My view is that the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others.
In that case, as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged. To protect themselves, the states and key individuals devised to funnel a portion of the benefits from the industrial revolution back down to the wider populace, to offer comfort through more spare time, better health, better living conditions.
The industrial machine operated at only slightly below the potential level of efficiency it promised, but now the machine was able to sustain itself and ensure it's future.
Where we are today is that the digital revolution has created machines that achieve an even greater efficiency. The "sharing economy" it has brought about is little more than an externalisation of corporation costs of production, allowing those corporations to reap greater benefits with very little cost. The inequality technology has brought about is staggering to behold.
What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not.
"the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others."
Remember that inequality was huge way before the industrial revolution. You know how feudalism worked, right? A few dozen filthy-rich noble families + 99% of population in abject misery, was the rule for most of Europe in the best part of the previous couple millennia. Situation improved with the ascension of bourgeoisie, but even that was limited to a small fraction of population that lived in big cities, in a time where almost everyone still worked the fields. The industrial revolution replaced old methods of economic exploitation with new methods, no big change for better or worse. Competition forced the bulk of industrial efficiency to benefit consumers; suddenly a good overcoat was not a luxury for the rich, etc. which started a virtuous economic cycle - and also meant that profit margins were NOT so fantastically big for capital owners. It's sure big fortunes were made by the barons of early factories and railroads etc., but the elites were already making tons of money before any new tech.
"people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged."
People were always aware of inequality and injustice. The real change in the industrial revolution is that exploited workers were concentrated in cities, and even more, in companies / factories, so they could organize easily and fight for better working conditions, which was almost impossible for peasants living in tiny groups miles away from each other.
"What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not."
Agreed here. This balance is a never-ending struggle, any economic model is only sustainable when the bulk of society have disposal income to drive demand.
> Remember that inequality was huge way before the industrial revolution. You know how feudalism worked, right? A few dozen filthy-rich noble families + 99% of population in abject misery, was the rule for most of Europe in the best part of the previous couple millennia.
I'm going to ask for a source on this, because this smacks of hyperbole or at least ignorance. It seems that when you refer to feudalism [1], you may mean manorialism [2] and more specifically the institution of serfdom [3]. First, I am not arguing that the life of a serf was in any way ideal. They were the lowest caste of society and were afforded very little in the way of self determination, but they were not wholly without legal protections and rights, they were often paid a wage for their labour or could at the very least pay their debts directly with their labour, and it was generally in the direct interest of their lord to uphold their end of the contract by providing compensation, protection, court hearings, and facilities for processing and storing the food produced on their lands.
While it would obviously have made for an extremely poor life had one been born on land held by a cruel or careless lord I wouldn't say that living and working in a workhouse [4] or mill would have been much better, at least as a serf you would have a right to live with your family in a hovel and work a portion of the land for your own benefit. 12 hour days in a dark, loud, and extremely dangerous textile mill and going home to an equally dark, loud, and stinking tenement room shared with a dozen other people sounds more like abject misery to me.
The beginnings of improvement in personal rights and freedoms began more so with Magdeburg rights [5] and town law, providing an alternative for serfs who were able or fortunate enough to exchange their tenure, buy out of it, or simply flee it for life in a town. That was as early as the 10th century. Things improved even more during the Renaissance and after the Black Death which resulted in an increase in the value of labour and saw the decline of serfdom in Western Europe.
I would argue that a deterioration in living conditions for skilled labourers brought on by the industrial revolution [6] and the end of the open field system [7] resulted in a greater necessity to organize to avoid further deprivation. Also, peasant revolts were not unheard of [6] and often began in the villages that formed the centre of life on the manor estate.
The life of a serf was far from pastoral but the change in living conditions from the late Roman Empire up to the modern era has not followed a constant upward trend and even today our society is quite capable of reaching local minima.
> My view is that the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others... as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality.
Your armchair version of economic history seems a little squishy.
What of the earlier inequality? What of the landed nobility, kings and barons and knights, the historical elites which we had before the entrepreneurial ones? Were the people simply blind to the inequality at the time?
And if the result of the industrial revolution is construed as a better way to extract wealth from human beings, then why were both elites and commoners materially better off than they were as serfs?
<editorializing on>
Heaven forbid that we should respect capital investment for being able to generate wealth better and more efficiently. Surely this would be a betrayal of class solidarity and the dignity of labor.
>And if the result of the industrial revolution is construed as a better way to extract wealth from human beings, then why were both elites and commoners materially better off than they were as serfs?
Simply put: they weren't. The very first labor movements were formed precisely because the landless proletarians of the Industrial Revolution were actually worse off (in terms of objectively measurable things like disease rates, nutrition, sanitation, average height) than their parents and grandparents had been as peasants (mind, this is at least partially because the period just before the Industrial Revolution was, in many countries, unusually prosperous for the peasantry).
Not sure this can truly be "simply put". On the one hand there was manual labor on the farm with very simple amenities like an outhouse and well water and no ability to advance as you're literally doing the same job your ancestors have done for centuries, but work ended at sun down and people had substantial control over their daily lives.
On the other hand, in industry there was less physically demanding labor for (relatively) more money and living in conditions with heat and water, but your work day might be 14 hours, you could easily be gravely injured at work, and your apartment was shared with a dozen people.
Both seem to have pluses and minuses to me. For whatever reason, people chose to leave the farm and enter industry.
> mind, this is at least partially because the period just before the Industrial Revolution was, in many countries, unusually prosperous for the peasantry
That much is fair enough, as a short-term matter then.
I'm worried about the form of the redistribution. In France, we have small taxes in many places. Just one example: We dealt with copyright issues by creating a tax on storage mediums, from a few cents to 20-40€ depending on the container, the size and the volatility - more than 40 different tax levels (see tables here [1]). Obviously they included the bureaucracy feature, where if you're a company you can send back a form and be reimbursed. I'm confident the same kind of insane level of tax compexity exists in pretty much any country and it implements revenue equality by squashing entrepreneurship at its root. Less innovation, less inequality ;)
So let's go ahead: Which forms of redistribution would do you see? Your comment made me notice that taxes proportional to the number of ads already exist (the VAT) and doesn't help redistributing. We need to take into account the change of scale. Would it be a tax per number of available cars for car-sharing services, then a tax per node in the friend graph for social networks? Sounds insane, but is it what we're bound to implement?
Re-distribution?? Ex-cuse-me?? These aren't YOUR cookies, you bum! Make your own cookies and THEN worry about re-distribution! When someone else has made the cookies, YOU DON'T GET A SAY in how they are distributed, do you get that?
Whether you like it or not, redistribution is the basis for most of the laws of my country (and certainly yours). It's not up to you or me, it's how the People think. In fact, that's what the OP is about.
It is besides the point to know which side I am. In fact, I've just said tax complexity squashes new enterprises. I've written an article about how an entrepreneur in France loses 70% of his income in tax-and-administrative-burden [1]. So guess whether I enjoy redistribution or not?
Just because the majority think they are entitled to the 1%'s wealth, does not make it so.
The French government might as well take 90% of that entrepreneur's wealth and "re-distribute" it to the so-called "People" (I call them "Sheep") and guess what? That one entrepreneur will still be wealthier than any of them and the "People" will still mumble. In other words, NOTHING will change.
Not almost. I will hoard THE entire pie and I will not feel ONE bit of shame about it, because it is MY PIE! You are the one who should be ashamed for wanting to steal from my pie just because you are incapable of baking your own.
> because it is MY PIE!
Not always. Most "pie" bakers either inherit their "pie" directly in terms of wealth or education or healthy upbringing from parents. The ones you call incapable of baking their own, probably did not have all the advantages that you did.
There's also the aphorism about standing on the shoulder of giants (or indeed standing on tax created infrastructure.) That applies to all "pie" bakers.
And you will still die poor and miserable, because try as you might YOU CAN NOT TAKE this which I have and you don't. You will just never have it and I always will.
Yes, let's do that! Here's a wake up call: I don't have access to any ingredients that everyone else doesn't also have access to!
Because it's not the ingredients. It's how I see them and what I do with them. You choose to cry all day long about scarcity and injustice. I choose to rejoice in the abundance and the unlimited opportunities given to me.
This is what makes me wealthy and you poor. Not the government. Not the political system. Not any form of justice or lack thereof. There is ULTIMATE justice in this world, ALWAYS. It is just as it should be.
I'm sorry, my previous comment was not an attempt at changing your functionalist, would-be-objectivist and elitist view of the world but just a veiled reference to space cookies because you seem to be high on something. Maybe it's a big white horse, who knows?
If it matters to you I'm not poor, at least according to HMRC it's quite the contrary.
That is incorrect. In the typical modern liberal democracy, the right to vote and other such forms of political expression is not tied to how much wealth one generates.
You're the new TempleOS. The only reason you haven't been hellbanned is that your particularly insanity, a weird Randian fantasy world, isn't inherently offensive.
Might makes right. If the rest of the world wants your cookies, then of course they can take it -- you'd either have to give it up or take a bullet to the head.
This is what you don't get, pal. The rest of the world may be able to get some of my cookies but they will NEVER have access to the COOKIE MACHINE because they are SHEEP. They just don't have it in them! Get it? You know what this means? It means I'll ALWAYS have my cookies and they will ALWAYS starve.
Who cares? They can just take your cookies and throw you aside, you yourself are not unique. There's always going to be a bunch of gullible saps willing to work hard that you can tax and take from -- it doesn't matter that they get your cookie machine, just that there's always a cookies to take.
What you seem to be missing is that the barriers to entry for modern technologies are incredibly low (and getting lower). From basic microeconomics, we know that the ability for a company to maintain >0 economic profit for an extended period of time relies on them maintaining a competitive advantage - barriers to entry help a lot with that.
Today, disruption is so easy. Starting a app/website/platform involves almost no fixed costs and variable costs scale easily. We are now seeing century-old corporations being disrupted by university students. Technology has helped this situation, not hindered it.
In that case, as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged. To protect themselves, the states and key individuals devised to funnel a portion of the benefits from the industrial revolution back down to the wider populace, to offer comfort through more spare time, better health, better living conditions.
The industrial machine operated at only slightly below the potential level of efficiency it promised, but now the machine was able to sustain itself and ensure it's future.
Where we are today is that the digital revolution has created machines that achieve an even greater efficiency. The "sharing economy" it has brought about is little more than an externalisation of corporation costs of production, allowing those corporations to reap greater benefits with very little cost. The inequality technology has brought about is staggering to behold.
What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not.