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It's the 21st century – why are we all working so hard?
- littletimmy 11y agoEntrepreneur employ Labor 1 and Labor 2 > Technology increases productivity > Entrepreneur greedy > Entrepreneur fire Labor 1 > Labor 2 keeps working hard, Labor 1 becomes lesson for Labor 2. Alternatively, Entrepreneur employ Labor 1 and Labor 2 > Clinton negotiates trade deal > Entrepreneur shift jobs to China > Labor 1 and 2 fired, now compete in a reduced job market > New Entrepreneur now uses Labor 1 and Labor 2 as uber fodder Alternatively, Labor 1 lives in the United States > Labor 1 therefore judges self-worth by his work > Labor 1 therefore works hard because it gives his life meaning And so on. The summary answer to this question is that we're structurally fucked. The only determinant of how hard labor can be pushed is labor power, and labor power is pretty low. The capitalist will colonize every last corner of the earth before he gives the worker any dignity, and probably not even then.
- ommunist 11y agoBecause we are nudged to cover costs of artificial habits.
- jonnathanson 11y agoWealth is not a fixed sum. When a machine comes along and automates 50% of our labor, we (not we literally, but 'we' as a system) have two choices to make: 1) Accept that our jobs are now 50% easier; or 2) find twice as much work to do. The latter is what seems to happen every time technology automates processes and procedures especially. Take email's replacement of the telephone, for instance. There are only so many calls you can place in a day, and therefore only so much value those calls can generate. But you can send hundreds of emails and accomplish much more work than you could with your phone -- and also generate lots more value. When capitalism is given the option to generate more value, capitalism tends to take that option. As productivity grows, we choose to reinvest that productivity gain in more work, resulting in more systemic wealth creation. This becomes a sort of treadmill, and damned if I know how we get off of it. When we routinize and automate something, we always seem to find a higher-order task to take on in its place. The result is that our world is wealthier than ever (in the economic sense of the word). The unfortunate side effect is that we seem to be working harder than ever. Tl;dr: Machines make our jobs easier, so we squeeze more work and more complex tasks into the vacuum created by the automation. This process repeats itself.
- orasis 11y agoA huge part of the problem is that improved productivity leads to higher housing prices. Solve housing, or the flip side of that coin, transportation, and you can start extracting significant quality of life improvements from higher productivity.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Johnythree 11y agoBecause automation is increasingly used to transfer wealth from the middle-class to the super rich (at least in America). There have been many studies: eg http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit...
- lolive 11y agoBecause if we stopped working so hard, all the existing processes would fail immediately. (automation requires constant care by humans).