[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

This aspect of automation is true - automation increases surplus.

However, what happened during the major first wave of automation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was that the surplus accumulated led to massive increases in wealth disparity. Capital accumulated at the top until the 1920s at a level not seen again until, well, very recently.

The Great Depression, massive government intervention, and WWII combined had enough of a disruptive effect to redistribute wealth and grow a middle class - which may have been an unlikely fluke of history, as the brief decades between 1950 and 1990 were the only time in human history that a middle class has developed, and the other millennia of human existence see massive wealth disparity as the norm. (Even then, the middle class only extended to Western nations, of course.)

But: inequality is destabilizing. Communist or socialist revolution, for instance, sure made a lot of sense to a lot of people when social mobility was zero and inequality pervasive before the Depression and WWII. Indeed, much of the horror of the two World Wars, the Communist Revolutions in the USSR and China, the rise of militant nationalism (etc etc) can be attributed in large part to inequality as a primary motivating factor.

The private sector and private wealth - if they want to keep it and keep the rule of law protecting property rights - will need to play ball with the government in some fashion to redistribute wealth. Not sure if this is UBI or not, but high numbers of unemployed or underemployed people don't lead to good things historically.

I understand people who had a social mobility of zero ended up supporting communism. Problem was it just made everyone's social mobility zero.