this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
253 points (99.2% liked)
Futurology
1856 readers
55 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Taxing corporations a lot more, is the only way to avoid dystopia. A small island country with 100 factory workers and similar number of supporting jobs/businesses, replaces all the factory workers with robots. Suddenly, no income tax from half the population, with half the population in need of assistance.
Taxing corporations sounds great, but that's not the only way. Worker protections are also a great way to disincentivize layoffs like this. Forcing companies to financially invest in the laid off workers makes a layoff like this less lucrative, and increases the value of the knowledge and skill the workers have gained while working at the company. One goal would be to incentivize retraining workers instead of laying them off.
Everything falls down to bad incentives. Companies need to be financially incentivized (IE forced) to make choices that are good for people.
Definitely both. We definitely need to tax them way more _and _ add worker protections.
Indeed. There is no one solution. My little island analogy was a bit too simple.
The main point is to reflect on what would happen when half the population falls outside a productive way to contribute with needs like everyone else: "Crime" skyrockets. The discussion society should have is whether or not the end result is acceptable: Half the population in poverty, and all that wealth consolidated to one family.
The sad thing is that this simplifies what is already the case. This is reality. If the average wage in the US was doubled, it wouldn't exceed anything more than the expected return for increased productivity. Which is insane
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/