Allocation of Automatic Machines in Vekllei

Part of the bulletin series of articles

Summary

• In most economies, high rates of investment into production factors (infrastructure, talent, research & development) produce high-value products that are able to provide returns.
• In Vekllei, however, expensive automatic machines (like robotics and schematic factories) are most often used to produce goods with little margin or trivial money-value.
• This represents an inversion of the economic logic of investment, revenues, and profit.
• The result, however, is that by subsidising the lives of their workforce at great deficit, Vekllei saves much more in its moneyless system by diminishing the greatest expense of most business – labour, and expertise.
• This is how, despite running huge deficits of production, Vekllei remains economically competitive, and has extremely high economic productivity.

Vekllei is known for its robotics and automatic systems, often controlled by computers. This is not because those things are unique to Vekllei – they are widely available overseas, and robots were invented in East Germany – but because they are so visible. Because of the value and fragility of robots, they are usually sequestered in sterile environments where they make economic sense. Robots are a tool of high-end manufacturing: fabricating cars, computers and medicines.

This logic is intuitive to anyone. They are expensive, and on an industrial scale, require massive investment upfront. The price of labour in many contexts is much cheaper, and so the market naturally orders itself – high-end manufacturing uses robots to replace high-skill and error-prone labour, and low-end manufacturing (textiles, agriculture, construction) is performed by people.

In Vekllei, however, this logic is inverted. Robots sweep streets, sort mail, manufacture clothes and perform, basically, menial work. This ironically contributes to their reputation as an advanced society – their robots are simply more visible because they are, wastefully in economic logic, on the street. That is not to say they don’t also populate in high-end manufacturing, because they do, but just that there is also substantial investment in their use almost everywhere else.

On its face, this practice runs a deficit that would bankrupt any system that tried to replicate it. Robots are expensive, technical, and fragile. But that assumes that Vekllei industrial manufacturing serves an economic purpose – it doesn’t, at least directly.

The Vekllei industrial economy, distinct from its moneyless commons, exists to furnish a basic quality of life for its people, and facilitate the real high-value sectors of its social economy – human expertise. Vekllei people are not typically paid, and so incur a trivial expense on their market. They work for many reasons, many of which are intangible, but are all fundamentally guaranteed by the national investment in the automation of low-skill work. Their robots subsidise valuable human expertise, and valuable human expertise subsidise their robots in a symbiotic inversion of economic logic.

Although described here as an inversion, in abstract it is actually straightforward – Vekllei automation produces dividends, just not directly. Their practice is simply obscured by the opacity and intricacy of their financial system, and is a good demonstration of why Vekllei’s economic successes have not been replicated elsewhere. It is just too bizarre, too risky, and risks a total breakdown of society if the prerequisites of their social economic behaviour are not reproduced.