alt Hacker News> What will the economy consist of when there are no more paychecks? Thus nobody buying anything.
It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other. It is easy to see how that could happen if more things become automated.
You could imagine a world where there are only two people who own anything, and the entire economic productivity is generated by robots owned by those two people creating things and selling them to the other person, who uses those things for their robots to work with. You could produce tons and tons of things with no workers, and the GDP would keep growing.
Of course, the high GDP doesn’t mean everyone is fed and sheltered. Having a functioning and growing economic market is required for capitalism to serve its purpose of providing for the citizens, but it isn’t the ONLY requirement. If the form capitalism takes as we move into the future is one that stops providing for enough of its citizens, it won’t be able to sustain itself. I think there are things we can do to shift our capitalism to do a better job of providing for everyone, but there are a lot of forces fighting against that.
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Capitalism works due to the "free market" which maps a large number of producers to a large number of consumers in an efficient way. When the market ceases to be sufficiently free, capitalism starts to falter. It may be regulation, it may be monopoly, it may be monopsony, it may be dysfunction of the judiciary system that fails to protect property rights, etc.
A system of only two parties trading the entire economic output of a country would be utterly un-capitalist, more like two kings trading in products of their kingdoms. No doubt that any social institutes would have been subjugated by these two parties.
> It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other.
A similar thing happens when people talk about "total debt" in an economy. I like to bring up the scenario of 3 people trading a shiny rock around in a circle. Each time seller doubles the price and agrees to defer payment.
In this way, three kids can spend recess at school running the nation's average household debt to near-infinity! There are a few flavors of GDP calculation, but I expect it could yield some similarly odd results.
In both cases, the map is not the territory, and the metric is indirect/imperfect.