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Desrtopa comments on Is ruthlessness in business executives ever useful? - Less Wrong
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We're rather short of full employment right now. Unemployment levels are still close to 8%, and there are currently a lot fewer job openings than there are people seeking employment. I've heard some economists contend that it's in part due to the fact that we're actually reaching a point where there are fewer "burger flipping jobs" available than there are people trying to fill them. Not everyone can be a programmer.
Even if they're mistaken, and that isn't yet the case, if the proportion of jobs that need a human to fill them decreases enough, we'd be bound to reach it eventually.
Due to increased mechanization, we're producing multiple times more wealth now than we were a hundred years ago. Why should anyone be poor now? The system we have isn't designed to provide much compensation for people whose productivity is low. It could be, and if it isn't eventually it's liable to become a rather large problem.
I never said that this would result in most of the population having no wealth; it's certainly not a historical inevitability. But our production levels have already come a long way in the past several decades with most of the gains being concentrated in a small proportion of the population.
In the extreme case where almost nobody is producing anything, but some people retain ownership of the means of production, it's obvious that society isn't better off if the median citizen isn't compensated beyond their level of productivity. But we don't necessarily have to reach that extreme before we reach a point where society as a whole is better off if the median individual is compensated beyond their level of productivity.
Economic cycles exist, and we're at a bit of a bad point in them right now. I don't buy the thesis that this is somehow permanent, though - there's always been a cottage market in talking about how This Time Is Different, whether on the upswing or the downswing, and it hasn't been right yet. Even if the total amount of labour needed to run a modern society is dropping, that can just as easily be absorbed into shorter work hours instead of unemployment.
Also, by the standards of a hundred years ago, almost nobody(in the developed world) is poor today. The biggest health issue among the poor today is obesity - try telling someone in 1913 that someone who has the cash to buy enough food to get fat is poor. Even the "means of production" have been greatly democratized, with the rise of mutual funds.
It's not a problem to be ignored, but I don't intend to worry too much about it. Distributional problems in society have a tendency to get solved, because the people who are on the wrong side of them tend to be the most numerous.
Plenty of people can't afford to pay for their homes. I think that a person from 1913 could accept that a person who could afford the food to get fat is poor if they live in an apartment with twice the people it's meant to hold and have to budget their paycheck down to the cent to keep their belongings from being repossessed.
Unfortunately, distributional problems also often end up being solved badly, see for instance the rise of the Soviet Union.