It has already been shown that most of the wealthy make money off of themselves , with less then 30% of their income coming from the industry. The rest is gained through various taxes and investments. If McDonald's, Catapillar, and Shell were to drop off the face of the earth, things would be shaken up, people would lose money, people would gain money, but at the end of the day the majority of rich would still be in the top 1%, and only have lost 30% of total income. Now look at how the top earning businesses last year are all "Basic needs" type stuff. Makes sense that the essentials of life earn the most, right. There is a reason that shelter, food, and entertainment were pretty much a basic right for most serf's even in the middle ages.

But, what about a society where people need these basic rights, but cant provide anything back? Well since high unemployment is good for investment earnings , causes fewer births and high unemployment raises the mortality rate this will create a situation where a declining population will actually be earning the elite MORE money, despite the lower value of everyday goods. Now,this effect is not very noticable becuase even though people die, jobs are continually growing , even to the point where there are too many high requirement jobs to be fulfilled.

Automation changes this though. Before the industrial revolution unemployment was almost nonexistant. after the IR it became a thing, alas not a very big problem. Now automation has created a Long term class of unemployed . No matter how much technology advanced in the past there was always a market for human intelligence to cull and use these technologies to produce more. The argument that it will create more jobs, just different jobs, is fundamentally flawed. It supposes that these machines will need someone to do the thinking for them. Even though bulldozers mean less people can do more work, it still needs someone to direct it. The way that automation is going is going to negate this effect. The machines will be managed by machines, who will manage themelves from their protocols more or less. This is without the event of AI creation too, at any rate. Like with bulldozers less people can do more work, but there is only job loss. Job creation is all automated. a smaller and smaller number of people will be needed to maintain the status quota as we figure out how to automate the jobs of the people who are doing the automating, or involved with it in any way henceforth.

This brings me to my last point - The inevitable outcome of large scale declining populations for the betterment of the wealthy. For the rich to stay rich a balance has to be struck. Every member of society who isn't contributing to their wealth is deterring it. With no need for cheap human labor there will be large portions of people with no money, no contributions. They will not be able to support the economy in any way, only deter from it. As I stated, this will increase the mortality rate and decline the birth rate. with no reason to increase human life, the population will decline naturally, as in survival of the fittest. this will continue until the equilibrium is reached where the rich have enough of the lower class to support them to the fullest without detracting. Since job loss is occurring all the time with automation though, this decline will be continuous. Thank you, and i think that about sums this up.

TL;DR - I encourage you to read it, but...

1.The rich can only profit if the productive vs. unproductive is at equilibrium

2.A population that declines until it reaches equilibrium will be good for profits

3.Automation will (eventually) eliminate job growth and promote job decay

4.Society will be thrown into perpetual decline to continue the status quot

If you read through this then thank you very much, i sincerely appreciate it :) if you have any thoughts then please feel free to comment and i will do my best to play devils advocate, and i am sure we will both learn something in the process!