I saw this:
Hawking’s comments were limited to:
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
Hawking’s comments are pretty hard to dispute. It seems implicit in the phrase “how things are distributed” that there must be some “distributer of things”, but he doesn’t state it outright, so we’ll leave that alone. However, the editorial writer (Alexander C Kaufman) does take a lot of liberties with Hawking’s comments, starting off with the title of the article. So I am addressing the author of the editorial more than Hawking himself, when I say:
The lopsided distribution of dollars and property is the wrong way to measure economic divergence. The wealthy in the world have vastly more dollars than the poor. But the poor in capitalist countries are vastly better off than the poor in less capitalist countries. Capitalism (even the distinctly non-free over-regulated crony-capitalist market under which most capitalist countries exist) has pulled the masses out of the miserable poverty suffered by their ancestors and their communist or dictator-ruled contemporaries. Meanwhile the wealthy have simply remained exquisitely comfortable everywhere.
As China has embraced capitalism, more of the poor in China are comfortable, while the wealthy in China simply remain pampered. And so it is everywhere that capitalism is allowed to flourish.
“Wealth inequality” is a non-issue. “Income inequality” is a non-issue. And capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others.
