The problem that Leiter overlooks lies on the other side of the exchange -- with the incentives the persons getting the money from increased efficiencies face. They have to find someone willing to accept the money. Imagine that A gets a machine that replaces the labor of B, so A gets to keep the money that A was paying B. A has to find someone -- C -- willing to accept that money for some other service, perhaps a service that the world has never seen yet. That is why technological progress happens.
Leiter is so wrong about what Socialists have preached. They rarely sing the ideal of freedom. For left-libertarians, maybe. But for classic socialists, it has always been about egalitarian equality. Leiter should read The Socialist Tradition by Alexander Gray.
Also, if he believes that socialism will only work in the future of abundance, then he needs to set out clear criteria for when those conditions will have been met. Since so many socialists, as he agrees, have thought they were in a world of capitalist abundance, but in fact turned out not to be, then he should be cautious about anyone adopting socialism too soon. He never states what that world of abundance looks like. But given that there are infinite human needs, status striving, and rivalrous good, it's fair to say that world will never exist.
<<Yes, capitalists want to figure out how to produce a given level of output with fewer workers. Their deeper goal, however, is to figure out the most profitable way to employ all available inputs.>>
There are lots of "inputs" that are not being (and that probably cannot be) exploited by the capitalists. Anyone trying to sell the oxygen in the air? Horse manure? Perhaps there are better examples.
Of course, unlike these "inputs", human labor is highly flexible and can be used for novel purposes. Hence its enduring utility.
I hope it doesn't come to that but human labor could also be a useless "input" in some distant future.
Competition drives wages down to the marginal productivity of the worker. Even under socialism the average worker can't get paid more than the average worker's productivity, and productivity is much lower under socialism.
People keep ignoring too - a UBI may be completely unaffordable now, but IF "capitalism" succeeded in making *all* or almost all outputs without human input, so with I dunno AI + machines we finally succeeded in true technological unemployment instead of what we have now with constantly rising living standards as a given human effort is multiplied, *then* I see no reason you couldn't tax + UBI ... but perhaps that's just my failure of imagination.
The problem that Leiter overlooks lies on the other side of the exchange -- with the incentives the persons getting the money from increased efficiencies face. They have to find someone willing to accept the money. Imagine that A gets a machine that replaces the labor of B, so A gets to keep the money that A was paying B. A has to find someone -- C -- willing to accept that money for some other service, perhaps a service that the world has never seen yet. That is why technological progress happens.
Leiter is so wrong about what Socialists have preached. They rarely sing the ideal of freedom. For left-libertarians, maybe. But for classic socialists, it has always been about egalitarian equality. Leiter should read The Socialist Tradition by Alexander Gray.
Also, if he believes that socialism will only work in the future of abundance, then he needs to set out clear criteria for when those conditions will have been met. Since so many socialists, as he agrees, have thought they were in a world of capitalist abundance, but in fact turned out not to be, then he should be cautious about anyone adopting socialism too soon. He never states what that world of abundance looks like. But given that there are infinite human needs, status striving, and rivalrous good, it's fair to say that world will never exist.
<<Yes, capitalists want to figure out how to produce a given level of output with fewer workers. Their deeper goal, however, is to figure out the most profitable way to employ all available inputs.>>
There are lots of "inputs" that are not being (and that probably cannot be) exploited by the capitalists. Anyone trying to sell the oxygen in the air? Horse manure? Perhaps there are better examples.
Of course, unlike these "inputs", human labor is highly flexible and can be used for novel purposes. Hence its enduring utility.
I hope it doesn't come to that but human labor could also be a useless "input" in some distant future.
Leiter talking Economics is equivalent to Moms Mabley talking Physics.
Competition drives wages down to the marginal productivity of the worker. Even under socialism the average worker can't get paid more than the average worker's productivity, and productivity is much lower under socialism.
People keep ignoring too - a UBI may be completely unaffordable now, but IF "capitalism" succeeded in making *all* or almost all outputs without human input, so with I dunno AI + machines we finally succeeded in true technological unemployment instead of what we have now with constantly rising living standards as a given human effort is multiplied, *then* I see no reason you couldn't tax + UBI ... but perhaps that's just my failure of imagination.