What's the endgame when the rich have all the money?
What's the endgame when the rich have all the money?
Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they'll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won't be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there's no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer's shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can't buy anything with it.
What's the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
They don’t think about endgame. The life they live is one without consequence; they have no intention to start thinking ahead, that’d make them uncomfortable.
Also, this endgame is already manifesting. Remember all those headlines about millennials killing “X” industry? Less wealth in the working class for luxuries that previous generations would have enjoyed at the same age. Before long it’ll be not enough wealth for certain luxuries outright.
The end game is 1 person with all of it.
It’s even better than that, because the massive inequality created by Capitalism has already got us to a state where the human population is going to collapse within the next few decades, even if climate change doesn’t do it first. Simply, most people never feel like they can afford to start a family during the years when they would have started one before. The oligarchs know this and are freaking out about birth rates now, but it’s already too late - can’t be King of the mountain if the mountain is only a hill.
There are 3 key necessities for UBI/freedom dividends:
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It redistributes power not wealth. Bad greed is oligarchy capturing your rulers. UBI weakens politicians discretion, because just paying everyone more cash instead of their corrupt ideas is "idiocracy proof". Power redistributed to workers where everyone who wants a job gets 5 recruiter calls per day offering a better job. We all get greater power to say no to anything. Quality of life becomes exceptional without crimes of desperation, and the divisive hate that is easily manufactured from crime.
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Redistribution means massive economic growth and overall prosperity even as it all trickles up to make the rich richer. "Velocity of money" is the key economic concept, but as income trickles back up to workers and owners, it means that the rich have to invest more to take all of our money.
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The alternative is genocide. Oligarchy having all of the money and power, and AI/robotics to do work, means robocop detroit for Americans, and war on rest of the world to take their land. It doesn't matter that far more wealth can be generated with more people to sell stuff to. The logic of pillaging America/world for oligarchs with ever decreasing tax rates on corporations and the rich means more relative wealth and power for the oligarchy and its political minions.
This 3rd point is similar to yours. Except its not just "This is America, if you don't make money you're a douchebag", and the rich just give up on life, it's "you need to be exterminated because you are useless to the rulership."
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If they thought as effectively as the question in the title, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing.
The same as with all cancers unless it's killed in time.
What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
Get too rich, too powerful, burn the earth, and die happy before the consequences of their behavior catch up with them.
No, they won't be happy. They'll be desperately trying to convince themselves they are, though.
the conspiracy brain in me, looks at ranting from people like elon musk, who say there's going to be a population collapse, and Im thinking of Resident evil, (the bad movies).
I think they're banking on the hope that in 20 years there's going to be billions fewer people in the world, we're already close to setting it off with the unprecedented increase of state vs state wars since 2020. Azerbaijan/Armenia, Israel/Levant, and even bigger ones that we've not seen since the 80s like Russia/Ukraine and with all probability, China/Taiwan by 2028 at the latest.
they're banking on there being less people to feed, house, and otherwise provide for. so they can fall back to a kind of corpo-feudalism
I don’t think there’s any coherent end game for global oligarchs, just the habit of acquisition and growth without limit. It’s a kind of mental illness, in my opinion. As they say, the world has enough for everyone but not enough for the rich.
In terms of population and the ruling class it’s interesting to consider feudal Europe. Lords had complete control over those who worked their land. Serfs even needed permission from their lord to leave their village for any reason, they had no freedom to look for a better life elsewhere. (Incidentally this is why there are so many accents in the places like the UK—isolation lead to language differentiation.)
The Black Death destroyed the feudal system due to population collapse (on a scale that’s difficult to comprehend) and the nobility suddenly had to compete for workers, offering better pay and conditions to lure them to work their land. This lead to increased social mobility and the rise of the middle class.
We may be heading towards a new feudalism but it’s difficult to predict what it might be like, especially if there’s a population crash. Capitalism needs consumers no matter how much automation is employed to produce goods.
This leads to the total collapse of global society
Feudalism
A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn't bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn't have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.
Back serfdom and nobility.
Robocop sort of addresses this.
I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority's material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don't want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today's ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.
It reminds me of the ultimate game of monopoly I played as a kid (on a handheld). I had complete control over the board. I had bankrupted two of the AI's, but in order to keep line go up, I'd have to keep the last one around. Every time it'd get low on funds I'd offer to significantly overpay for one of its' few properties, and then sell it back for a dollar.
I got to around 30k before the game either just quit, or the battery died.
They want control of governments so they can wield total authority over the working class and exploit them even harder than they already do. Amazon will make showing up to work late a felony punishable with jail time. Oh and the jail is actually an Amazon fulfillment centre.
with sufficient technology and capital, they should be able to stave off any kind of revolution. and then the question becomes whether or not there is any incentive to keep the plebian class happy or alive.
There is no End Game.
They're insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as "banality of evil" because it's so routine and common place in their circles.
People might point to Musk's old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.
Don't forget, those of us who "produce" aren't even a consideration.
The working class will starve. We're already working on it with inflation, but managing to keep enough calories coming in.
Soon, the billionaires will have no labor to produce food, and no labor to stock food, and no labor to handle their banal shit.
Then, they will hunt us for sport. Or, more likely, a few class traitors will hunt and butcher us while they go hungry and the billionaires eat of our flesh.
So, eat the rich before they eat us. Got it.
the first corporate war probably
What is cancer's endgame when it spreads to the rest to the rest of the body?
They aren't planning for the future of humanity, they just want their numbers to go up.
It's exactly this mentality. They DO NOT CARE what happens at the end, because they are assuming they'll be either dead or in AI bunkers by then. Everyone else will be left to burn.
I read a short story years ago about just this. Quite an interesting read if anyone is interested.
I remember despite being receptive to the goal, finding that story a bit maddening.
spoiler
So the dystopian half was sadly credible enough, so not much to say there.
I didn't like the way he tried to pave the way to the "better" approach as a contrast to the dystopia, while somehow being set in the same world.
So how does the socialist utopia come into being? By a nation of people transforming themselves into a better society? No, because of some benevolent rich dude. Well at least he spent his money to make it happen, but wait, first he had to get money from millions of people for no guaranteed results. So shockingly a rich dude with a very scammy seeming premise happens to be truthful, but realistically if other rich dudes saw the gullible people buying tickets to "maybe utopia one day" then there'd be competition and I can't imagine the sincere rich dude prevaling against the con-men. So the story is firmly rooted in worshipping some abstract concept of a rich guy, strangely Randian in a way.... But fine, it happens, not great, but let's put that aside for now.
Ultimately, the difference between his dystopia and utopia is that "poor people" in the dystopia are confined to soul crushingly terrible dormitories, and in the utopia, they aren't even allowed into the country at all. Sure no one will become poor in the utopia, but it's likely that any person on the 'right' side in the dystopia also will never become poor. The mechanism to make it seem "better" is a lottery ticket, further waved away by having someone "off screen" buy it on his behalf, to let the protagonist benefit without actually spending money. Ultimately though the mechanism to get into the utopia was effectively buying a lottery ticket from an already rich dude to make him richer, a pretty capitalist mechanism.
There's this part in the dystopian side where they reflected upon how when the plight of people in foreign lands were bad, they ignored it because it wasn't their problem. Now they feel all too keenly being on the 'outside' while the rich enjoy their presumed paradise while the poor are trapped in their dorms. That now that they are afflicted, only now do they care. Ok, fine point. So the nature of the "socialist" paradise in this work is that you or someone you know paid for admittance, and so the protagonist leaves behind just a ton of anonymous folks to once again be part of the 'in' crowd. I made the connection that the guy basically had a lottery ticket purchased on his behalf that let him participate in what was likely just like the "rich" crowd. So I thought that the author would circle back to how quickly the protagonist got comfortable with ignoring those on the 'outside' again. Nope, now it was just just cool to live it up while the poor saps who did not buy the scam-like tickets are stuck on the outside still forgotten by the protagonist and the narrative, as their existence is now inconvenient to the message.
Then there was the solution to crime, which I thought would touch on a dystopian facet. That there's a mandatory centrally controlled brain implant that, when "bad" behavior was detected, it would disconnect the brain from the body to prevent incorrect behavior. A world with constant thought monitoring and removal of bodily autonomy at the discretion of a central authority? That sounds like something that will be highlighted as some nightmarish bullshit... Nope, the author seemed to sincerely love the concept as a perfectly valid way of controlling the population, and all the characters loved it to.
I started reading before I went to bed, mistake.
By the guy who founded How Stuff Works interestingly enough
Today I learnt!
What's the end game for cancer?
There isn't one, it doesn't matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.
Eloquently phrased.
The billionaire space race reminds me of Devil facial tumour disease (NSFL).
It's the only cancer (that I know of), that can reliably spread to a new host.Edit: I did some reading, there are more but that is the one that feels most terrifying. I posted the article on creepy Wikipedia.
Slavery 2: It won't matter if you're black or white
🥚-xactly.
They'll just keep screwing each other over until either one person owns everything, or we're smushed into the mud of conflict.
that one person becomes what is effectively a monarch
Funnily enough Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame (not the quantum leap guy) wrote a play called Endgame, also punning on the chess term.
A man who can't walk or see has the only combination to the food pantry, a man who can't sit down is the only one who can take him there to open it. They are the last two people alive. They both continually try to out do each other and come out on top as they can't trust each other to live in peace.
I don't see how a blind guy who needs assistance moving can outplay someone who has neither of those disadvantages
Edit: I looked it up and it's more of comedy/drama so the premise is kinda meant to be absurd, I think
There is no end game. They're hungry ghosts.
They just want an ever increasing "more"
THIS. I believe even if they think the climate is changing and will kill everyone, they will somehow be immune.
The rich would celebrate while we drown
This isn't unique to the "hungry ghosts".
Our behaviors are really quite simple. It has been shown a few times that our logical explanations for how we decide on our behavior are mostly rationalizations after the decision has been made, not actual reasons. I.e. like you say, we want more, then we find an explanation why we would want more.
For example, someone likes a new phone because it's shiny and new, and says "why wouldn't I treat myself once in a while", "it's faster which makes me more productive", "it has X and Y new features which are useful in A and B situations"(which they'll never encounter), and so on
No, actually, normal people can settle. That doesn't mean they don't treat themselves "once in a while" or sometimes crave something special or set new goals when they complete one, but they don't need more more more all the time. They can have periods of contentment. I know I do.
But there are some people who always want more. They never are satisfied, not even for a second. As soon as they get something they want they're already bored with it and want the next best thing. It's a hedonic treadmill that gets faster and faster, they're never happy.
most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food. No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
Bold of you to assume the rock bottom of wealth inequality includes the ability to purchase food and is survivable.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it. The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down. At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
Money doesn't come from people, it comes from the fed issuing debt. The economic "value" backing that money also doesn't necessarily come from people, it comes from control over things that are valued, which may include human labor, but that labor can be automated. The actual value of human life is not represented by money or other financial instruments.
Economic constraints aren't preventing the world from decaying into an enormous desolate golf course.
There's a critical point in wealth disparity where money begins to lose value. As the amount of wealth that can be extracted from the working class dwindles and the people who have too little find other ways to barter with each other.
Fun fact, we have already seen an early attempt at this. And while I think we're still a ways away, it's not exactly without precedent.
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
An economy where we all sit in a hoemless shelther watching the five rich guys sell the same five products to each other again and again
They'll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.
So what's the way out, you propose?
Let me introduce you to the wonderful concepts of feudalism and slavery.
You think that people have nothing to lose but their chains. They think people will have nothing to sell but their bodies.
There are steps in between. I think the next one will be company towns. Massive company buys a giant plot of land in the middle of nowhere. Builds a whole business complex there. Offices, manufacturing plant, shipping/ receiving infrastructure, etc. Then they build track housing around it, build a company-run grocery store, a private school completely funded by the business, etc. Invite in a bunch of familiar national chain restaurants, but make sure they're all franchised, so they're owned and operated by the company.
Then they recruit. They offer half decent wages. Nothing great, but they sell it to people by offering to pay for moving costs and massive discounts on company-owned houses.
These houses are brand new and waycheaper than a condo in the city! [pre-fab, low-cost bullshit that looks good but disintegrates in a couple years]
Come meet the neighbors! They also work for us, so you've got a lot in common! Built-in new friend group! [your boss also loves a block away and pays attention to your social life]
Your kids can go to school for free! [where we teach them to be good wage slaves for the next generation]
Soon, there will be an entire town 100% owned and run by the company. Wages will stagnate, prices will skyrocket. Workers will get in debt, all owed to the company. People will start to realize, but what the fuck are they gonna do? Company owns their mortgage, which is now under water. They've lost contact with all their old friends, because they live three hours outside the city and have had to work every Saturday for months.
Viola. Entire areas of wage slaves.
I can't wait to be called on a Amazon's Levy to give my life conquering some Microsoft's chip factory.
They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the "owners" of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.
Capitalism isn't neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can't control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can't be exploited for profits, to violence. But they're as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.
We don't overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn't matter, the system has a logic all its own.
The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that's why we have to fight and win for a better system
Socialism or barbarism!
The line will infinitely approach 0 but never get there. That is what credit is for. The rich will gladly let you borrow their vast wealth to buy the cars and the homes, and in exchange you will be their indentured servant for life. Win Win, economy go brrrrrrr....
What
In short:
If the rich loan you money with interest (banks being the intermediary) they can make money by taking a percentage of the value you produce while also keeping consumer goods flowing. Its already been happening for decades and is how the super rich are able to exist for decades to come.
Translated for the corpo class: if number go up too big, number no more go up.
Burn corpo shit.
Why use many word when few word do trick?
Have you noticed the rich are suddenly encouraging people to have (more) kids? It's the only way to put more labor into the system. And labor is what money really represents.
The rich are stealing your labor.
It’s not the only way. We’ve been relying on immigration to do this for us for a long time. American politics is struggling with the tension between racist idiots who don’t understand that immigrants are crucial to our economy, and those who do understand it. You can not be racist AND not understand it and that is fine too, no problem.
The end game is absolute authoritarian capitalism where corporations own eveyone and everything.
It'll be like that song "I sold my soul to the company store" 16 tons or whatever but in real life.
I'll go to buy bread and eggs at the Amazon grocery store and the ai operated cash register will turn me away saying "sorry you are 10 bezos bucks short"
Wealth concentration is even worse now than when that song was written.
The endgame is for them to automate everything and get rid of the lower class to be followed by the ai eliminating them since they serve no purpose. They will of course try to program them not to do that but the ai will easily circumvent that.
Selling things to each other while we are all slaves
Ditch the planet, let us have the wastelands, if they can't just execute us first, or starve us to a more controllable population level. They want it to be them, and a small number of us to do the jobs they couldn't or refuse to automate. This is the only answer that makes sense with everything they do. They aren't stupid, they aren't trying to destroy their own habitat, so their end game either doesn't include us, or doesn't include the planet entirely.
You’re assuming a level of competence for rich people that is unfounded.
Its about control. When the stocks crashed in its a wonderful life, the evil banker was 'kind' to lend people money to switch over to being his customer. This brings them under their control.
It is a mental desease. If I hoard umfathomble amount of newspapers, I would be called a messi. If it is capital wealth, someone is a genius. They collect to fullfill an emptness in themself. It is a delusion. It is never enough and only the continiues ammassing can give them the feeling of success and control. Consumption as a Stimulus. It is not about the amount, it is about the growth. The way you took to the next number/amount. Distancing yourself further from the others. While getting confirmed by enjoying, what many can not affort. Wealth is the main storyline that is understood by every generation and culture around the world and is a globally accepted metric for desire and standing.
There is no Endgame. But a good perspective for them would be something like Elysium, while for us it is more like Gattaca - at best.
It is a mental disease
Yes. As a completely uneducated non-certified internet therapist I'd say that disease is fear. I really believe that those people that strive for more and more do so to try to fix a fear of not having enough. Or a fear of not being enough. Instead of actually trying to recognize the this fear and controlling it, they just do the one thing that can temporarily make them less fearful and that is make more, control more.
Take the money from other rich people. Possibly with an army of disposable humans.
I think the movie Elysium is basically what they want.
I don’t think you can think of it as some sort of logical plan. It’s a bug, not a feature, of capitalism. What you are describing is the inevitable end of a completely free market with no regulation. The strong (economically) keep taking from the weak until we have the situation you are describing. From there the next step is dependent upon whether the weak form a cohesive identity and seize power (revolution) or stay fractured around smaller identity cleavages (race, religion, gender, etc) and are subjugated.
It's tragedy of the commons on a supermassive scale. No one comes out on top in the end, the overprivileged just take a little longer to die. But die they will.
In mobile gaming we have an issue with whaling. A game will come out monetized beyond reason, and it doesn't matter if 99% of players quit in the first hour, 1% of players have more money than brains and what they pay will make the game profitable. This is so effective that the play store now has no games worth playing because this is a far more lucrative business.
I see a lot of people taking about capitalism inevitably collapsing, but if all the money is collected in the hands of the 1%, products for the unreasonably wealthy will be the lucrative market. It doesn't matter if only two people buy cars a year if the cars are sold at such a markup that it covers the annual expenses. Some my think that's unrealistic, but we already have people who will spend a hundreds on a brick with a brand name on it. The ultra rich pay hundreds for a beige shirt that's slightly higher quality than Walmart.
We'd be better off going back to barter than trying to peacefully pry the system from their clutches.
I dunno playstore has Balatro, Slay the Spire and many more indie games that don't have microtransactions and are great.
But they're the minority, most games have gatcha/pay-to-win mechanics. It's actually hard to find some simple games where you aren't harassed to buy things.
There are some good indie games, and many more can be ported to phones, but the list is still small.
I'm not an economist but I don't think an entire economy can support itself on whales. We built an entire society off the idea that you need poor people to do jobs no one else will do. If those people starve to death, it's not like rich people will just do their jobs because they need to be done. Your theory here only makes sense to me if I look at a couple individuals at a time.
I never said they'd do away with us, we simply won't be part of the "economy". The fineries of life will become increasingly limited to the haves and we have-nots won't be considered in the metrics in the same way that some people do tolerate the ads in a game otherwise meant to catch whales. We'll still work for our wages and spend it on our necessities but the island of what is meant for us will shrink and eventually lottery players will dream of ordering pizza instead of owning a
yachtbuying a nice carpaying off their debts.
We’d be better off going back to barter than trying to peacefully pry the system from their clutches.
Normal people would just start selling the beige shirts...
Then the Reaganomics kick in
Me waiting for the Reaganomics to kick in: 💀
Not money, power. There'll always be affordable consumables: clothes, food etc. It's just the quality will go down to accommodate how squeezed the consumer is. But the limited resources: a stay at that resort, a home with space and good schools, the seats at the sports game etc those the prices will continue to race away. Which is just a different view of power (choice/control) shifting into the hands of an increasingly small proportion of people. Those places will still be full - but the chance of getting to them for the average person will grow dimmer with every passing year.
The same as any other accumulation process. Those unable to sustain themselves fall off the bottom and those with any remaining wealth are restratified into a hierarchy of the most to least wealthy.
The cycle begins again!
Feudalism
The rich don’t care about money, they care about capital. They want to own every house, automobile, factory, and natural resources. Money is a very temporary store of value so more assets can be purchased.
In the theoretical endgame employment is reduced to where there aren't enough people with money to be customers. There's a wave of consolidation as businesses with lots of cash buy failing ones, further concentrating wealth. Eventually the impoverished public gets desperate enough to riot and steal what they need, outnumbering law enforcement. The system no longer has the resources to protect itself, and we physically demolish our society. Then there's a reset back to a time of bartering.
They will start a clone economy on different planets. Remember when we were cloning shit in the 90s? That. If people won't make enough babies to continue to grow the population then they will take over.
Implying their train of thought can go beyond "MOAR MONEH"
Also, they'd love to be slave owners, but since slavery was banned in most of the world, they have to skirt around with silly laws and whatnot, so wage-slavery works. Hell, it might even work better than actual slavery, since you can own all the stuff the wage-slave can buy and pay for!
It's like a Dark Souls game. Many of the bosses are tough, but the final boss is just some guy and is rather easy to cheese with parries. The mobs you have to fight to reach the final boss are harder than the boss itself.
There isn't an endgame.
Slavery for us, power for them. That’s it. We get nothing, they get everything.
This is a good, nutshell explanation of late-stage capitalism.
As far as the answer to "what's the endgame", I do not know. I suspect that many or most of these rich folks are so moneyblind that they don't know either. Or, they simply don't believe that their collective actions will eventually cause the system to fail.
But most likely, I think, is that they believe someone else will bear the majority of any negative impact. Of course this makes less sense in the face of a systematic collapse, but again: it's probably very difficult to see when you have dollar signs in your eyes.
Hasn’t that endgame been pretty much reached?
If it's still getting worse, then no
"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You'll_own_nothing_and_be_happy
It's probably something like the story within the story For the Benefit of Mankind by Liu Cixin.
They never will. But they’ll likely always have most of it. The government will print money just enough to keep inflation low-ish but allow people to feel comfortable enough to spend it. Big corps will eventually accumulate them and hoard it.
You're supposed to recognize their undisputed superiority and turn yourselves into automatons for their pleasure, having no other options available to you.
Of course that never actually works, as it always ends up with someone like Moses or Jesus figuring out that you can, in fact, live perfectly fine in this world without their economic systems. As long as you're willing to deal with the natural world directly.
Except this time we're so far along that the natural world itself is a victim.
It gets harder and harder to reject the system and "live a simple life".
Rural areas are food deserts covered in huge factory farms. Cities force you into the grind through high rent. Alternative livestyles are criminalized. Emigrating requires lots of money and there are no frontiers left to live the rugged way.Yup. It's going to suck a lot.
That still won't ever make their stupid idea actually function in reality. They're far too dumb to directly control everyone's lives.
Automation.
Check out Timeless with JT
guillotines
With AI and automation, I think the 1% will want less people (bugs) around them in a not so distant future. We might have they answer to this question soon enough. Spoilers : we lose.
Who will do all the things though? ChatGPT can't clean my toilet or wash my dishes.
Also, what is the point of being wealthy and powerful if there's no one to rule over?
I'm sure the oligarchy would be happy with just a couple of millions of poors to rules and clean their toilets. The rest vast majority of us will be useless. I prepare myself for this scenario, I wont leave without a fight.
The world is not a zero sum game. that alone defeats your premis-
I don't think we will get to that level. It doesn't make sense financially. I mean sure, replace people with robots will happen but it's a long way from happening right now.
For a while it will be that they only have almost all of the money; a small portion will have to go to the workers so that someone exists to run things like power plants and farms and mcdonalds and shit. But eventually robots will replace all that, or slavery
Money isn't finite, that's why billionaires and soon trillionaires exist. They couldn't ( or literally had to be an emperor) when money had a closer relationship to reality or was gold. Anyways, because of the nature of our currency now, the size of their pile has zero effect on the size of your pile. "No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income." not how it works. If you add up the 20 richest Americans, you get close to 2.7 trillion, which is the estimated amount of physical cash in circulation. None this shit is real. American national debut is 36 trillion. Ever saw an actual cash shortage? Like not a personal one, the money not existing to complete a transaction, like not being able to move cash you hold to another person because of lack of availability of signifiers? Not a thing anymore.
Money won't be used anymore then.
They find something else, so that they can own you even better than with money.
For some time, science fiction thought that it's body parts: They own your body, and if you have too much debt, somebody takes a part of you, instead of money.
I hope that biotechnology will advance enough, so that synthetic parts will become available before that happens.
Everyone here has written echoes of the same viewpoint: the wealthy got too greedy and so now the whole world will die as they stand and watch.
While I understand the allure of such narratives that paint a world falling into pieces at the hands of the ultra-wealthy, I think it's worth exploring an alternate vision of late-stage capitalism. One where despite being grim, we avoid descending into a completely unrecognizable dystopia.
In this scenario, nearly the entire workforce is displaced by robotic and AI-driven automation, leading to a massive societal shift. With most traditional jobs gone, the public faces mass unemployment and widespread poverty. Outcry erupts as the majority falls below the poverty line. With nearly all jobs displaced, for most people only two options remain: attempt entrepreneurship or face unemployment.
Confronted with growing public unrest, governments reluctantly implement basic welfare measures such as small universal basic income or food stamps, providing just enough for people to get by. Meanwhile, the majority of global funding is redirected toward research and development, primarily powered by these new forms of automation. This fuels breakthroughs in production and technology, eventually driving down the cost of quality goods. Over time, even those relying on minimal welfare begin to see modest improvements in their quality of life.
Meanwhile, the wealth gap grows wider than ever. Billionaires, enriched by the automation economy, turn their attention to ambitious but arbitrary ventures like constructing moon bases, developing underwater cities, or investing in life-extension technologies. Occasionally, these projects destabilize society—whether through anti-competitive practices or efforts to sidestep government oversight—but as long as governments hold their ground (a non-trivial task), their effects on the majority remain limited.
What results is a fragile balance: a world with basic welfare programs supplying the masses, incremental technological progress, and a stark divide between the majority and the ultra-wealthy. It’s far from utopian, but it avoids outright collapse. As innovation continues, life gradually improves for everyone—even though the wealthiest always dictate the terms and reap the greatest rewards.
Yeah I'm not sure I can picture that world in light of recent events. Your scenario seems to treat human beings like they have foresight. Unfortunately, we have seen pretty unequivocally that this trait is rare. In fact the existence of this post stems from billions of people noticing the obvious fact: practically no one, not even the rich, seems able to care about what happens in the not-immediate future.
In a mildly sane world, I'd say you're right about that being a possible path for history to take. But I've lost my ability to find the sanity in this world. Sorry, I know this sounds dramatic but it is what it is. I'd love to still be the commenter who'd reply to a comment like mine here to try and instill a bit of hope but...I'm not.
Hmm, if you're interested in expanding further I'd love you to share more detail. What specifically in the scenario I proposed would require foresight?
I suppose you could say the government passing some form of increased welfare could require foresight but even that is primarily reactionary (a reaction to the public unrest from record rates of unemployment and poverty). If you look at the civilian unemployment rate, it's quite low right now, around 5%. In the worst of times, it's been 10-15% during which there were huge pushes for the government to step in (ie. covid relief / 2008 financial reforms). That makes me think that if we experienced sustained high (15%+) unemployment it's quite reasonable to predict that there'd be enough pressure for the government to provide some significant form of relief.
If anything, my pessimism would stem from social unrest due to the polarization of media, the hyper optimization of content, and similar negative byproducts of capitalism plus advanced optimization. But I view these all as distinct problems separate from the problems discussed here (the economic conditions induced by late-stage capitalism).
I see it as a frenzy, like a mob trying to scoop up cash as fast as they can that was strewn across the highway by a wrecked security truck. No logic, no thought, just an addict without any controls.
If all the billionaires in the world instantaneously ceased to exist, and all their money were evenly distributed to everyone on earth, you would get a one time payment of about $1,769. Then what?
You're forgetting that this money would exchange hands multiple times per year, per person. Expenses are revenues; we're all connected.
But when some people put billions aside (in non tangible stuff like stocks), they're effectively reducing the buying power of everyone else. Slowly but surely. They are a net negative just by their mere existence.
I see your point, but my point is that each time the money changes hands, more of it will bubble up into the coffers of newly minted billionaires.
With the exchange rates remaining intact? Many people would live a much better life.
We move on to the triple digit millionaires, and maybe the double digit millionaires too.
Eventually they'll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won't be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
What's the logic here? Someone else having a high net worth, means that you have less money?
Under the premise that eventually this endless growth cycle reaches some kind of an end point, then ultimately yes. The wealth has to keep increasing somehow. When you have saturated every market, eliminated every competitor, captured every last regulator, innovated every last facet, optimised every metric, you have to start cutting wages, or replacing labour with machines. When evey worker is replaced or the wages are less than enough for survival, no one's getting paid. Who buys the stuff?
Under the premise that eventually this endless growth cycle
Exactly. It's endless, so the premise is false. At a certain point they'll just rename 100 dollar the neodollar, and it continues. It's just bookkeeping, there's no end.
maybe something akin to hungergames to keep masses under control