. Technological unemployment is a core tenet of marxist derived systems. It comes from labor union/syndicalism (the underpinning of fascist socialism). It is rooted deeply in the 'Luddite' mentality.
The thing you are missing about automation is that it inherently disruptive to labor. Every new machine that increases productivity can eventually cause displacement of jobs in a market. On the other hand, thanks to Greshams's law, it tends to be that the drop in price of something leads to more consumption, which does balance things out.
But the thing you are missing about this 'elimination of money' nonsense, is that it is only and solely possible to determine what is productive and what is not, by the money in money out ratio. If it's below 1, you are operating a charity. If it is only 1, you cannot improve your system and you become vulnerable to not being able to adapt to competitors grabbing more customers that you can't without changes.
Money enables simpler accounting of inputs and outputs, and the changes between what these are in a given activity are indicators of change in demand and supply. It acts as a store of past increase of value that can be accumulated in order to make improvements in operations. You can't do commerce without money, and as soon as you start talking about barter exchange (which will make me pull a silly face), you forget that if everyone also trades relatively worthless, rare tokens for other things, and then can exchange them with others to get something else. REALLY! Can I just scream now? Money is an item that is valued for its being accepted by other people as a means of doing an exchange without the direct arising of a 'coincidence of needs'. This is what makes barter a weak system and why eventually money arises. It allows temporally and geographically isolated inputs and outputs into the system that allows logistics to adapt to getting the stuff where it sells best most efficiently, also - I include here of course labor itself as well, the reason why national borders are stupid.
You do a lot of arguing with yourself, but even that is quite interesting. :-D I have no idea about the 'Luddite' attitudes you are talking about. Pleas elaborate on that.
Yes we do need a unit to measure the effectiveness of stuff, but it is definitely not money. At least not the money as it exists now. As of right now the closest we have to what works are the crypto currencies, because they are based on computational power. What I saw at bitshares is actually very good, as the transactions pay small fee that goes towards the maintenance/improvement of the system.
That is exactly the problem! Instead of decrease in the ammount of work, the current model is based about artificially increasing the consumption. There is that huge industry that exists to promote that. That is my beef with the system as is. I understand value in advertising to reach more audience and inform them about a product. But advertising to create the demand that does not exist? That is weird and parasitic, that is the ammount of effort put into it could be used much more constructively.
But back to the subject of money. One good system that I know of is "Islamic banking", fascinating stuff really.
While this is controversional, another interesting system was "freigeld". As far as abolishing money altogeter, that is something I am not sure about. Anyhow, have to get some sleep now.
'the money we have now' ie fiat currency, is manipulated in supply deliberately and openly to 'stimulate the economy' until eventually it gets all burnt out and then we have a crash, the big guys buy up the fire sale and the cycle repeats. It's a circle jerk. All you have to do is base the economy on money that is not centrally controlled. Then people can see clearly what the interest rate is really, and it regulates saving vs spending. High uncertainty = saving, low uncertainty = spending. The central banks manipulate it so it seems like the latter is always in play, until the last moment the pumping stops working and everyone scrambles for the exits.
Money is the only possible unit of measure in a market. But when its supply rate is controlled by certain groups, they can manipulate the rate to profit at everyone else's expense. Money controlled by one group for their own interests is not a money, but a debt instrument, one which they got governments to force you to use by various means. The beginning of fascism comes from banks controlling governments. This is how they pay for all the violence and this is why we can't have nice things.
It is nothing to do with the simple idea of a medium of exchange. This arises naturally out of barter. And it helps people regulate the economic activity by showing what is wanted and what is not.