Without getting into criticisms of distribution models, almost everyone can agree that wealth is better when it is more equitably distributed among the members of a population. Without going to the extreme and saying that it must be distributed completely equally, it’s generally recognized that the richer the average person is, the better off things are for everyone, and that extreme wealth in the hands of only a few while everyone else lives in poverty is an extremely unstable situation. The problem is that a wealth distribution system must be not just somewhat equitable, but legitimate. Legitimacy is no small problem. Legitimacy is, in short, the consent of the masses to your rule. Without it, your options for maintaining government narrow to methods based on violence and fear.
For example: the method of paying wages for labor is a distribution system for wealth that has a lot of legitimacy baked right into it. Ideally, you are paid more the harder you work. It has a lot of associated supporting ideology about the virtue of labor, and generally, everybody agrees that it’s fair that the people who work harder should get paid more. Of course, wages for labor does not necessarily always work out best on its own. There are many tools with which to suppress wages, some of which will make the distribution scheme seem less legitimate, and also similar methods for raising wages beyond what might be considered legitimate as well.
For much of the modern world, the idea of labor is so intimately associated with getting paid that it can be easy to forget that ‘wages for labor’ is actually a tying together of two separate schemes, wealth and work distribution. There ARE distribution methods where these two distribution schemes are NOT tied together. Historically, slavery would be a good example. Here, wealth distribution is not at all tied together to labor distribution. Instead, the slave’s ‘wages’ essentially go to an intercepting parasite class, the slaver. Often in history, slavers began as part of an aristocratic warrior class. This might have served as a form of legitimacy justifying slavery of those they had conquered. The problem is that an aristocratic warrior class could often degenerate into a purely parasitical decadent class with long peace, robbing the system of legitimacy.
Obviously, slavery is a system the modern world has largely given up on. We rely much more on wages for labor as a wealth distribution and work distribution system in one. Of course, this is not our only form of wealth distribution. One other form of wealth distribution is welfare for the unfortunate. Its legitimacy is based off the moral notion that we should help those in need, and is unconnected from the actual work these people do. It is basically wealth distribution on the basis of sympathy, rather than work.
Another wealth distribution system is presented as a type of investment in a person. For example you may justify wealth distribution to the less needy on the basis of sympathy for the unfortunate. Or, you could justify it on the basis of investment. You could say, “We should feed, clothe, educate and tend to the children of the poor, not necessarily out of sympathy for them, but because taking care of them in this manner is much more likely to make them productive future citizens.” One can most often see this morality at work when discussing education benefits. It can be used to justify the same kind of programs as distribution by sympathy, but it has a much different rationale. It is basically distribution on the basis of future potential, or investment.
These three different moralities behind wealth distribution have, thus far, combined to make life in the west much more comfortable than it has been in the past. There have been failures. Appalling failures. And the legitimacy of these systems have often been called into question. But in general, life in the past 100 years has been a vast improvement over the rest of history.
The problem rapidly approaching us, however, is something that challenges all three wealth distribution systems: automation.
Automation has been with us for quite some time, basically acting as a productivity amplifier. At first, this was a boon, because we were operating under a scarcity economy – demand always outstripped production. There were always hungry, unclothed people – and more importantly, they were hungry and unclothed simply because there was not enough food or clothes, not because of any failure of the distribution systems. Then, as automation increased worker productivity even more radically, negative effects became more apparent – low wages as labor became less necessary, the cultivation of a consumerist culture to increase demand. We have been living with these problems for a century or more, of course.
The new automation problem is that we are approaching a level where human labor can be cut out of the equation entirely. Previously, the argument could be made that while automation might consume hard-labor, repetitive jobs, in the course of increasing production, it would inevitably create more jobs that required a finer, human touch (retail, for example.) Automation, machines, were stupid, essentially. Like a bull, you could train to plow a field, but you couldn’t exactly get him to tend the pumpkin patch.
The problem is that the next generation of machines are going to be exactly that fine-grained and intelligent. With each successive improvement, they are going to get better and better. We are essentially going to have an influx of machines that have all the capabilities and benefits of having slaves, with none of the moral worries.
Why does this challenge the three distribution systems?
Consider wealth distribution on the basis of labor. Once they design a robot that can do your job, the cost of that system is inevitably going to fall. Your wages, as a consequence, will inevitably drop. Eventually, the cost of the system is likely to get so low that no humans are going to be able to compete. And this isn’t going to be happening in just one sector of the economy. This is going to be happening in nearly every sector. We will see a massive spike in unemployment, and the wages of those still working will drop sharply. A few sectors where automation faces unique challenges may survive with vastly reduced wages. Essentially, wealth distribution via labor is going to fail because of a shortage of work to be done. We can’t all service the machines, especially considering that can be automated as well.
To stall this, you can probably expect governments to adapt measures to provide incentives not to automate. Probably more than a few governments are going to go overboard with this. They’re going to do this because wealth distribution on the basis of labor is the foundation of modern industrialism. It is one of the pillars of the modern world. If it goes away, we’re well and truly in uncharted territory.
But how moral is that, really? Surveys indicate that most Americans hate their jobs.
Does it really make sense to have someone continue to flip burgers, for example, when we have a machine that can do it cheaper and more effectively, when they hate flipping burgers anyway, all so we have a justification to hand them their wages? We may be well-adjusted to it, but we are asked to give up an awful lot of our lives to do tasks that we simply tolerate so we can have the money to live. It may be moral to have such a system when that’s the only way to get the work done. Is it really moral to have such a system when we have machines that can do the work for us? All so we can continue to use the legitimizing system of wages for labor? Wouldn’t it be better to let the machines do the work, and find some other wealth distribution system? It seems to me that, under a sane system, we would be celebrating each labor-saving device, instead of bemoaning the job loss it’s going to result in.
Now, consider wealth distribution on the basis of investment. The challenge faced by this system is obvious. Wealth distribution on the basis of investment is based off the idea of investing in people so they might become productive in the future. When most of the work is done by machines, what production are we expecting our investment to pay off in? One could say that we’d still need people to design the machines. Yes, this is true – but not everyone is intelligent enough to do this. Perhaps we could expect people, not bound working eight hours a day, to become much more artistically creative, productive in that way. Perhaps a cultural explosion will be the fruit of our labor-saving devices. I personally think that not everyone is a creative type, and we’re going to have a lot of people in a lot of psychological angst, feeling deprived of purpose and usefulness. And even these jobs are eventually going to face a challenge as our machines become much more intelligent themselves. However, humanity might eke out a few centuries with machines handling hard labor and humans doing design or artistic/creative work.
Wealth distribution on the basis of sympathy faces probably the least challenge from the rise of automation. In fact, it seems likely that wealth distribution on the basis of sympathy is likely to thrive as more and more people are put out of work by the rising tide of automation. I can only ask: Is that really the future we want? A future where the majority of humanity are seen as victims to be pitied? Where you are born into a world where misfortune is not only seen as common, but is actually the sole reason for distributing wealth? Such a world sounds downright medieval and a little sick, to me. Not to mention that sympathy has limited ability to invoke legitimacy past a certain point. You can be sympathetic to the hungry poor. Can you really be sympathetic to someone who has middle-class amenities and comfort? Distribution on the basis of sympathy may legitimize wealth distribution on a large scale, but only up to the edge of poverty – any more, and there’s not really much to be sympathetic to, is there?
Rather than relying on these three wealth distribution systems for legitimacy, perhaps we should try to come up with new ones.
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