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fubarobfusco comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 20 April 2015 12:02AM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 April 2015 02:07:26AM -1 points [-]

According to Marx, in capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of "reserve army of labour" and of “poverty in the midst of plenty”, or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.

— Wikipedia, "Overproduction"

Comment author: RichardKennaway 26 April 2015 09:10:35AM 2 points [-]

Has anyone made a mathematical model of that? I don't know what most of the words in it mean, in concrete terms.

It sounds like "we can make more than we want with less labour than we can supply." Is that accurate?

In scarcity, which has been all of history up to the present, everyone's strategy has been to get as much work as they can, make as much stuff as they can, and sell as much stuff as they can, in order to get as much stuff as they can in exchange. I can imagine that when half the workforce can make twice as much stuff as everyone wants, that may not work so well. But that's just a verbal story, and I don't trust those.

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