I see this type of thinking a lot, sometimes even within myself. I don't think the problem is Capitalism (or "Growthism") - it's that we don't do much as we could to counter act the negative effects. Instead of worrying about the rich/poor divide, we could instead try to improve conditions for those on the bottom (food/shelter/health are all good starting points).
> I don't think the problem is Capitalism (or "Growthism") - it's that we don't do much as we could to counter act the negative effects. Instead of worrying about the rich/poor divide, we could instead try to improve conditions for those on the bottom (food/shelter/health are all good starting points).
To the extent you are doing something to counteract the negative effects, the system is not capitalism.
But the point is that "trying to improve conditions for those on the bottom" will never pan out, because the effects of growthism on the poor are compounding, i.e. exponential, and at best those things you are trying to improve the lot of others, scale linearly. Things get really bad when you do things like government welfare, which provides a linear benefit to the less fortunate while enriching the rich and polticially connected far more (indirectly, through deficit spending).
That's false. In the limit, you could have 100% of the population unemployed, robots manufacturing everything and have the robots and robot factory owners taxed at 99.9% FICA, paying social security to everyone at birth.
This scenario has been covered by quite a few "post-work" authors, who look at humans returning to a hunter-gather society. See Hans Moravec in _Mind Children_ for example.
We used to walk around and these marvelous automated machines produced everything for us: nuts and fruits from trees, free for the picking. In the future, we'll walk around, and robots will be churning out the equivalent of fruits and nuts from factories.
The modern concern of labor arises from the industrial revolution.
It's not a growthist system, though, if previously accrued tax receipts are used to pay out the welfare you're describing.
What would make it growthist, is if the welfare is paid for by borrowing, which would require compounding interest to pay it off. That the payback requires interest (which compounds, i.e. grows) implies growth in the overall productivity of the system to continue functioning.
Moreover, if you consider these post-work humans to be "poor" something strange is going on in your head. It's easy to conflate "unemployed" with "poor" because that's generally the case in our society. But I wouldn't consider the humans in your "limit case" (with my growthist modification) to be the poor people being screwed over by the growthism. It's the robots.
Borrowing to pay for welfare is one problem, borrowing to smooth out fluctuations in production is another. If the robots are to be efficient, they'll produce exactly what is demanded for equilibrium, but the economy cannot be in equilibrium, because people's demands are constantly changing. If for example, there's a revolutionary new product, suddenly the factories tooled to produce the old product need to be converted to make the new product. So, either the people must suffer shortages in supply, or the robots borrow to expand, meet demand, and then pay back the borrowed capacity.
And in fact, if you arrange things right, the robots who have the product that is no longer in demand can lend their unused capacity to robots making a product that is in higher demand.
My point is, borrowing from the future isn't always wrong, it depends on the context. If Western civilization had never invented banking or finance, we would have been far worse off.
> What would make it growthist, is if the welfare is paid for by borrowing, which would require compounding interest to pay it off. That the payback requires interest (which compounds, i.e. grows) implies growth in the overall productivity of the system to continue functioning.
Strictly speaking, it requires growth in the overall rate of production, which is not the same as growth in productivity (which is production per unit of some input consumed, usually labor-hours.) If, for instance, the rate of population growth were greater than the interest rate on the debt, you could have constant productivity with employment levels without a problem.
> Instead of worrying about the rich/poor divide, we could instead try to improve conditions for those on the bottom (food/shelter/health are all good starting points).
As robots and computers take over more of what humans once did, we'll have to deal with this problem (see various articles by Kevin Drum). Unless you're fine with a "Mad Max" scenario, some kind of welfare state or minimum guaranteed income is probably the least-worst option.
"Mad Max" is probably the wrong analogy - 2000AD's Judge Dredd (85%+ unemployment, riots against automation, and so on) would be the dystopian sci-fi you're looking for.
Vonnegut's Player Piano also comes to mind: society is divided into a management class and an underclass. Nearly all jobs are performed by machines, so no one in the underclass has to work, but everyone is assigned a meaningless job. It's partially about the seductive nature of technology, and how human ingenuity is capable of engineering us into irrelevance.
