It's rare for me to say something bad about technology

I was looking through some incomplete drafts on my blog, hoping to make a complete thought out of one when I saw an entry on efficiency in Capitalism. In the end it hurt my brain too much and I slept, but it has some interesting ideas. Of course, as this is a more specific field those ideas are much more likely to be dead wrong than usual, but whatever.

When I looked over it again I realized something new, about the growth of consumerism and why it won't stop if things continue the way they are now. The post was about the growth of technology and how that would affect the cycle of money flowing back and forth between consumer and corporation. My conclusion was that capitalism is a system of scarcity, in a world of ample supply where goods can be produced with little or no labour, the resources would all gather on the side of corporations and the few with direct control over them. Capitalism would collapse. This conclusion was wrong, I underestimated the power of the market.

It's 4 in the morning as I write this, and I have a doctor's appointment at 9. I'm thinking of just staying up the whole time. Anyway, I thought I'd add to my blog at least as lay awake.

Back near the beginning of the semester, when my Economics and Global Politics were both talking about capitalism, I started to question the nature of efficiency in different systems. Frankly, too much efficiency in capitalism is inefficient. Efficiency is basically just achieving the optimal result with as little resource waste as possible. It's the production/cost ratio. Capitalism is a system of competition where those that are able to do this well grow, and those that don't die. However, the overall system of Capitalism has a much different pattern: Money is only worth anything as it is moved; in capitalism it flows from the consumer to the producers back to the consumer in wages.

Manpower is a huge cost for corporations, so they naturally try to get the job done with as few people as possible. In an age of greater and greater technology and roboticism, it's becoming easier and easier to do this. They cut the cost of wages, to keep more money in the company and for the investors. However, this creates an imbalance of cashflow as jobs are destroyed. All of the money is locked in the corporations, but it quickly becomes meaningless as there are no consumers anymore.

The current solution for the similar problem of simply underpaying outsourced workers has been to compartmentalize industries: goods are produced somewhere with terrible wages, almost all the money goes to the corporation, then all the stuff is shipped to somewhere with decent wages to be sold there. The decent wage places don't produce many goods, but because they have some of the terrible wage's share of money, they can get by on just perpetuating the system moving money around in service industries. How many people do you know make things for a living?

At the time I had some sort of half formed reason in mind for why underpaid workers were different than technological efficiency. It eluded my grasp however, and I soon gave up and went to sleep. Now it seems obvious that there is no difference, they are the same and Capitalism will deal with the new problem in the same way as the old: in the parts where there is money, just move it around. Workers will lose their their jobs at first, but those jobs will be replaced by new ones in the service industry as money begins to move toward the corporations and the people in charge of them look for ways to spend their money. Store clerks, sales, money management, the arts, the sex trade, these and other industries where machines can't really replace people will probably grow as time goes on. Capitalism won't collapse, just shift.

Growing roboticism will eventually make it cheaper for corporations to make use of machines almost entirely without use of an underpaid uneducated group. Should this happen, I do not know whether those people will be left with no possible source of income or whether new industries will grow to account for this vacuum. One option leads to complete economic abandonment of those people and far increased poverty, the other leads to a potential end to poverty, as they would become better suited to become consumers if they were paid, and they now only have use as consumers.

In Capitalism, you NEED a job to get money. When there is no meaningful work left, you need to create for meaningless work.
In Communism, there isn't necessarily any reason to have a job, and a world like this needs few enough people on top that it would probably be enough if you left it up to volunteers.
I don't advocate communism exactly, as I don't know enough about it. It's just an example. The world isn't going to be fixed no longer how long we walk our current path, fucked up status quo remains fucked up status quo. We need to change the actual system somehow. A tech-driven equivalent of whatever the ancient Greeks were like that was driven by slaves might be nice, if that also included the city state part.

But yeah, the world is fucked, we need to figure out how to fix stuff.

Note: I'm happy to mix it up a bit from the more emotional stuff I've been doing lately. This is hard on my mind and I didn't actually read it over or complete it to the extent that I wanted however.