charlie@cca.UUCP (06/30/83)
Suppose you were a philosopher king and social planner and were trying to design a social structure for the human race. Suppose you believed that in the next 50 years, advances in technology (robotics, AI, etc.) were going to make blue collar jobs all but obsolete and white collar workers about ten times as efficient as they are today. Suppose you believed that natural resources were going to prevent any dramatic improvements in the wealth of society (say more than a factor of two). What would you do? It would only take 5% of the population working to produce current levels of efficiency of production and the marginal value of additional labor would be extremely small. Under capitalism, labor would be paid very little (matching its marginal value). One utopia that comes to mind under such a situation is to give everyone a share of the pie, let individuals make the invest vs. spend decision and choose among investment alternatives (giving the efficiency of capitalism) and let individuals make the work vs. not work decision (wages would be small, income from one's partial ownership of the means of production would be sufficient that work would not be necessary, and the majority of the population would elect artistic, educational, or recreational pursuits instead). This view should appeal to most capitalists. Issues of selling one's share of the pie, how to distribute it initially, and such are a separate issue and certainly a cause for much legitimate argument. BUT: Our society and culture are based on the work ethic. People get their feelings of identity and self-worth from their jobs. Social change is a slow process. No society could be expected to assimilate so radical a change in orientation in 50 years. We simply can't tolerate 95% unemployment. People would not turn to art and education; they would turn to crime, rioting, suicide, and who knows what else. We need a much slower transition, lasting many generations, coming to accept the fact that "society does owe you a living" and an idle life of fun and frolic is ones birthright. So, social planner and philosopher king, what do you propose for the transition? You might decide to slow down technology. Outlaw robots. Outlaw AI. (It will happen in secret at a perhaps tolerable pace). To do that, you will need to be much more authoritarian that the world is today. That is a high price to pay. Let me tell you my solution: For the transition, I would create makework jobs that allow society to keep its bearings and values. These jobs should have pleasant working conditions (no garbage collecters), they should be perceived as important by the individuals doing them and society at large, and there should be no limit to the number of people who can be usefully employed in them (i.e. they should not produce anything). The second two goals are at odds, but hang on, I have a solution. As it turns out, such jobs exist today. The workers are called bureaucrats. They don't exactly produce nothing, but output is not correlated with work expended and their main product is work for other bureaucrats. I include in this category the information industry (that's us!) and lawyers and such even if self-employed. Now unfortunately, you can't build a bureaucracy overnight. Ideally, I would like to grow it at the rate needed to soak up unemployment as it develops. But I can't, so as social planner, I would start now even though labor is still worth something (the cost is small compared to societal collapse). I would create government agencies with high sounding goals like eliminating discrimation or enhancing public safety. These agencies would not be given the resources to make progress toward the goals (progress toward a goal is inherently self-limiting and we want these agencies to be open ended). The real goal of these agencies would be to force the private sector to employ more bureaucrats (the multiplicative effect is very helpful for fast growth). Gee, maybe I wouldn't need to do anything at all... Note: I'm not being facetious; propose a better solution.