> At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force
Not necessarily. The same robotic technology that decouples low-skill labour inputs and outputs is decoupling populations from force projection capabilities. Less cynically, there are organic ways for the situation to positively evolve (e.g. higher across-board labour productivity) without overt wealth redistribution.
Can you expand on this? I don't understand which populations you're referring to as having become decoupled from force projection?
In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.
Guns have limited range, and are easily rendered largely ineffective (e.g. armored vehicles). Robots and other advanced weapons make direct combat entirely one sided. Surveillance apparatus allows identifying combatants attempting a guerilla warfare approach. AI could allow identifying an assassin attempting to draw a weapon and killing them before they could get a shot off. Etc.
Against the current US military I dare say that overwhelming numbers would win, against a theoretical future military that is less clear. Moreover the current US military would probably revolt if used to overtly oppress the population, but a more robotized one with humans only required at high levels might not.
Guns don't do anything without bullets. Bullets don't do anything if they don't hit a target. Disable power and communications and most people become immediately useless at living, let alone mounting an assault.
The days of sheer numbers being useful are long past in the era of modern warfare.
Not really. The US followed certain rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan that a truly ruthless military would not.
For example the Battle of Fallujah was fought with Vietnam level tactics. There were about 100 KIA for the US side. The battle could have been fought differently with zero US losses.
The gun owners are typically on the other side of the aisle from those who support redistribution of wealth. Not saying that couldn't change or that desperation can't trump principle, of course.
This isn't true, most democrats do not support redistribution of wealth, where leftists who do support the redistribution of wealth are generally in favor of gun rights.
There's no chance that's close to true. The further left you go, the more ardently people are anti guns in the US. With few exceptions it's a dramatic difference between the center left and far left on gun rights. The far left is entirely anti gun, the center left occasionally panders to win votes out of necessity.
The two most famous Socialists in the US right now are probably Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Both are very aggressively anti guns.
From my understanding classic Marxists are very pro-gun, as a necessity to protect the rights of workers from the ruling class.
"The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. [...] Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." ~Karl Marx - Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
> The two most famous Socialists in the US right now are probably Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Both are very aggressively anti guns.
That is not true of Bernie Sanders [0]. He has moved to some degree towards favoring more gun control laws than he used to, but he is by no means more anti-gun than most mainstream Democrats.
You're wrong, and the reason is that your definition of "far left" is nowhere near far enough. Neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez are far left, and Sanders isn't even a socialist (despite using that label).
Actual hard left - the kind that actually believes in Marx and revolutions - is not a hive mind, but it is true that it tends to be a lot more acceptive of grassroots violence, and things that enable it (like guns). Which is not all that surprising, given the history of the movement.
Look up Redneck Revolt or Socialist Rifle Association to see what I'm talking about.
This was intended as a serious question in good faith so the downvotes and lack of responses are unfortunate.
To elaborate: Hillary Clinton's 2016 platform included increasing the inheritance tax, and she's about as centrist as Democrats get these days. The inheritance tax is redistributive. Did any Democrats come out against her position? https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2016/09/23/hillary-c...
Redistribution of wealth usually refers to seizing private assets directly, rather than simply creating more taxes. Democrats almost universally support private ownership of the means of production, where the opposite would be either workers ownership of companies held in trust or the nationalization of companies and industries.
> Redistribution of wealth usually refers to seizing private assets directly, rather than simply creating more taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_of_income_and_w... says: "Redistribution of income and redistribution of wealth are respectively the transfer of income and of wealth (including physical property) from some individuals to others by means of a social mechanism such as taxation, charity, welfare, public services, land reform, monetary policies, confiscation, divorce or tort law."
I don’t know if thats true: I think everyone wants a “fair” distribution of wealth. The question is in the definition of fair, and means to achieve it. Conservatives believe that distribution achieved by tax and regulation will hurt the total economic production of the US, and lead to everyone being worse off, though more equal (in the extreme: everyone is equally poor), and they also consider it fair that the distribution is unequal (as do liberals). Its just a matter of how unequal.
But at least part of their definition of includes that they have the chance to increase their position, which is incompatible with tax/regulation at the extreme: if everyone has their incomes set in stone by the government, there is no chance to change in status.
But losing all low-level jobs to robots, notably, removes that chance. For different reasons than the liberal (who dislikes it for the centralization of wealth/power, and the extreme polarization of wealth distribution), conservatives would intuitively be against it for the denial of opportunity across the board
Tldr: everyone hates being poor/homeless, and too many people being homeless will cause a revolt regardless of their individual political leanings.
One aspect of UBI (when/if we can afford to implement it) is that it presents some solution the problem you describe if it's unconditional. If everyone has an set-in-stone income provided by the society because the robots are doing all the low-level jobs and the society doesn't need their labor, then they still have sufficient free time and ability to do something extra to increase their position.
There are many useful things that aren't (or won't be) viable as jobs because they pay too little or too sporadically to sustain yourself, however, they do provide enough to increase your revenue and status, and give a feeling of opportunity - if you'd have the basics provided in some other way.
One function of UBI has never been clear to me: if everyone has X, then no one does.
Applied to UBI’s case, the baseline of $0 has been “lifted” to say $1500; wouldn’t that just cause the market to increase prices proportionally, until $1500 is effectively the same as $0? Specifically, those baseline goods/services where that $1500 targets?
I would imagine luxury goods wouldn’t change much, as those spending in the area won’t change their spending behavior significantly with a fresh $1500; but a poorer community certainly would, and I would expect the market to match
In a modern first world economy (i.e. the only economy where UBI starts making some sense, and we're probably talking decades in the future so even more automation/productivity than now), the basket of goods that would be considered "basic" constitute something like <10% of total consumption and production. There would be some inflation caused by extra buying power, but it's not expected to be prohibitive in all the commoditized products such as food; I mean, the amount of consumed food would not change meaningfully as we feed pretty much everybody anyway, the only question is how the compensation is arranged - it doesn't matter that much for the economy if the poor unemployed person gets fed by food stamps, conditional social security, universal basic income, government supplied food packages, charity cash donations or charity soup kitchens.
One aspect that would change is the rental market. We would expect the landlords to try and capture much of that money. However, the big impact of UBI on rent is that it decouples the residental areas from the industrial areas; if you don't need to live where the jobs are and can credibly leave for a place where rents are cheaper, then some people will do so and that puts a limit on the rents.
As you state, small poor communities would feel a significant impact; however, in their case the main effect would be that they would become subsidized by the other parts of the society - much of the UBI they get would be spent on goods coming in from outside; their local market won't impact the price of a bottle of Coca Cola or a bag of potatoes, it's coming "from outside" anyway.
The cost of local services, on the other hand, would become much more spread out - if currently the cost for many services clusters around a single point (often close to minimum wage) because everybody needs a job so they do that service even if they don't want to; and everybody needs to eat, so they have to charge a reasonable amount even if they would be doing it as a hobby; In an UBI world you'd expect the cost of services to spread out widely so that services that are pleasant and interesting (for the provider) are cheaper than now, and services that suck for the workers become more expensive, as the workers now have a choice.
Even without guns, it's much easier to break a robot than it is to operate one. I think the economics of the physical economy favor the physical masses over the paper wealthy.
I think I misplaced my post, the intent was to respond to someone arguing that automation would help the wealthy quell the poor. Any comments I make about robots apply to machinery in general.
To your question, it is easier to break a tank than to operate one. Anti-tank weapons are cheaper than tanks, and range down to well-timed Molotov cocktails [0].
What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
People don't compare themselves to how people lived 80 years ago. They compare themselves to other people, today. So saying "Look poor people, who cares if you can't afford decent housing, or health care, or quality food - you've got a cell phone!" will not quiet the social unrest that a growing underclass will cause.
Yes, I agree the lowest 10% are no longer as destitute, but my point is the dangerous social unrest that is likely to be caused (some would argue already has been caused) by widening inequality is not something that absolute measures of living standards will have much bearing on.
That remains to be seen. There's clearly a certain level of "comfort" where the majority of people become satisfied enough, and the quality of life at the bottom is rapidly increasing as technology and the world matures. The rise of the middle class in China and India seems to be the biggest indicator of this approaching steady state.
There are some indications that relative inequality creates vocal anger and unrest, however, it generally takes quite low levels of actual living standards (or physical security) before masses of people become willing to actually risk their lives in violent overthrows of the regime.
Historically, "Bread and circuses" is sufficient to keep disgruntled poor masses just disgruntled but not revolting; regimes get overthrown either when the rulers can't provide bread anymore, when they do unbearable physical harm (e.g. disappearances, torture, etc), or when an external force comes in. And currently it's not a big burden on the economy to just provide lots of cheap food and entertainment for everyone to pacify them, that can be done with just a few percent of GDP.
You attacked a very poor interpretation of the parent comment then. Claiming ' they may have iphones, but they don't have food ' is patently ridiculous.
I'm not sure if that's a helpful observation, though. The floor for the "lowest" percentile in America is outright destitution.
Homelessness means no shelter from the elements or people that want to hurt you, possessions beyond what you can carry and defend, no health care, and being treated like a second class citizen.
I would be interested in the numbers, but based on my experience of homelessness in California, most homelessness is due to severe mental health issues, not poverty. I'm unsure of any data suggesting these kinds of mental health issues are increasing, but I'd be interested in the data.
Also, having seen the situation in third world countries, I have a real issue calling American homelessness destitution, but I understand the arguments from social cohesion.
I have no doubt homelessness in San Francisco is caused by poverty. However, San Francisco is not california. Do your data apply to California as a whole, or just the bay? San Francisco is a very bad choice in city to extrapolate from.
> What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
Ah yeas, the good ole "TV's and refrigerators" argument[0]. They have luxuries! Even homeless people have cell phones, what a world!
Now how about things that actually matter:
* Housing
* Healthcare
* Education
* Transportation
* Income security
All these things are less accessible now than they used to be.
As for the "luxuries": when everyone is expected to have something, it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity.
Before most people had a fridge and a car, daily grocery delivery and grocery stores a walk away were the norm. It isn't now because cars and fridges changed the infrastructure. You are screwed without either in most places (and yes, relying on McFoods instead of a fridge is "being screwed").
Public bathhouses aren't the norm because most people aren't homeless and have access to those at home. In that regard, the very poor are worse off than a hundred years ago when a lot of tenements didn't have showers/bathtubs[1].
Before everyone had a cell phone or a computer, people weren't expected to find jobs online. Now this is a requirement to be a member of the society in most cases.
And so on, and so on.
In short, "Poor people now have ________, so we're better off!" is a bad argument. If these people had good lives, you wouldn't call them poor. Their lives suck. Yes, in a different way than a 100 years ago.
But back then, nobody would be out of job because they couldn't answer recruiters' email either.
What? More people across the entire world have more access to those things that actually matter than ever before in history. This is indisputable fact. There are also 7.5 billion people now so it's impossible to compare absolute numbers without looking at the actual billions who have been lifted out of poverty.
There is greater inequality and that is a real problem, but the bottom is still rising, helped along by the very things you seem to mock.
It's a really big stretch to say that some people are somehow worse off now than before because of a lack of public bathhouse (we do have public shelters and bathrooms) and lack of cell phones (we do have libraries, subsidized phones, social services, etc) and just comes off as disingenuous.
>What? More people across the entire world have more access to those things
I won't argue for the entire world, but I have some numbers for the US - all adjusted for inflation:
- Housing: real-estate prices have increased 4x since the 40-s. The median age of purchasers jumped up by more than a decade.[1]
- Healthcare: per-person spending has increased 9x since the 60's[2]
- Education: the higher education cost has increased by at least a factor of 3x[3]; that article doesn't take into account mandatory fees and living expenses. Or that's 2x if you account for increase in salaries[4]. Should I even talk about jobs available to people without college degrees? You could support a family with a high school diploma back in the day.
- Transportation: public transportation has been in decline in the US. It is by far less available to people today. Read this article for a bigger picture[5]. In particular, the section titled "Death of interurbans and streetcars".
Car prices have remained somewhat stable[6], but that doesn't help people who can't afford one. They are really screwed in a society where car ownership is pretty much expected and public transportation is nonexistent, especially in the suburban areas and small towns.
- Income security: it's hard to characterize that with a single number, but long story short - we are worse off now than in the 70's[7][8]
---------
To sum it all up: in the past 5 decades, housing, healthcare, education have increased in cost several times, public transportation died, income stability is down the drain.
If you just discount the rest of the world then you're talking about < 4% of the population of the planet, making your post nothing more than random examples that you're stretching into a strange narrative. The people at the bottom aren't living great lives, but they are much better off than the people at the bottom even 50 years ago.
Plenty of people are still buying homes (unless you think those prices just rose without any buyers) and higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs that remain open in the US today. You can't just look at some isolated negatives and yet ignore all the positives of change with the immense amount of opportunity available today.
>If you just discount the rest of the world then you're talking about < 4% of the population of the planet
Talking about a country with population of ~325M which we both happen to live in far from being merely "random examples" in my opinion.
>higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs
6M jobs in a country of 325M. That's 2 years worth of high school graduates for you. Not exactly inspiring, don't you think?
>The people at the bottom [...] are much better off than the people at the bottom even 50 years ago.
I made my case above why I can't agree with that statement, with sources. If you have a different metric, please provide it, with sources. Then we can discuss that.
>You can't [...] ignore [..] opportunity available today.
Sure, there' plenty of opportunity for some people - including you and me, given that we're on HN. Arguably there's less opportunities for vast amounts of others. Less opportunities than there was in the 70's, in particular.
You can ignore that, but that's a part how we got Trump. Saying that the lives of poor people are improving doesn't seem to bode well with the said poor people.
Yes, talking about a fraction of US population, which itself is just a few percent of global population, while billions of lives have been improved is random samples.
If you must scope your argument that narrowly, it does not hold. The US also has the greatest opportunity and socioeconomic mobility in the world and this has only improved. Your attempting to piece together a narrative from disparate data while ignoring the world, even though we already track measures for what you're talking about and they all show great improvements.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
>The US also has the greatest opportunity and socioeconomic mobility in the world
Hahaha no. We are lagging behind Canada, Australia, Spain, for example, and not by a small margin[1]
>we already track measures for what you're talking about
Yes! That's my point!
>and they all show great improvements.
No they do not! They do the opposite!
See the little numbers in square brackets, like [1]? They refer to footnotes. There are links in the footnotes. There's data there, data that supports what I'm saying.
Try arguing in the same way: make your statements quantifiable, and follow up with references that support your statements. It's fun, and we all learn something!
Fine, I'll concede the point about the USA. But as stated, it's 4% of the global population so discounting the vast majority of the world and how many billions of people live betters means this conversation never started on a decent foundation anyway.
Globally this may be true, but it's just false for the US. Wages haven't increased since the 1970s, and now even metrics like life expectancy are falling.
Wages have increased since the 1970s. Median and average wages are at new all-time highs. The middle class hasn't improved, the bottom 25% have seen dramatic improvements since the 1970s.
That 1970s income figure, is a fluke of history. The sole reason it was that high back then was because the US inherited a unique position post WW2, in which it had 55% of all global manufacturing, temporarily. That caused a brief 20-25 year period of artificial economic results that saw the US pull far away from everyone else. Over time much of the developed world has caught back up.
Total compensation has increased since then. That includes health care, which is very expensive. The per capita cost of healthcare is near ~$11,000 now, several times what it cost in the 1970s inflation adjusted.
Homelessness is near an all-time record low in the US and poverty is near 40 year lows.
A record number of people are covered by health insurance.
The per capita income transfers for social welfare policies have tripled since the mid 1970s, inflation adjusted. That is, the US welfare state has dramatically expanded over 40 years, to the benefit of the poorest.
Sure, there's a lot more to do. That doesn't mean there haven't been some vast improvements.
> At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.
There's also the dystopian possibility that automated forms of social control are developed neuter the ability of any kind of popular political movement from challenging the elites. That automation could be anything from systems of censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to police androids.
I think it makes some sense to deliberately cultivate and preserve IRL communities and networks that aren't very tech-mediated. By no means are they a panacea, but I think they have fewer vulnerabilities to tech-based automated control.
Legalisation of drugs fits in here IMO, it's a salve for the people to keep them from mounting rebellions. Making hard drugs cheap and widely available probably is a relatively effective way of killing off a proportion of your poorest citizens without raising too great an alarm.
Things like VR could placate the people too, give them a fake "luxury existence" and they're less likely to rebel.
I think this will happen. Brings to mind Google's secret project The Selfish Ledger, especially how it can be used for "Behavioural Sequencing"... [0]
As tech gets better it'll become easier to analyse the masses and make good predictions - how much can the masses put up with? How much further can we push them before the boiling point is reached?
"And just before the nuke hit, he reflected on what a great life he had. Under his watch, Skynet raised the percentage of female programmers to an even 50%."
Of course, some would see that that's actually a DYStopia, I mean, where are the trans?!
An alternative, which I advocate for, is that the lower class form productive collectives, stop contributing to the ultra wealthy, and generate their own real wealth. Much of the worlds wealth exists in wealth-generating infrastructure and information that is accessible to all of us. If we simply divest from the ultra wealthy and build a new economy based on cooperation, we can construct a system that inherently lifts us all. Automation will increase our productivity. In the end, the question is simply how we share the result of that gain. Normal capitalist corporations are designed to funnel wealth to a few board members, but cooperatives could succeed here too, where the wealth they generate is more naturally shared amongst all the workers. It’s not a silver bullet, but I feel as though it would represent a real improvement. We have to do something about how we distribute the creation of new wealth, and I don’t think we should wait for someone else to make this change for us - we must take action to realize the potential here!
EDIT: I also think some billionaires are sympathetic to these issues and would be willing to contribute. But if we form large economic collectives, we can amass enough power to force the wealthy to notice when we divest.
One concrete step can be getting rid of the capital requirements (by regulation) to invest. The idea of 'qualified investors' is literally a way to keep poor people poor, and rich people rich, by cutting off poor or middle class people from the major vehicles of wealth creation. It is ridiculous that I cannot invest in the IPO of a company in my local neighborhood because, while I have enough money to satisfy the business, I don't have enough money to satisfy uncle sam's onerous requirements.
But yes, cooperatives like Mondragon are good examples, and also incredibly traditional.
These capital requirements are regulations that have been introduced as a response to companies fleecing the poor-ish, the uneducated and those who had a bit of cash, but decided to put it into one (fraudulent) investment.
Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO promises.
Notice I said 'neighborhood business'. I feel comparing ICOs -- which usually consist of a team you've never met asking you for money for a product you've never seen -- to an established neighborhood business interested in raising capital for expansion of a proven business model is comparing apples to oranges.
Won't take long for the crooks though. Most government regulations are introduced in response to abuse and everywhere they've been rolled back, the abuses come back. No matter if in finance, in taxis (e.g. Uber's surge pricing), net neutrality, whatever.
Allow people to invest 50% of the amount they paid in taxes in a given year. It can only be done via online platform that does basic due diligence. They can only raise half of the money from a regular user, the rest has to come from a professional investor.
That could create a moral hazard, where businesses court mom & pop investors, who don't have the means to pursue legal action against the company should they do something less than scrupulous with their investments, instead of investors with the means to hold them accountable.
I certainly don't disagree, but the idea that someone like me, who has no debt, and who is in no danger of losing my lifestyle should not be allowed to invest because I don't have 'enough' is absurd. I would be in support of requirements where you have to show to the government that investing will not cause you to lose your livelihood, but most people do not need $1million in the bank in order to achieve that goal.
For example, I have several hundred thousand saved, and wanted to invest 20k of that in a business in my neighborhood that was doing a public offering. Because I 'only' make in the 100k-200k range, and I 'only' have 300k in the bank, versus the 1 million required by the government, I was deprived of this otherwise perfectly fine opportunity.
It is clear to me that the regulatory environment we have now is not at all fair. I am certain that my system would cost the government more. However, the government should be happy to take on extra expense when it means the creation of richer taxpayers, and the democratization of capital, IMO.
Most investment opportunities aren't available to the unconnected, even if they have some semblance of wealth (e.g., RSU grants for an employee).
Private investment opportunities seems to only flow from the connected to their friends. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that even a small time investor (in the order of 1k-10k) can participate in these private deals that often payout with 10%-20%/p.a, but other than govt regulations, the biggest barrier is knowing they exist.
It's straightforwards knowing when deals exist when you're actually allowed to invest in them. Then you can just get to know your neighbors and they will be able to raise money from you.
More importantly, these regulations mainly impact poor communities. If you are a potential business owner in a poor community, you are forced to secure funding from people outside your community, even if you could probably find enough investors within it, who you already know, who could contribute a bit.
Thus, imagine a kid growing up in a poor minority community. When they grow up and want to start a business, will they be able to exploit relationships with the older people they already know? No, because securities law limits the number of such investors they can take on to 35, and requires that these 35 be intimately familiar with the business. Instead, this minority child will have to request funding from rich people who may be culturally slightly different than they are and who they do not know.
One reason why this seems unrealistic is that if "the lower class form productive collectives", they stop contributing to the ultra wealthy but will not generate their own real wealth. Currently, wealth generation is not really labor-limited (especially for the kind of labor that the lower class of population can do), and such a collective wouldn't generate much if any wealth because as "automation will increase our productivity", they'll be less productive than the ultra-wealthy - such a cooperative by definition would be labor-rich but capital-poor and thus would/could automate less than the ultra-wealthy that they abandoned. Organizations that have easy access to capital and difficult access to labor will outcompete organizations that have easy access to labor and difficult access to capital.
In late 19th century capitalists absolutely relied on laborers to create their wealth, in late 21th century capitalists rely on investments in automation to create their wealth, and they have limited need for the lower class laborers. Already right now there are millions of jobs that could be automated but aren't just because you can get dirt cheap labor to do it manually (e.g. textile/footwear industry in SE Asia) - and as soon as the laborers start asking for decent income (or simply the tech falls in price, as it does over time) the laborers will get replaced with automation.
And the displaced workers won't be able to form productive collectives, because in that economic scenario, to be productive and efficient, you need to do the same thing with few people and lots of (expensive) machines; the whole reason why they become displaced is that most of their labor objectively isn't useful anymore - it won't become any more useful if they form up into a collective.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but not with the takeaway.
Yes, I absolutely expect these collectives to be less productive than the wealthy class. Does that matter? I’m thinking it doesn’t! The biggest reason is that currently the wealthy take 95+% of the wealth they create, so the fact that they’re more productive has little affect on the workers who live off the paltry wage they are paid. A collective that is less productive but shares more of its profits could pay their workers more than the capitalist companies are. These collectives needn’t compete with non-collectives as the participants of the collectives can opt to buy from a network of collectives whenever possible, providing them economic protection. Finally I think there is work to be done to commoditize robotics hardware and software such that capital costs are low, and this is a key goal of my planned life’s work. The collectives would of course work all in open source, and I think this would lower their costs across the board as there would be no intellectual property to artificially raise costs.
Finally I will say that I agree it sounds unlikely. But think of the outcome! The people would work for themselves and share in the wealth gained by productivity. Instead of wasting away working 60 hours a week until they die, there would be a chance for them to earn more wealth and take time off. It’s a choice of misery or freedom. Even if it’s unlikely, it’s not impossible. And I think it’s a goal worth pursuing.
Thing is, "currently the wealthy take 95+% of the wealth they create" is an accurate description of the dynamics in pretty much any industry, in pretty much no business has so extreme margins, probably not even if you're digging out gold and diamonds with slave labor. Even in industries where the largest value added is IP and branding (e.g. Apple), so direct expenses are comparably low, you get margins like 40%, and those are the winner-take-all economy-of-scale industries where worker collectives can't plausibly ever compete.
If the margins in a "wealthy-class-run" company are 20% and they take it all out as profit; then a competing worker collective that's 20% less efficient would have a margin of 0 and no profit whatsoever and no ability to pay their workers more. You can run a labor-heavy shop as a collective (e.g. fast food has had some successes) but anything relating to manufacturing seems just wishful thinking.
Your example of commodity robotics would bring the per-item robot cost down, but that that would make the whole industry much more capital intensive - if robots are expensive, then there's more labor and less robots; if robots are cheap, then you replace more workers with robots and the percentage of capital vs labor shifts to capital. If robots are expensive, then a less automated workshop can compete price-wise with a large, more automated factory. If robots are cheap, then the large factories that get economies of scale on configuring and integrating these robots simply drive down the cost of end product so much that any smaller shop can't compete at all. No matter how cheap robots are, the worker collective can't afford to build as large and as automated factories that the wealthy capitalists can.
A separate point is that if cheap commodity robots would enable worker collectives to run a just as automated operation, then it's impossible for most people who leave their "overlords" to join those collectives - if an industry now has 100000 employees; and because of arrival of very cheap commodity robots the results can get done with 10000 employees, then it doesn't matter much if that revenue gets taken by a capitalist employing 10000 laborers; a worker collective of 10000 people; or 5000 / 5000 in tight competition... then it doesn't matter because 90000 people have to leave the industry anyway, even the worker collectives have no need for them.
Let's use self-driving taxis as an example of automation. Let's assume that some time in the future, cheap commodity "robots" driving cars enable automation for most of taxi driving. In the "capitalist overlord" scenario, Uber runs and manages self-driving taxis. In the "workers collective" scenario, a bunch of current taxi drivers form a collective, buy "commodity robots" i.e. hardware that makes their cars self-driving (to have comparable efficiency/price with competitors) and run and manage a company that competes with Uber... but they won't drive taxis anyway, they're maintaining and managing a self-driving-taxi company that doesn't need much if any actual drivers. Now what's the practical difference between them forming a "workers collective" versus them buying shares in any other self-driving taxi company? In both cases they're the owners, but not the workers, because their work has been made obsolete by automation. In both cases they get their income as rent on their capital, not wages for their labor; at least not most of them. If they can't afford to buy the shares, then they can't afford the capital investment to start an equivalent competing company, those should be pretty much the same amounts.
Regarding efficiency: that’s a good point about lower efficiency leading to zero/negative profits, and this reflects a reality for many workers collectives today. That said, I would expect these collectives to charge higher prices, perhaps 1.5-2x as much, and let consumers decide. I’d definitely rather pay more for quality goods that support a more fair system, and usually find it difficult to do so.
Regarding collectives versus buying shares: a key and significant difference with collectives is the notion that each member has equal voting power for decisions made within the company. Shareholders meanwhile have less control, owing to the power of the board of directors. Concentrating power makes anti-social behavior more likely, as the class difference between the board and everyone else means decisions they make may not affect them the same way they affect others. This is significantly less pronounced in a coop as I describe, so there is less anti-social interference caused by businesses in this scenario.
You have other good points I’d like to reply to, but I’ve got to run. I just wanted to mention that a key thing I feel you are missing is that working for and a society made up of worker cooperatives would lead to a qualitatively different life. It’s not a pure apples to apples competition scenario as I am advocating that people actively make buying and employment decisions based on a desire to realize this new cooperative society. I agree with you that absent ideology, the capitalist organization would crush the coops based solely on a selfish purchasing decision. That is, the capitalist products may be cheaper and may be better (or not), but I still believe a coop can survive and thrive if enough people choose to stop supporting the capitalist way.
These terms are a bit loose by the way - I stil describe a scenario rooted in a fabric of capitalism. The coops sell to each other based on markets if they want, or other agreements if they want. No government interference is required. And I advocate that these groups behave in intentionally pro social ways. It takes devotion and energy and heart. It is not for those simply looking to make a buck.
Seriously, do it. However, I'll warn you that it's not as easy as you might imagine. Cooperatives require cooperation and if you've worked on a software team before, you will see that true cooperation is quite difficult to achieve. Usually it devolves into power plays where a certain few decide that they should be making the decisions to save us from the stupid people. And having taken the power and made all the decisions, they feel that they deserve more than other people because without them, there would just be chaos. So you just end up constructing a new wealthy layer.
It's not like this hasn't happened before. If we go back 200 years ago, the money was all tied up in the super wealthy families and royalty. The system was set up so that the wealthy would inherit their god-given gains (slight sarcasm, but I don't think that if you asked them they would disagree with that statement). Our financial system has changed and there is the "new rich" now (who have vulgarly worked to become rich). Of course the financial system is mostly controlled by this new rich class and they spend a considerable amount of effort to ensure that they continue to control it (obviously). Donald Trump is president and got there by campaigning against the legacy of rich people. You can't make this stuff up.
Having said that, I once belonged to a home brew beer club. That club was amazing. We got fed up with the stores completely ignoring our requests (because they were concentrating only on casual customers who only made beer to save money, rather than because they wanted to make beer). We just decided to approach producers directly and ask them what kind of minimum order they required. Then we organised bulk purchases every year. Somebody would organise the purchase and put everything on their credit card. We'd collect all the money and then get together at someone's house to split everything up and deliver it. Eventually our bulk purchases got so popular that we started doing them at much higher frequencies (like every couple of months). We no longer needed minimum orders and in fact we were making purchases that were larger than most of the micro breweries in our area. We could actually command rare hops, etc that nobody else could get, because we were the best customer that the suppliers had. Our purchase sizes were tens of thousands of dollars and we had people lining up to organise buys because the air miles (or whatever deal the credit card companies were giving) would mean free vacations anywhere in the world for the person doing the work.
Eventually the homebrew stores started complaining because our business was orders of magnitude larger than theirs. But it was too late. They tried to sour the suppliers against us (and it worked in a few cases), but for the most part the supplier preferred us. I moved away and so haven't talked with those guys for a long time, but I've always thought this is basically the ideal cooperative. But it only really worked because the guys organising the deals had high paying full time jobs doing something else. The organisation was just a hobby for them. You can easily see that if someone decided, "Hey I'm going to start a home brew store and since I'm the one with the contacts for the malt/hops, I can force everybody to go through me". And suddenly they are the ones in charge and you get what they decided to order, etc, etc. They start making decisions based on what makes them money, not based on what makes you happy -- it's only common sense, after all. And they try to make sure that nobody can steal their business out from under them (like we did one time to the incumbent home brew stores). Now instead of a collective, we just have the same thing we had before -- only difference is a different person in charge.
At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.