Two Different Lives

This post is connected to the following post: Capitalism Disrupted.

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[Don't know how long my Microsoft Internet connection will last. Yesterday I could not do a post because I could not upload a picture. That's part of the fun with this blog - posting pictures. I also couldn't update my widgets updates. Just now, I had trouble logging into WordPress to do any work. So like I said, I don't know how long this will last. Geez, so many tricks I have to think of in order to make this work.]

To continue the series on how the new capitalism could shape up after all jobs are automated, here's another version.

Imagine a world where the ultra-wealthy start to separate themselves from the regular folks. They don't just reside on the coasts but they reside in secluded and barricaded living areas and have no contact with regular folks. Two markets emerge: one for the super wealthy and one for the regular folks. There is not much interaction between the two markets. The creation of separate markets take a long time though. As some point after 90% of jobs are automated, the regular folks begin to shift away and try to develop their own markets, with their own monetary systems, as they can no longer compete against machines. They sell to each other, they create goods for each other, instead of

interacting with the wealthy. In order for this separate market to be viable, the regular folks have to be able to create their own energy source. Or maybe it becomes free for everyone because everything is automated and thus no person is actually doing the work or providing the value to be able to claim he has earned the income from power. So electricity and other power sources and distribution sources have to become free in order for the regular folks' separate market be able to provide a living income. Or, maybe out of desperation, the regular folks create a new and cheaper energy source that is cleaner than the current one.

This separate market would not be easy to develop. This regular group would have to be able to develop their own system of power sources and power distribution sources or be able to utilize the free automated system (sharing it with the wealthy). This group would also have to be able to create all other market mechanisms such as the monetary systems and contract system since the super wealthy will have sucked up all of the current cash into their own self circulating market - wealthy selling and buying to other wealthy. The regular folks would have been driven off the wealthy system due to having no jobs and hence no income.

The regular folks would have to figure out how to retain the best and brightest and not lose them to the wealthy sphere. If they can make their lifestyle or something else better than that of the wealthy, then they can retain the best and brightest, so that innovations can accrue to the regular folks.

In this kind of world where the wealthy lives separately from the regular folks, I imagine the wealthy world becomes brutal (well, this is probably wishful thinking on my part) because in order for someone to make greater and greater piles of money, somebody has to lose them and fall out of the wealthy sphere. Or maybe the wealthy sphere stabilizes with a small group of super wealthy families. But then those families would become inbred, much like during the centuries of royal families in the Middle Ages. If my recollections of my readings are correct, this kind of inbreeding causes some kind of degradation in either mental or physical capacity. I remember reading about the British royalty having mentally insane family members in the royal lines. I think the same thing happened to the Egyptian royalty. There is a scientific reason why we don't mate with our family members or close relatives. It's just not healthy.

Anyway, if the wealthy continues to interact only with their kind and ignore the regular folks, it is possible that their capacity would decline. In order to stay healthy, they would have to mix with the regular. But would they be smart enough to do that or would they think themselves as superior? It's hard to say how they would develop.

But for the regular folks, in order for them to have a livable life, they may have to make a separate market just for themselves. They have to be independent of the super wealthy. But in order for that to work, they would have to refrain from turn against each other.