Steven Vincent Johnson wrote: This is more or less the definition of socialism. For those who are fond of > the > capitalistic approach, the solution is to make everyone a shareholder, so > that > income is distributed as dividends as well as wages. That way no one > complains > when fewer people need be employed (&/or fewer hours worked), because > dividends > go up commensurately. >
That seems functionally equivalent to socialism. It is socialism that dare not speak its name. In many important ways, economics did not come into existence until the beginning of the industrial revolution. Before that, economies were governed by kings, lords, guilds and the like. They could not exactly defy economic principles, but they had such tight control over people's lives they could set many arbitrary rules that stuck, such as how much a miller or baker would be paid. Fixed salaries for these jobs inhibited economic growth and made it difficult to respond to changing conditions, but people barely noticed that effect, because so much else made life difficult. You might say it was like trying to detect the heat converted to mechanical work with a Newcomen engine (~1%). I think that economics are mainly the study of how human labor is divvied up and paid for. Material resource extraction and so on are less central to most economic theory I have read. I think that once human labor is no longer needed, economics will more or less vanish. It will become an unimportant and uncontroversial subset of social policy, like the laws governing the pasteurization of milk. Along similar lines, if cold fusion succeeds, national energy policy will be something decided by a sub-committee of ANSI in a meeting attended by a dozen experts. - Jed
