Doctor Robot

One of the popular topics among the curious minded is the coming robot revolution where, presumably, all work will be done by robots. A regular feature of the news is the story of how some function previously done by people is now being done by smart machines. The prevailing assumption is that the sort of manual labor jobs done by the working class will disappear over the next generations. That may be true, but it will not be the working man losing out initially. It is going to be the office people who feel the pinch first.

One of the things everyone sort of knows is that a whole lot of what passes for office work is not particularly important. Government is the most obvious example. Everyone is familiar with the image of the road crew standing around watching one guy work, but that pales in comparison to the government agency. Thousands hiding cubicles watching porn or gambling. The paleocons used to make the point that the expansion of government at all levels is primarily a jobs program. It keeps the troublesome busy.

Anyone who has worked in big corporations or large law firms knows there is plenty of busy work going on in those cubicles too. Some of it is defensive, like human resource departments and safety managers, but a lot of it just sort of happens. Make-work jobs grow on an organization like a fungus. The hospitality industry has always suffered from this more than most. In good times, they hire up, even though the need is not there, but then come the lean times, the extra is cut loose and no one really notices.

The robot came to mind when booking my last physical. I have been saying for years that a good chunk of health care could be automated today. Yet, the only growing segment of the labor market, outside of government, is health care. At my doctor’s office, I interact with probably a dozen people during a physical. I know what two of them do and one of them could be replaced by a kiosk. The rest are just women in purple scrubs milling around doing nothing I can identify as medical work or even clerical work.

What has always been puzzling to me is that I never actually see a doctor. In fact, I have yet to meet my doctor in person. We have communicated by e-mail once or twice. Instead, I deal with a nurse practitioner. Once a year, she asks me the same questions and then types my answers into a laptop. She then gives me a physical examination, sticks her finger in my arse and that is the end of it. If I were allowed to answer the questions in advance, the whole thing could be done as a drive-thru service.

I noticed when booking the last visit, on-line of course, that the time slot was now 30 minutes. In the past, I was told to be there for an hour. Some of that time was waiting for my turn, but most of the face time with the nurse was the question and answer stuff. The new on-line appointment process had me answering the questions during the booking, rather than in person. I even did the insurance work in advance. I just show up, get naked, get violated, give a blood sample and go on my way.

The truth of it is most people could get along simply fine with Doctor Google and a routing service to guide people in need of services to the correct providers. When I hurt my knee a while back, I met with a dozen people I had no reason to meet, just to get to the correct person. Frustratingly, I knew the service I needed because I knew the injury. I even looked up the possible ways to address the injury. But I was forced by humans to see a dozen of them first. The robot doctor would never do this to me.

This is just one example of the millions of daily tasks now done by humans in offices that can easily be eliminated with current automation. The fact that it is happening so slowly speaks to how resistant work life is to change. Medical service providers are now being squeezed by insurance companies so the medical providers are looking for savings via automation. One day, reality will come crushing in on the insurance firms and most of those jobs will be automated in the blink of an eye.

The medical services business is a massive racket, which exists as it does primarily due to government. I have made the point for years that it would look something like veterinary medicine if not for government. As such, it should be more resistant to the robots than other fields. The fact that it is showing signs of disruption due to automation suggests we will get our first glimpse of the robot revolution in a white collar field, rather than a blue collar one. The robots are coming for the office workers first.

That will be bring some interesting socio-political ramifications that our rulers seem incapable of pondering. Just look at how they struggle to make sense of the public reaction to wholesale migration. Democrats abandoned working class whites in favor or cheap foreign labor and they remained poleaxed over why these voters abandoned Team Clinton for Team Trump. Imagine what happens when suburban unemployment doubles due to automation. Signaling over trannies is probably not going to work too well.

In case anyone is wondering, Doctor Robot gave me a clean bill of health.

56 thoughts on “Doctor Robot

  1. Robots are easily kept out of offices by way of licensing requirements. Plus, since robots won’t be paid, and thus won’t pay taxes, the government will make sure that only humans can be licensed.

  2. my doctor told me that putting a finger up the butt is no longer in practice as part of a routine physical.

  3. The medical services business is a massive racket, that exists as it does primarily due to government.

    Well, one COULD make the case that lawyers are also a significant part of the problem

  4. The **** County Highway Dept. where I live in WI has had several layoffs in ’17. Yeah apparently they found shovels that will stand up by themselves.

    • As a side note, in my industry of railroading Positive Train Control will be fully implemented by 2018. PTC is a collision prevention system which is what we believe is the testing ground for what eventually will become crewless trains. PTC was rushed to the front of the line after 2008’s Chatsworth Ca. Metrolink doing a header into a Union Pacific freight killing 25. As a result of that crash they implemented a cell phone ban on us while running trains. I’m fine with that. PTC is being tested on a portion of my railroad down in Louisiana. I hear they’re suffering fits and starts with it regarding trains broken in 2 or more pieces. That can take a few hours to get them back together depending upon how remote the location is.
      Some railroads also use Remote Control units ran by either a Conductor or Engineer whom has the box strapped to their chest. 15 years ago a Train Master admitted that when the RC’s get behind in production they’ll throw a engineer in the cab and put another man on the ground to catch up on the switching. I’m 48, I’ve got 12 years left. I would suspect none of this will overly affect the remainder of my career but the next gen of railroaders will live in interesting times.

  5. ‘Frustratingly, I knew the service I needed because I knew the injury’

    My wife, here in England, had a bad knee and went to see numerous people in our much-vaunted (at least by the socialists among us) NHS with not much progress. Finally her doctor sent her to see a hip specialist, who was utterly mystified why she had been sent to him.

    A few weeks later she met a man with a similar problem, though he had a dodgy heart but his doctor eventually sent him to see a brain injury specialist who announced he could find nothing wrong. I know the NHS is a vast, clumsy machine but filling the waiting rooms of specialists who cannot help and merely waste everyone’s time isn’t great, unless of course there is a box to be ticked by the doctor that says ‘action taken’ but never asks what.

  6. Modern healthcare has been resistant, thus far at any rate, to automation and the turmoil of 21st century economics because it is a cartel whose goal is not the maximization of patient satisfaction and health, but protection of the turf of medical professionals – physicians, pharmacists, nurses, physical therapists, and the rest. The healthcare field has insulated itself from the worst of the changes affecting the rest of the economy by use of what Charles Hugh Smith accurately terms a “complexity fortress.”

    The complexity surrounding healthcare is intended to limit entry into its various fields, thereby keeping the number of practitioners relatively low and wages and profit margins high. A relative of mine, a physician of many years experience and no small success, once told me that the AMA is akin to a medieval guild.

    The civilian world could emulate the military model of healthcare in which decision-making responsibility is pushed downward and into the hands of well-trained and more-numerous medics and corpsmen, but that would mean the rice bowels of HC educators would not be as full, and we can’t have that, can we? “Patient safety” is the excuse offered for the difficulty getting into civilian healthcare fields, but the real story is that entry must be limited to keep wages high. In other words, it is about the money…. it always is, isn’t it?

  7. The big picture here is that we will accelerate the devolution of the species because the new paradigm will reward parasitism at the expense of productivity. This inevitably leads to a cancer-like population dysfunction when the attendant social pathologies become dominant and destructive. The only viable alternative is to artificially create an environment of extreme hardship and force everyone to aggressively compete for resources.

  8. A few weeks ago my boys 100 Lb pointer stopped eating and stated drinking gallons of water.
    After a couple of days we took him to the vet, he had a full exam and an xray.
    No sign of anything so a full range of anti-biotics and a few cans of extra virtuous food.
    Two day’s later no change except for the squirts. Back to the Vet. Xray, sonogram, nothing.
    Three days later back again, this time an observably visible mass in the the colon had appeared.
    Dog in overnight, operated on next day, pieces of kitchen rug removed two full days of 24/7 post operative care. Full panel of drugs, staples removed 10 days later.
    Dog’s fine, total cost a little less than $3k.

    Had it been the boy rather than his beast, it would have been $35k.

    The US Veterinary Medicine system is fine. It’s the one run by the AMA that’s fucked.

  9. “sticks her finger in my arse and that’s the end of it.”
    How odd, if you’re old enough that she’s giving digital prostate exam, she SHOULD be fondling your balls as well!

  10. Fact is, most of the people you interact with on a doctor’s visit are there to block any attempt to file a malpractice claim. They make sure that the rote questions are asked and the answers are recorded. No one is allowed to directly approach the MD at the apex; must protect the king.
    Kinda like the layers in the Mafia, to keep anybody away from the top guy.

  11. Short of a quantum leap advance in AI, mostly robots will shift employment much the same way that electric vehicles shift, but do not eliminate or massively reduce, energy consumption. Trade jobs (electricians, painters, HVAC, etc.) are going to be safe for a really long time. Jobs that are considered high tech “STEM” jobs today (think “robot repair” and software development) will be the trade jobs of the next generation of workers.

    Until robots can change bedpans, don’t expect the medical field to see much of a decrease in employment. This is particularly true as the population ages. I would expect to see a lot more “leisure” jobs (entertainment, recreation, hotels, resorts, theme parks, etc.) as increased automation means more free time. In medicine, expect the physicians to “pay themselves” in Time in addition to Salary. With the Government dumping vast sums of money into healthcare to buy votes, don’t expect huge changes any time soon.

    Government “busy work” jobs won’t increase much. Total Federal employment has grown at a much slower rate than population over the last 40 years. The country is 50% larger (330M vs. 220M), but total federal workers have only grown from about 16M to 19M in that time…not 24M. Yeah, the Pareto Rule still applies, but that’s true in any organization.

    The main jobs going away in the near term from automation will be food service and financial services. People are pretty comfortable using online booking/ordering systems as the technology gets better (we made our anniversary dinner reservation via OpenTable last weekend, no need for the restaurant to have a reservationist on standby). A lot of food preparation can be automated. And people are starting to figure out that 0.5% overhead on an 8.5% ETF lets them keep more of their retirement money than a 2.5% overhead “managed” fund that grows at 10%.

    It’s not like that finance guy at the kiosk at Fidelity is going to save me from the next market decline. The Fed will do that for him.

  12. To join the chorus,

    I work in the medical lab and the automation is already here. Clearly, the big advances in medical laboratory tech came about in the 80’s, when three things were developed into what is now relatively cheap: robotics, computers and lasers. Those three things form the foundation of nearly every laboratory analyzer.

    What I find comical, is that we call ourselves “medical laboratory SCIENTISTS”. The reality is that we are, for most of us, simple technicians. Yes, we understand what those tests mean, but we spend all of our time maintaining machines.

  13. Here in former Yugoslavia people would joke how we pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us.

  14. The thing that will keep lots of people employed is that software doesn’t work very well. It works so poorly that often you need the help of a person to undo a problem that software has caused.

    Look at all the cell phone stores that are all over the place. There shouldn’t be a need for these places as you should just be able to order a phone online or pull it from a rack at walmart and activate everything online, either on your own computer at home or walmart’s wifi using the device you are trying to activate.

    Yet somehow there is a Boost, MetroPCS or Cricket store on every block and apparently these places are able to stay in business. The only reason plausible reason for this is that software doesn’t work well enough for people to use in a way that’s simple enough for people to use it.

    • My wife is a doctor. They may have “eliminated” manpower from some of their record keeping sections, but she has the software support at Epic on speed dial for when the software malfunctions or crashes.

  15. As you stated, most of the office jobs are going to go away. Technology is going to handle shuffling the paper from one spot to the next. The problem is, we are reaching an automation tipping point.

    People always like to throw out the buggy whip maker analogy over concerns about automation. However, if you look at earlier waves of automation, they mainly involved shifting people around to similar levels of work. Virtually all of the ditch diggers were competent enough to move to a factory screwing parts together to the ditch digging equipment. Now the automation is killing jobs and not creating new opportunities. For instance, automating truck driving doesn’t create new jobs for truck drivers. Most aren’t going to be up to the task of programming and there aren’t going to be that many jobs programming.

    The same thing is happening with office jobs. Even some high end tasks there are becoming automated. How long before you enter your symptoms, maybe a nurse does a couple of things, and the computer spits out the results? You might have a doctor who does a quick double check of the results. So where you needed six doctors, now you need two.

    I think vet medicine is having problems because of too many women in the field. Men tend to be more pragmatic about animals than women. Women get emotionally attached and are willing to spend any amount for Fluffy.

  16. I think Doctors will eventually be the programmers and Quality Controllers of health care. Lower paid people can draw blood, take retinal scans, perform MRIs, etc… The doctors will just be the ones reviewing results, making the official diagnosis, and prescribing treatments.

  17. I used to work in an automobile manufacturing plant. Robotics were rolled out in a big way back in the early 80’s. Repetitive tasks such as painting or welding unit bodies were automated. Other tasks such as routing cables or harnesses are more challenging for robots.

    Imagine the difficulty in programming a system to do something as simple as clean a motel room. Magazines have teased about Jetsons style house cleaning robots for a couple of generations, but the design is challenging. I can imagine an alternate history in which eugenics rather than dysgenics was implemented in 1963. Toilet scrubbing might pay better than engineering in such a world.

    Software applications are a bigger factor than robots at present. Software has simplified many engineering tasks to the extent that many engineers spend hours doing tedious data entry while the software handles all of the calculations. A professional engineer spends many hours getting credentialed only to rarely use his knowledge. (Unless he or she is developing the software)

    Discussion of a future world full of computers are robots seemed exciting back in 1969. What we got was a world of cubicle drones repetitively typing in data. I don’t think the spaceships or flying cars will be on the market soon.

  18. ….”Frustratingly, I knew the service I needed because I knew the injury. I even looked up the possible ways to address the injury. But, I was forced by humans to see a dozen of them first.”

    If it wasn’t the insurance companies trying to force you to take the most conservative (and cheapest) route by making you see 10 different people, then it was the scam between a bunch of friends at different offices for referrals so they could get their cut of the pie. Much like the lawyer who always had his go to “doctor” when you were in a car accident.

    I’ll never forget the first time I encountered this. I was hospitalized after a 8 hour non-stop fest of liquids coming out both ends. Had massive chest pains from all the liquids lost, thought I was going to die. I get admitted at around 10PM in the ER. Every 30 minutes some new set of doctors would come up to ask me the same questions over and over again. Always somebody different. After the 5th doctor, my mom who came to the hospital, kicked out the next doctor who tried to come in and he got pissed. I was sleeping, but my Mom said he was mad because he couldn’t put his name on the bill for payment. (All Indian doctors by the way).

    Then I finally got put into a room for observation and filling me with IV and potassium packs after all the liquids lost. Then I get 2 guys who show up and they want to do an Endoscopy, so I get that done. The guy who does the procedure looks at the photos and says he doesn’t see anything, all looks good except some inflammation from all my vomiting. His partner comes back the next day to tell me they found something that looked serious, wants to set up appointments with me for more tests. i said his partner said everything was fine, but then he went into uh-oh mode and said they did a more intensive scan of the photos. I said I would call him, never did because I figured they were trying to scam money with needless tests. Never heard from them again either.

    After 5 days I was released, they never told me what happened to me, even after drawing enough blood to feed Dracula for a month. Then I found out another person had work had the same thing happen to her, she was told it was a bacterial infection. So that’s what i assume I had. Everybody got their fix at the hospital for socking it to the insurance companies and I didn’t even get a correct diagnosis.

      • I work at a mid sized Plaintiff’s firm. We do almost all our cases on contingency. So we sign clients, front any and all costs, then take roughly half of what we get in terms of a verdict or settlement as fees and covering expenses. There is a lot of procrastination, most work is done at the last minute, but I hardly ever see any unnecessary work happen, unless it’s mandated by law, regulation, or our IT department. As an aside, there is no better guard against the “frivolous lawsuit” than the contingency fee agreement.

        I have friends who work at defense firms that bill clients by the hour. Whole different set of incentives, whole different environment.

    • Yeah, I had some pills block my esophogus and had to go into the ER. They wound up doing an endoscopy to clear it all out. The doctor wanted me to make an appointment, a month off, so he could tell me what he found. I felt like he could have taken the five minutes to do it that night. It’s all done to line their pockets

  19. When researching a Doctor these are the two most important questions to be asked:

    Is she good looking?
    Does she have tiny fingers?

  20. So far automation in medicine has resulted in more employees hired to do less real and more busy work, and higher, not lower costs. The use of electronic medical records is a good case in point. We were told that it would speed up processes, improve efficiency, lower costs, and make it so that more patient-physician face time would be available. In your case, any time saving noticed was gotten by transferring work to you. If you were to ask anyone on staff in that office whether their work load had diminished, my guess is that they would say no, that they were involved in some new mandated task required by some new regulation.

    Find a nurse or surgical tech involved in robotic surgery and ask them if the cases are done more quickly or if they save money over traditional surgery. So far they are expensive and cumbersome and the studies purporting to show advantages are mostly cooked to show what the investigators want. Don’t get me wrong. There are some technical advantages to be had, I’m just arguing the cost and efficiency side of things.

    One thing I have noticed through the years is that technology tends to result in cost savings in just about everything except medicine. If it does so in medicine it is after years and years of waiting for that savings. I attribute this to the high degree of regulation which destroys any efficiency advantage to be had, and to the rigidity of the institutions created as a result of the medical monopoly.

    I’ll say it again: on this one the libertarians were right, and I say we’re because they never talk about this anymore. Licensing needs to be abolished.

    • I can’t understand why anyone things electronic medical records is a good idea. If it were done correctly, it would flag areas for the doctors. On prednisone? Then a bone density scan and meds to support the adrenals would be in order. Electronic medical records don’t do anything like this. It seems to have been a pay off to the tech companies, forcing hospitals and clinics to buy a lot of computers and software. And let’s not forget how hackable the whole thing is.

      I have better luck, treating my illness, with a naturopath than with my pulmonologist. The naturopath understands that you treat an auto immune disease by building up the immune system. The pulmonologist just wants to do expensive invasive procedures to confirm his diagnosis.

      • Just to play ever so slight devil’s advocate, the main cost savings from electronic medical records is not having to pay to store a cubic acre of paper records for 10 years after the facility stops treating patients. And additionally no one will have to search through the miasma to find records anymore. That cost savings is still in the pipeline.

  21. I work in the IT department of a large Fortune 500 company, and the inefficiency is flabbergasting. And I’ve worked in several of these kinds of shops, so I can also add that my current employer is by no means exceptional; most of the employee roster in a big company is dead weight, or participating in mindless paperwork-shuffling.

    Putting aside the standard Dilbert-esque monologue on life as a cubicle drone, it does make me think about modern economies, and what would happen if businesses truly were in the business of making profit, instead of participating in some strange corporatist make-work morality play (this is apparently Hispanic Heritage Awareness Month, about the fifth month in a row that HR wants to make sure we’re “aware” of some downtrodden folks).

    I can easily imagine my department being 50% smaller, if we could trim away the paperwork Kabuki dance. It could probably be 70% smaller. What would America look like if the HR facilitators, Compliance officers, and Diversity co-ordinators were forced to find meaningful professions? What would the unemployment rate be? 30 percent? 50 percent? And this is *before* the impending tsunami of automation that’s coming.

    I’m a lifelong fiscal “conservative” (whatever that word used to mean), and this is the kind of thing that makes me grit my teeth, and admit that we might have to consider some form of living wage. I’d love to hear a better suggestion, because the only other option might be for the Actual Workers to live in gated communities with robotic sentries and laser drones to keep out the furious mobs.

    • Yes, how will our market-based economy have enough consumers to keep it going well? Or will the entire paradigm change?

      • I’m thinking “Paradigm Shift”. That term tends to get thrown around a little too easily, and there are plenty of automation tut-tutters who will repeat familiar stories about the Chicken Littles of the 19th century who asked what all the farmers would do once food production was automated. But this time is, dare I say it, different. No matter how healthy and vigorous an economy is, there’s only so much fat it can carry.

        Something to point out is that, this employment catastrophe isn’t going to be the result of The Singularity, or Strong AI. The sad fact (as I think Z Man is alluding to) is that about one-third of modern middle-management, HR, and office work could be replaced by a well-written spreadsheet macro.

        More likely (and worrisome for different reasons) is that businesses will continue to outsource things they’re bad at. I can imagine a future, only five years off, where 80-90% of businesses outsource all of their accounting, legal, sales, and HR work to “Google Office Services” or “Amazon Cloud Office”. This will further increase and concentrate the control that the tech monopolies hold over our lives, and make them even more powerful strongholds of Progressive SJW totalitarianism.

        • “This will further increase and concentrate the control that the tech monopolies hold over our lives, and make them even more powerful strongholds of Progressive SJW totalitarianism.”

          This is believable and scary.

    • “I’m a lifelong fiscal “conservative” (whatever that word used to mean), and this is the kind of thing that makes me grit my teeth, and admit that we might have to consider some form of living wage. I’d love to hear a better suggestion, because the only other option might be for the Actual Workers to live in gated communities with robotic sentries and laser drones to keep out the furious mobs.”

      The walled community is the net result either way. One cannot cultivate a class/cohort around the ethic of productive pro-social labor and another around the mandate of provision for their life a priori. That might sound workable under some kind of nobless oblige, but you simply end up with an amplification of what yesterday’s conservatives complained about in the entitlement-driven underclass with its myriad dysfunctions and anti-social tendencies.

      Frankly, the only tried and true solution is the revival of the family as a base-level social unit and localism as the de facto source of extra-familial safety nets. The further away one gets from local and familial control over the distribution of resources to dependents, the harder it becomes to enforce pro-social norms on those who would drift off into the asocial cycle of pure dependency and entitlement. At bottom, there must always be locally familiar and accountable persons in charge of differentiating between the deserving and the undeserving and the latter must be permitted to be cut off entirely.

      The basic income is little more than the progressive misreading of humanity writ-large. It would put all the familiar progressive bureaucracies in charge of doling out ever-more-generous sinecures to their politically favored cohorts while using the dogma of social-racial hierarchy to continue pushing passionately for the defenestration of their enemies. Nothing could be more dangerous than this, not even nuclear war would better ensure that Europe and her diaspora were totally annihilated body and soul.

      • Completely true, and it’s the reason that the words “living wage” make me throw up in my mouth a little. I think it would be an absolute catastrophe for the soul of the nation. I simply can’t imagine any way to un-ratchet the Progressive rot in our society, short of civilizational collapse or an overthrow of the government. It seems to take hard times to build a noble people.

        It’s a truly depressing thought, that peace and prosperity is one of the most destructive things that can happen to a civilization. It seems like two to three generations is about the max that the party can stretch on, before the decay sets in.

  22. That’s nothing, just wait until the oldest profession is taken over by robots. It may be the end of humanity as we know it.

  23. Personally I am amazed that colleges and universities still exist as overpopulated brick and mortar institutions. 99% of the academic work can be done online, which only leaves the social “experience” of being brainwashed via immersion and peer pressure.
    There is a huge push on to automate commercial ships at the moment, so my job/career path is likely to be eliminated within the next 20 years or so. It’s going to be a bizarre couple of decades coming up.

    • Automated commercial shipping would give the US Navy a nice out when one of its ships crashes because the crew was fornicating instead of navigating.

    • Captain Mike, I am sorry to hear of your likely fate – you deserve better, given that you probably add a lot of value to the bottom line of those who employ you – certainly more than most airheaded academics running around these days. It is an insane world we live in, isn’t it, when the productive are sacrificed to save the careers of the unproductive?

  24. Z Man;
    Back in the dim past when US businesses worried about Japanese (before they worried about Korean, much less Chinese) competition, we had one of those corporate running gunfights that rarely seem to be settled before being overtaken by events about employing robotic manufacture. The arguments against have some salience today.

    To wit: Robotic manufacture is both operationally and financially a bad idea. Robots are expensive, pretty task specific (i.e. inflexible), hard to maintain and can’t be temporarily laid off during a downturn to trim expenses. The latter is even more true if one leased the robots to keep their costs off the balance sheet. Human labor is none of those things, the opponents (correctly) said.

    In the end, because the Japanese forced us to compete on quality (the horror) robotic manufacture won out on an 80:20 basis. That is, those high volume tasks where human mistakes mattered and human mental flexibility did not were given over to robots. Low volume tasks where human mental flexibility mattered were not. And automated final testing was instituted for both. Why final testing for robotic assembly you may ask: To avoid the kind of massive scrap waste that improper programming or improper feed-stock would allow robotic assembly to reproduce endlessly.

    To apply this paradigm to medicine, the intake questioning could be done by a robotic kiosk, as you say. Robots can already take your blood pressure. But I very much doubt that anyone would tolerate a robotic blood draw or proctological exam.

  25. Anyone who has worked in big corporations or large law firms knows there is plenty of busy work going on in those cubicles too.

    Try working for a major oil company. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a giant welfare programme to keep those with an expensive degree occupied. The relationship between activities carried out by employees and actual revenues remains a mystery to me.

    • It is a welfare program basically. If we fired nearly all the dead weight everywhere, economies of scale and automation driven efficiency would cause an immediate economic collapse

      wages are the ability to fulfill demand basically , too little wages and everyone is bankrupt . hell your future measured as fertility rate is bankrupt or well you have a truly massive welfare state or all of them which is what we have

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