There will be a bright future for our capital owning population.
There is a weak correlation between old people and capital ownership and easy to mistake the two if inferring from the age axis, e.g. person X owns more capital at 50 than at 25. However, this doesn't generalize well when doing a cross section at a given age, see for example the average savings for a 50 year old, which is a meager $43,797 http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics.
Ah, but that's the hard part. Capitalism does provide some benefits. For example it is magnificent for encouraging economic growth, which for most of the world is essential. There are still large swaths of the global population living in poverty in first world and third world situations.
What I believe will happen is most of the world will look like china. If you were to look at them maybe 10 years ago, what you would see is economic growth fueled by cheap exports. Today, they are starting to see a middle class stable enough to support their own economy. Global trade is still essential, but it is now only a part of the pie, rather than the whole pie. At the same time you'll seeing a middle class grow in china, we're starting to see manufacturing move out of the country searching for cheaper pastures.
I think its a model that will repeat itself across the world. First comes a improved political environment, than a hearty shipping infrastructure is created, and then business and global trade starts. Repeat.
I believe capitalism won't be replaced, it'll fade away.
This part in that future is actually made of shares in the stock market. If you want some, you have to buy it. Fortunately anyone can : it's a free market and you can enter with as little as a few hundreds bucks.
> This future of no capitalism people want scares the heck out of me, almost makes everything I've worked for pointless.
The future of continued capitalism scares the heck out of me, because it's the future of more and more people living on subsistence level, slaving away all their lives for increasingly smaller group of wealthy people, until the whole thing either collapses or the economic machine optimizes all humanity away for more profit and the Earth will be left with no people.
Well, the good news is that this won't be possible since they will soon be made useless by automation. You can't enslave someone who has no use for you.
Well, if even quality sex services get automated away in the end, then I guess we'll have no other choice than to say "so long and thanks to all the fish", followed by starving and dying.
