Economic system of the future

[KrazyHorse]

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[KrazyHorse]

Because Say's law applies to food as well and there are limited alternate uses to which the non-labor substitutable factors of food production may be put.

Are you saying that because of Say's law there never can be a substitution of labour by capital. This doesn't make any sense.

No, I'm saying that the price of labor will drop under your initial hypothesis until the market clears.

Furthermore, it is not at all obvious to me that a generic exogenous technology shock increasing the marginal rate of return of capital at today's levels of both capital and labor supplied would lead to an equilibrium where labor's share of the economy would decrease, never mind the absolute value of accruing to labor decreasing.

Empirically, the share of labor in national income accounting has been impressively stable for many decades in developed countries. You can posit some kind of dystopian future where the real price of labor falls dramatically, but it is by no means an inescapable consequence of technological progress.

[onodera]

Communism

[Sir Og]

No, I'm saying that the price of labor will drop under your initial hypothesis until the market clears.

Furthermore, it is not at all obvious to me that a generic exogenous technology shock increasing the marginal rate of return of capital at today's levels of both capital and labor supplied would lead to an equilibrium where labor's share of the economy would decrease, never mind the absolute value of accruing to labor decreasing.

Empirically, the share of labor in national income accounting has been impressively stable for many decades in developed countries. You can posit some kind of dystopian future where the real price of labor falls dramatically, but it is by no means an inescapable consequence of technological progress.

The fairly stable rate of labour in national income that we see is due to the fact that human labour is still competitive with machnines (capital) in the majority of economy's sectors IMO.
However there is an ever increasing number of jobs which are never going back to humans no matter how cheap labour becomes. For examlpe even today a farmer will not hire 1000 laborers to till his feild even if they agree to do it cheaper than the cost of tractor tilling, because of the much better reliability and quality of the work done by the machine.

[KrazyHorse]

Human labor is "still competitive" because as machines took over more and more tasks we found other things for people to do that machines weren't good at. I expect this process to continue. The relative cost of labor-intensive output and capital-intensive output has also continuously moved in one direction (the one your hypothesis assumes away).

Demand curves slope down, and the automation of one type of production generally drives quantity up and cost way, way down.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I seem to recall this conversation many years earlier when Agathon posited the same issue. The automation of society and productivity gains making obsolete human work hours. The same arguement ensued that man is able to find new and creative means to create new products and services where they didn't exist before. (Adaption of Says Law). Poly continues to be a green endeavor, recycling arguements.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

this is the hypothetical heaven... food, shelter provided by default, and you can focus to do whatever you want... add in "free" body repairing nanotech, and you can do what you want forever

[giblets]

So we've ignored the question in the OP (what would happen if x happened) and are discussing whether extrapolating current trends would lead to x.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Actually the premise of the OP was called into question that such an eventuality is unlikley thus conversation about it equally unfruitful.

[Whoha]

Robot capitalism will no doubt flourish, since communism is the very definition of failure.

[KrazyHorse]

Actually the premise of the OP was called into question that such an eventuality is unlikley thus conversation about it equally unfruitful.

This. Plus, I entertained the hypothesis in my response to gribby, or at least a large fraction of it...

[KrazyHorse]

Actually the premise of the OP was called into question that such an eventuality is unlikley thus conversation about it equally unfruitful.

This. Plus, I entertained the hypothesis in my response to gribby, or at least a large fraction of it...

[giblets]

Hopefully no one will invent robots that can run on grain and perform any task more efficiently than the typical human.

[BeBMan]

It will work like in Star Trek with the commie-like federation using replicators and android/hologram slaves for everything. Still you can't go wrong with gold-pressed latinum in case of galaxy-wide hyper-inflation. Or so.

[Traianvs]

OP question is pointless. In the future we will all be robots (or cyborgs anyway)