I... kinda agree with the OP. It's something I've been thinking for a few years.

My father tells me that when he was a kid one could have elementary-school level and be sure to be comfortably employed. There were a lot more jobs than capable people to do them. (He still pursued an education nonetheless)

As he grew up he eventually saw that elementary education wasn't enough anymore, unless one were okay with garbage collector or janitor jobs and their subpar salaries. As jobs became more and more scarce he saw the exigences go up and up. As he says, it will come a day when one will need a post-grad and to speak three languages fluently to apply for janitorial jobs.

My take is that we as human societies went wrong somewhere when the industrialization hit and production became a lot more efficient. An increased efficiency meant a few possibilities: a factory could raise their production output, they could use a fifth of the workers they used to employ to deliver the same amount of product, or they could reduce the workers' daily journey. Naturally no company owner chose this last option, (or even if someone had they'd be at a disadvantage against competitors that did not,) but ultimately that's where I think we could have laid the ground for a much fairer society with jobs for everyone and riches distributed with a lot more fairness instead of being concentrated at the hands of a small bunch.

Imagine being paid what you are today for doing 2 hours of the same work you do today, and then you have the rest of the day free to enjoy with your family because someone is coming to relieve you at the end of your two-hour shift. Alternatively, you could work the whole eight hours one day of the week and spent the rest of the days as you see fit - and your company isn't any worse for it because there is a different person doing that job the other days too. People would spend a lot of time enjoying arts and doing sports or other activities, leading us to being more culturally advanced.

(Actually, the major advance in culture would come from taking a lot of people out of poverty. When you barely have any income you don't spend anything in books, movies, music... you spend almost all your money in your and your family's survival.)

Too bad it is just an utopia, but it would be awesome to have it come to fruition.

I don't think this will ever work, because there are things that need to be traded no matter what, e.g.: land and/or real estate. Suppose I live with my parents and get married. I'll need a house for my new family. Either I buy one (how do I do that without money?) or even if I build one I need to own the land that is currently owned by someone else. So either you'll have some sort of commerce for it or you'll advocate that the government can give it to me, in which case it needs to own the land first... and there we go, it became a socialistic utopia (which we know only works in fantasy land and is a lot different from real-world socialistic societies).

Is your job "water-proof"?

Of course it won't. You'd need a lot of governments world wide (and at the same time) to agree on that. The problem is that all the power that governments have is based on money. So even if you have one single nutcase who'd be ready to give it a try, you'd still have a hundred sane presidents/prime ministers/whatevers who'll never agree to it.

Why should a government "obtain" or "own" any land to be able to give it to you?

Don't get me wrong, I know exactly what you're talking about. But if we're talking about the end of money, we'll need to talk about a lot of other things too. You can't abolish money without finding new concepts for a whole lot of other things at the same time. And some of these concepts could be as silly (or simple) as building a house were someone tells you to build your house. You go to someone who plans the development of your city, ask him where you can get a house for your family and he gives you an empty house or gives you a choice of locations with electricity, water etc. and tells you to build a new house. You get a house because you need one.

Of course this all IS an utopia. A "socialistic" one? I don't know... I never cared a lot about what is socialism, facism, left, right, whatever. Just have a look at this thread. Someone said my thoughts would lead to Marxism, another one told me it's an Utopia (not only you) and another one said that capitalism (which I admited to love) is facism. What am I now? An utopian Marxism-facist? Well, thanks for that, I guess... I never was a fan of putting every single thought into one strict political corner. In the meantime I'm just thinking about how our future could look like. And I don't think that it'll be a world with money but without enough work. This won't work with capitalism. But capitalism is what we currently have.

Your idea of reducing our working hours to just a few hours a week could be great. adaliabooks mentioned something similar already. It's just that I can't see why capitalism should play along. If companies keep prices high (which they can and will do as long as people buy their stuff) it'll still mean that all our work goes into stuff that's necessary to survive. This means we'll have more free time, but we can't do anything with it that'll cost money. So we basically get more time to envy the rich.

No, I meant that even if governments worldwide agreed to get rid of money it still wouldn't be feasible.

In fact, taking this hypothetical scenario further, it wouldn't even be considered unless the world had a single global government - and the ultimate socialist dreamland, at that. A beautiful dream in theory, but as we have seen from every attempt at socialism it is bound to go very wrong.

Erm... because it has to come from somewhere? And wherever that is, that land probably already has an owner?
Unless you're suggesting that the government can simply wily-nilly order someone to give away their property with no compensations?

Oh boy, another new can of worms! As if we didn't have too many already. There are so many problems with this, but I'll just leave with "I don't wanna live in that house I was assigned to, it has so many problems and is way too far from my relatives". But let's not get too far into this. It'll become its own discussion.

Your example is definitely what a socialistic society looks like. If the government decides everything about the land use (including who they'll allow to live in it), they're the defacto owner of that land. If I own a scripture that says I own it but I don't get to decide anything about it then I'm not the owner, I'm just the schmuck who got duped into paying for a useless slip of paper.

Interestingly, I never said you were either of those things, you just assumed I did. I just said that the changes you hypothesized would lead to or need other changes, that would in the end become a socialistic utopia (if one could ever exist in the real world without falling apart). I never said that you were sympathetic to any political rationale.

Adaliabooks didn't say anything about reducing journeys, but he mentioned the post-scarcity society concept ( I didn't know that term) where the reduction of work hours is one of the effects we can derive. Whatever. What I was saying in my original post was that our societies could have started heading down that path a few decades ago and it would have been better if they did. And differently from most ideas we see in every discussion of these subjects this one CAN be done, as long as there is widespread commitment and a HUGE reorganization.

Erm... our planet doesn't have to come from somewhere!? It's already there!

First: Governments already "own" most of the land that is available for building houses.
Second: What do you do with empty land you "own" if there's no money? Sit on it? Being an asshat, not allowing people to build a house if they need one? We're talking about a scenario where capitalism doesn't exist anymore (because there's not enough work for people to earn money). You won't make any profit with "your" land, no matter if it's empty or full of skyscrapers. If the only thing that land is good for is to build something on it, then allow people to build something on it.

Well... There'll be a shitload of cans of worms. But why not discuss them? That's exactly what forums are made for: to discuss things.

What do you do if you can't get work in your city, but get a job offer in another city? "Nah, that job is too far away from my relatives. I'll stay where I am and be jobless for the rest of my life!" You can't say that. You'll be forced to take the job. Well... Of course you won't be forced... You'll always have the choice to live on the street and to beg for food.

If you take the job in another city, you'll have to work all the time and won't be able to visit your relatives very often (too tired to travel a couple of hours every weekend). If you take the house at the other end of the same city (why would you get a house in another city?) and there's no need to have a nine to five job, you'll have time to visit your relatives (travel an hour on any day).

What did you "pay" for your paper, if there's no more money? What "compensation" are you expecting? Funny pieces of paper from the past that are equaly worthless as your piece of paper? And what do you want to do with your compensation? Get the same stuff that you'd get without your compensation? What do you want to decide about "your" land? There is no more money. No profit to be made, no matter what happens on that piece of our planet.

Again: It's just a question what will happen when there's not enough work for everyone to earn enough to survive (have a look at Africa to see what'll happen then). Giving people free money (basic income) is kinda stupid. Companies will always adjust their prices to get as much money as possible from people. Governments will constantly have to raise the basic income, or start to dictate the prices of products. And that's definitely socialism.

I didn't know the term post-scarcity either. But I think the reduction of working hours is exactly what adalia meant with "You might need £20k a year to live comfortably these days, in post scarcity you might get away with £1k because food costs pennies instead of pounds, or is given away for free." The only other thing adalia could've meant with it is that we keep on working 40 hours a week but get our wages cut by 95% - which would be pointless. And it wouldn't solve the problem that there's not enough work for everyone to make their living. It doesn't matter if a jobless person can't afford a meal for 10 Cent or a meal for 10 Dollar. So I think what he's saying is that we get the same hourly wages, but cut our working hours by 95% so that everyone can still have a job and a sufficient income.

It's definitely more realistic than the end of money, yes. But it'll be necessary that people will change their mind about wealth and property. If I can live comfortably with a job where I have to work two hours a day... What could my life look like when I work eight hours a day? There'll be quite a few people trying to get multiple jobs to become rich. And in a capitalistic system, companies will adjust their prices to get as much money as possible from their customers. That'll mean that people with only one job will be piss poor and need to look for another job.

We already have that today. But there's one important difference! When poor people aren't working 10 or more hours a day anymore, they have a lot of free time to "experience" their poverty. You don't want poor people to have too much free time. There are enough places where you can see how this'll end (french suburbs, for example). Poverty and too much time don't go together very well. So you'll have to guarantee that everyone can live comfortably.

If you follow this thought, you'll end up in socialism again. Governments could give you a basic income (free money) that's always enough to live. Or they'll have to restrict the number of jobs you can have. Or they'll have to dictate prices of essential goods (food, energy, etc) and enforce minimum wages (or give everyone a basic income).

Again: I think working less to create more jobs will be more realistic than the end of money. But it won't work in our current capitalistic system. In capitalism, a company will always try to make as much profit as possible. And people will always try to become as rich as possible (to be able to afford more stuff). So you'll have to enforce changes in our economic system.

I meant that this could be better solved if discussed in another thread or later in the same thread, because spreading out in too many lenghty subjects would make for conversations that are hard to follow. Every post would be a massive wall of text. Wait, they already are. Well, even more massive then.

I agree with everything in this quote. Government would have to enforce shorter journeys, no ifs or buts. And it obviously couldn't be done overnight because as you said poverty and free time together are a terrible combination. Crime would skyrocket.

That's one of the reasons why these changes would have to be introduced slowly. Where the usual journey is 40 hours a week pass a law limiting them to 38 hours at first, and only for companies above a certain level. This is because it's easy for a huge behemoth like IBM or Pepsico to hire an extra employee to make up for the time their employees don't work anymore, but a mom n' pop shop would go out of business.
The big companies would naturally lower wages to make up for their loss. The best employees would then migrate to smaller companies, raising their level and creating an interesting side effect of spreading the market into more companies and generating competition. This can only be good for the customers and for the economy as a whole.

As time goes by you can start nudging those variables further. The company where people worked up to 38 hours could now be limited to 37 hours, while slightly smaller companies could start following the 38 hours limit. Eventually even very small companies would get hit by the law, but by then they would have had decades to prepare. Every small limitation would give way to a bit a reorganization within the companies and by the time we get to 20 hours a week a company would have doubled their staff or lose terrain to their competitors.

That's how it works in a healthy market, I have no objections with the idealist idea and the occasional functioning example. But the capitalism of today evidently favors the monopoly or at the very least the quasi monopoly on basically every important sector.

That's why we have a google, that's why we have an Amazon, that's why we have a Steam.

The reality of the market is that these are factual monopolies despite having 'competition'. They will remain quasi-monopolies for DECADES at the very least. Because sure as hell no competitor with oh so good and novel ideas will be able to get an anywhere sensible market share in a strictly capitalist system. Not even with a good bit of money in their asses.

I've had AMD cards in my computer for 20 years now. So I deeply regret it, but they will quite evidently lose out to both Intel as well as Nvidia. They will eventually go down, maybe this year, maybe in 10, maybe in 20 years, which leaves us with two more quasi-monopolies. And they're going down because capitalism has declared them the weaker company, they're going down because they have in no way the resources of their competitors any more, they're going down because can not offer their products at competitive prices any more, and no amount of trying hard and having the better ideas (like energy efficiency) will save AMD.

I'm a developer so "Yes, I think my job is futureproof".
But I also think capitalism is not great at all.
I think everyone should at least be able to live as a human without having to beg.
If you don't want to give everyone a basic income at least you should give everyone a house, something to eat and a chance to get warm, at least if you cannot give everyone a job.
I also think communism is not great at all.
If you do something great you should be able to get "rich" and buy something more than basic things to live.
But I also find it right to limit "richness" to a certain level with tax (if you have a lot, you can give something more to everyone... that's also a good thing for you because if for any reason you will lose your "richness" you will not be left alone. And the world around you (not being desperate) is much safer).

Who can do all this? Only the State that represents all of us. No company will think about the welfare of workers first (even if it should be like that).

As a human being, I think it is uncivilized to abandon another human being to his destiny. Uncivilized and cruel (even if is his fault. We are human we make mistakes. I was able to became a developer because my parents were able to forget some mistakes that I made. Still I think most people that are in a terrible condition are not in that condition because they make a mistake).

@Vainamoinen
I don't get why you waste your intelligence to look stupid. You're clearly a clever guy, but you always make up stupid things to defend your beliefs. I got that you don't like capitalism. But AMD isn't a good example why capitalism doesn't work.

Ryzen has pretty competitive prices. And Ryzen is doing pretty well too! That they can't offer their GPUs at competitive prices has to do with AMD's weird choices. HBM for example is freaking expensive and doesn't make any real difference in games. DX12 and Vulkan... Yeah, they're great at low level APIs. Just that developers don't really care about them. Another weird choice is to optimize the driver of their gaming GPUs for mining. If they'd offer a mining GPU (without HDMI or DVI ports and other unnecessary stuff) with specialized drivers, we'd see cheaper gaming GPUs again.

Energy efficiency isn't exactly one of AMD's strong points. Before Ryzen they pumped more and more energy into their processors to "keep up" with Intel. Their 2xx and 3xx GPUs were the same. They had to pump some 300W into them to compete with Nvidia. 4xx and 5xx were better, but they already ran at their limit (no real OC potential, even if you throw lots of energy at them) and are still much worse than Nvidia. Vega? Let's talk about energy inefficiency... They're more expensive, slower and need much more power than their one and a half years old Nvidia counterparts. The 1070 is a lot cheaper than the small Vega and just a tiny bit slower. 1070 Ti is faster and still cheaper (1070 Ti is not really new - it's just another version of an already existing chip). The 1080 and the Vega 64 are pretty comparable in terms of performance. Just that the 1080 is a lot cheaper and needs less power (I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was more than 100W difference). 1080 Ti still needs less power and kicks Vega 64's ass.

Sorry, but that AMD isn't competitive - despite all their "innovative ideas" - has got nothing to do with Nvidia's and Intel's monopoly. It's just that AMD's GPUs suck. It's a different thing with CPUs. Ryzen is awesome. And that's exactly why people are buying Ryzen CPUs.

Hey, at least I didn't write this. Capitalism made video games great? Who gave you this idea? Auuuuuu contraire, mon capitain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6TmTv6deTI

In the above video, "MrBtongue" convincingly illustrates how the soul of a company that was created just for the love of games originally has been dismantled by capitalist principles.

It is like that, and I believe, it is like that each and every time.

As soon as they're halfway well off financially, games companies turn to shit. They stop talking to customers eye-to-eye, they're much more interested talking to potential and present investors and business mags about what they intend to do, they're much more likely to fuck up their games with microtransactions and similar crap, and they're much less interested in making games they themselves find appealing. The good designers leave the company in droves, and those that remain start to profoundly hate their work. Recently -

Telltale.
Daedalic.
CD Project Red.

All showing signs of utter capitalist necrosis.

We got a lot of video games because people like you and me showed an interest in it. The same people that killed the Amiga by pirating the living hell out of its games, and the same people that handed Valve its monopoly in a bread basket because they suddenly, for some reason 'wanted all their games from one service'. The same people that buy FIFA every year so EA can continue to usurp your and my favorite company and then fuck them up. Where's glorious capitalism to save video games now?

AMD, of course, was your example originally. And, yes, they made a really great attempt with the Nano. Look how that turned out. Look at the prices. Look at the sales. I can't even get the thing over here, much less at reasonable prices. Nvidia, of course, can put out the greatest shit evidently, even lie to their customers about performance, and get away with it. Also one of the great things that mars capitalism like shit on your shoe: consumer(ist) loyalty. It's what eventually made Apple great after its founder ran the company into the ground twice. Getting back to this little quip at the end of my post here because it really annoys me. Even at the literal end of capitalist wisdom you do not seem to draw elementary conclusions from the things you demonstrate to have understood.

There's work for fewer and fewer people on the capitalist sector/market each and every year. This problem will get worse, in part due to automation. This you have understood. It's right there in the thread title. Capitalism will not sustain a huge job market in modern times, whatever largely fictional merits the system may have boasted in the past. There's also a horrifyingly huge need for personel on the social job market. The jobs are not offered though because they're not profitable in a capitalist system. In other words, not all of us have the chance to "work for their money", not today and definitely even less in the future. All this you know.

What's your conclusion?

Don't let it go to your head Vaina, but you've got something else right ;). I completely agree with you on this, there's no perfect system, and when it comes to art - capitalism is a damn bad one. It will definitely encourage reduction of everything to what has mass appeal, because that sells. It's not just games of course, we see it in all forms of entertainment, and in fact in all products. Food is reduced to the most easily sourced ingredients, added with the preservatives that give it the longest life, often at the cost of flavour. When it comes to the finer things, capitalism doesn't promote them (which I suppose is odd for something so commonly associated with wealth, but then money can't buy you taste).

The nice thing is we do get to choose if we buy those things, but if we're in a distinct minority then it's possible that those things we actually want will not last. It depends on people not chasing coin - there's a pub in Cambridge that I used to go to that sells strong real ale at a loss, I asked why and he said "because we like selling strong real ale". I suppose in gaming it requirea a studio to keep to its principles and keep just trying to make good games (some do, Larian have been quite impressive in that regards, and Egosoft show impressive commitment to their games long after release).

Totally with you - capitalism doesn't do a great job here.

Not so much with you here. Do you have any numbers to back all this up? My understanding is that employment has been steadily increasing for the last few years. The UK is believed to be at (or close to) full employment right now. You question the (apparently "largely fictional" - cite?) merits of capitalisms past, but at least there are solid records to support this. Employment, wealth, poverty, are things that people have been carefully measuring for a long time, there's a lot to look at. Long term and more recent short term trends go against what you're saying - where are you getting this from?

As far as I can tell you've got history against you, and your own prophecy siding with you. Were you expecting the world to end in 2012? Most sensible people at the time wanted something a little more than just an old Mayan prophecy.

Nope, you didn't. Instead you completely ignore the development that capitalism (=competition) brought us in the last few decades and bring stupid examples about AMD that are factually wrong.

Games and series like:
The Witcher, Dishonored, GTA, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and many many more. Sure, you'll find reasons why capitalism ruined all these games (DLC and DRM) -.- But we wouldn't have any of these without huge studios, competition and the marketing of evil, capitalistic publishers. Look back at video gaming before it became mainstream. Gaming was a niche and small developers released games full of major bugs (not just missing textures or clipping and animation errors, which gamers nowadays see as a reason to call a game a "beta release").

Look at indies nowadays. Most of them are undistinguishable pixel platformers with "unique artstyle". Or Rogue-likes. And that's not because they're being disadvantaged due to capitalism (Kickstarter does work pretty well to fund games). It's because indies still work like developers from the past. They're small teams with a vision. That's nice and all and there's sometimes an innovative concept between all these platformers and Rogue-likes (Divinity Original Sin). But they'd very rarely finish a game like Mass Effect or The Witcher 3. Games like these are born from the competition between huge developers and publishers. They push each other to always release bigger and better games.

Yes, I know, AAA games are all crap and indies are the better games... Just not for me. I'd probably already have stopped gaming without AAA games. Games like Divinity Original Sin are nice, but... I'd miss the big releases.

Again: The Witcher, Dishonored, GTA, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and many many more. Evil, evil, AAA game industry. They truly ruined video games.

Yes, it was. But I didn't say that capitalism doesn't work because they release shitty products. That was your point, not mine. I said capitalism (and the resulting competition) works because without AMD Intel would still release minor tweaks as new CPUs. Intel needed Ryzen to get out of hibernation. Without competition there's no real development. And without development there's less progress. My old i5 2500k is still enough to do anything today. If there's no competition, people thing that what we have is enough.

Yeah, it was a "great attempt". But it was exactly what I meant when I said that AMD is making strange decisions. Fury and Nano were clearly high end cards. Just that games already started to need more than 4GB VRAM when AMD released them. So... Why did they put some weird memory on it that is freaking expensive, can't be more than 4 GB and doesn't make any real difference in games (4GB of fast RAM are worse than 8GB of slow RAM)?

AMD wanted to release new high end cards with HBM2. Just that HBM2 wasn't ready. And what did AMD do? Nothing. They released their weird Polaris cards, leaving Nvidia not only the high end segment, but mid range as well (GTX 1050, 1050Ti and 1060 are the better cards at lower prices). And now we're back at pumping lots of energy into the chips to keep up with Nvidia -.-

HBM is a great thing, but still not needed for gaming. AMD needs to ask itself one question: What do they want their GPUs to be? Graphic cards for gamers, or a development platform for high bandwith memory? They focused on HBM too much and forgot to develop their chips (or held them back to wait for HBM2). Now GDDR6 is knocking on the door (a result of competition from HBM?). If it'll be used on new mainstream GPUs, developers will start to make use of higher bandwith. But AMD won't profit from it, sitting on a complicated and expensive type of memory.

-.- Look: Just because a system has its flaws, it doesn't mean it totally sucks and needs to be cleansed with fire. EVERY system has its flaws. Socialism failed a lot of times already. Capitalism created a competition that brought us a lot of development, research and progress. Yes, it did it on cost of the individual human being. But what if capitalism and the resulting competition really manages to bring us so much development that people don't have to work anymore? Wouldn't that be a great thing?

Of course capitalism will stop working then... No jobs, no income, no buying power, no profit, no more capitalism. Capitalism is your best chance to get rid of capitalism. Embrace it! ;P ;P ;P

My conclusion is that we need to think about how we'll live when capitalism became too efficient for itself. That's the whole point of this thread. And just for you, I'll repeat what I think and what other users came up with.

My thoughts:
- An unconditional basic income won't go together with capitalism. State gives free money to people -> people give money to companies -> companies get richer -> companies decide to raise prices (we're still in capitalism after all) -> people can't afford anything anymore -> state will increase basic income -> repeat. It won't work. Well, it will... kind of. But it would be pretty stupid.

- If free money doesn't work... wouldn't it be an idea to get rid of money altogether? This'd kill a whole lot of more jobs instantly (banks, stock exchange, insurances, tax offices, accountants, etc.) and leave more than enough people to share the essential work that is needed to keep us fed and warm. But will we still keep up research at the same speed as now? We humans need our competition to get pushed to our limits.

Interesting thoughts from other users:
- Drastically reduce the hours we work. If stuff gets produced "for free" by robots, it doesn't need to cost a lot. We would be able to live with a smaller income (work less to create more jobs). It's just the question what'll happen if people try to get two, three or four jobs to become rich :/



So... What's YOUR conclusion? Socialism? A planned economy? Should governments expropriate companies and take the economy into their own hands? We've seen that this doesn't work countless times already.

Yes, there's "full employment" in our first world. There are even people who have more than one job. The problem is that there are too many jobs where you don't earn enough to be able to survive. You work your ass off to be piss poor. In Germany some people (edit: roughly 1.2 million in 2016) even have jobs where they get less money than the unemployed! They have to ask the government to support them so that they at least aren't poorer than a jobless person. That's ridiculous. But people have no choice but to take these jobs. Otherwise they'd get their unemployment compensation cut pretty badly.

I don't know if you can really call it "full employment" if you have to do a job that only exists because you haave to work "for free". That's the one thing that's really bad about capitalism. If companies would be forced to pay fair salaries, we'd be far away from "full employment". Many jobs would just die because they wouldn't be profitable anymore.

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