Monday, September 05, 2011

Deadly pecuniary externalities

If you live from selling your labor, as most people do, and if the price of your labor falls below subsistence, you're dead -- unless of course someone keeps you alive out of charity, which is however not at all implied by property rights. And AI implies pretty clearly that the cost of human labor will fall to an infinitesimal fraction of what it costs to keep a human alive (let alone in tolerable conditions).

Or to put it differently, pecuniary externalities can be just as deadly as predation and regular externalities.

Vladimir in the comment section of econlog