This New World, edited by Laura Paddison, is a new subset of HuffPo for those interested in sustainable business models. They say capitalism is broken. Can we fix it?
Here's one idea Paddington recently wrote about that has gotten an airing in other capitalist countries: Introduce a tax on robots that replace workers. Workers who earned wages were taxed on those wages. But now that income stream has dwindled, impoverishing workers and governments. Under the guise of "progress," corporations are given tax advantages for "modernizing," and ultimately robots underbid even the poorest-paid human.
That's profitable for corporations. But is it profitable for human beings and civilization? No one has yet passed a tax on robots, but South Korea came the closest, ending its corporate tax subsidy for "modernizing." There's no doubt but that machines will continue to replace humans, but a tax would help slow the process down, giving us time to retrain and problem-solve—like advocating for the caring work that machines cannot do, and raising caring wages to compensate for those lost ones.
Interested? Apparently Bill Gates likes the idea. Here's a link to Paddington's article: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robot-tax-bill-gates_us_5b0f030ce4b0be10a4882b63
