> Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).
For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix broken things.
It isn't magic or far future. We can, right now build a machine to do almost anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes in raw materials and pumps out a car.
The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That will probably be a solved problem really soon™.
> or we won't be Capitalists anymore.
I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay.
I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff. Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of untried creations.
Bob's Red Mill is now employee owned, and I think maybe SAS shoes? When I worked at 7-11 they had a profit sharing program you could participate in if you worked there long enough (a year I think), although that was years ago they might not do it anymore.
But yes, I think those are exceptions. In technology I still tend to get stock options and an employee stock purchase program, so there are still niches you can get in, but for the most part the people who can leverage their position is much smaller (I'm certainly not in the 1%, but easily in the top 10%, even though I don't feel like it) these days.
There are some news of companies moving back to the US, but so far finding something actually made in the US is still a rarity, especially something cheap.
Machines certainly improve our productivity, but that's been happening for a long time. Smith uses the example of nails, a skilled blacksmith made at most a few hundred nails in a day, an assembly line of a few specialized people makes many thousands.
At some point maybe robots do everything, but at this point in time I think it still has more to do with cheap labor arbitrage. It's a lot easier for people to blame robots or something rather than their pursuit of profits, though.
> I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff.
The famous example in the UK is the John Lewis Parternship department stores. Their workers own the company, they receive fixed wages and then a share of the dividend at the end of the year.
For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix broken things.
It isn't magic or far future. We can, right now build a machine to do almost anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes in raw materials and pumps out a car.
The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That will probably be a solved problem really soon™.
> or we won't be Capitalists anymore.
I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay.
I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff. Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of untried creations.