Comment Re:In other words... (Score 1) 285
Increasing automation isn't going to erode our quality of life so much as it is going to take all the fun out of his. He might as well be collecting leaves for all the good his extra money is going to do for him.
He makes this point himself - I recall he talks about buying maybe 2 or 3 pairs of "work pants" a year.
I don't get how a guy who stands up, and says "Hey, things are pretty unequal, and maybe we should do something about that or there will be some unpleasant civil unrest - seriously, how many more pairs of pants do I need?" is coming off as actually being all "Waaah, the proles are having a better life and that makes my life less enjoyable."
All that stuff you talked about? Nice groceries, tech goods, better healthcare? That's stuff for the middle classes. That's for people with good jobs that pay a lot more than minimum wage. But the more automation we have, the less middle class we'll have that can afford them. The reason there is a squeezed middle is because on one side, we have robots, and the other, we have foreign workers who'll work for less.
Well, here's the thing. The cheap foreign labour is now being replaced. Initially, by even more desperate poor brown people. But increasingly, by robots. Companies like Foxconn, not noted for their enlightened policy on worker welfare, are now replacing their workers with robots.
Productivity, on the upswing for over 5 decades, is now dropping. Not because the actual labour a single worker can do is less, but because the amount that's needed is less - because people can't afford the fruits of that labour. Like you said, how much can one rich guy consume?
The guy who took a pay cut from $1M to $70k, so he could pay his staff $70k minimum wage gets it. He's a surfer dude. $70k buys him all the knarly waves he can hang 10 on, and then some. Paying his workers a decent wage gets him 2 things - a workforce with great loyalty and no worries getting in the way of increasing the value of his business, and a feeling of doing the right thing that $930k dollars just can't buy you (in your own bank account).
The answer is to look at that million bucks and not to think "How much happiness can it buy me?", but "How much happiness can this buy?"