Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
> Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
Once the robots, energy, and weapons all belong to the same small group, that group no longer needs to sell anything to anyone. Production continues, but only for themselves and their enclosed system. The rest of humanity becomes a surplus population that can simply be allowed to die off.
In other words: the economy you’re worried about preserving is already obsolete the moment the owners of the machines no longer require wage slaves or consumers to keep the system running. At that point, mass demand is no longer a feature, it’s a bug that gets patched out.
Prices don't represent anything absolute, they just capture the cost of reallocating a marginal number of goods to produce this particular thing instead of some other thing.
If there is so much of something that everyone can have one, effectively prices would drop until everyone could afford one. Like how even homeless people can afford air, because there is so much of it that there is no point charging people for access. Or YouTube they just let anyone watch it because it is so cheap to push bytes out over the internet.
Removing humans from the production process would, in theory, be similar. There is a certain amount that gets produced and we come up with some way to allocate it. Prices and wages adjust to that reality.
> We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built...
That just so story is probably a lie. The math wouldn't work out and Ford would know it - he was just competing with other companies for labour. It is like programmers getting paid huge amounts - it isn't because the companies think it helps them because of some vague circular logic about what happens in the broader market. They just need the skills, now.
The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.
What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.
And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.
And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
You don’t need anyone to buy them if you already have all the capital. You sell good and services to make more capital, but if you’ve got enough capital to provide all your needs, you don’t need anyone buyers.
If you ask the authors of sci-fi dystopias: the corporations owning the means of production will get taxed just enough to keep their masses from starving, the aspirational 14% will ake whatever resources they have to buy shares of this coporation and get a slightly bigfer share of the pie, and subgroups on the elites will be giving perpetual checks on each other, attempting to take full control of the mountain top but never quite successfully doing it.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
The only goods that will be produced will be the one that machines will need for their survival or for whatever unfathomable goals they will have. Human goods will only be produced as long as human labour still has some value.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.