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Where does this idea come from that if a worker is granted a novel piece of technology which makes him/her more productive, he/she is entitled to a raise, witho

Where does this idea come from that if a worker is granted a novel piece of technology which makes him/her more productive, he/she is entitled to a raise, without necessarily demonstrating any personal improvement or additional contribution to the company? This attitude reeks of entitlement, to me. Edit: to clarify, I believe that articles like these, which do not differentiate between what I would call intrinsic and extrinsic productivity. If a worker picks up a new language and automates away a portion of his job, his intrinsic productivity has increased, making him more valuable on the market. If I retool a station on an automotive assembly line and extrinsically increase the productivity of a worker, it doesn't make sense to presume that he is deserving in a share of that increased profit, because his value has not changed. I think there is a certain hesitation in polite [non business] society regarding this kind of measurement of human value, and so we find ourselves with what is only a puzzle in appearance. The bottom line is that a worker's compensation on average is determined by how useful he is with a certain set of tools, not how useful his tools are.

jhoechtl 9y ago
Your attitude is understandable at first sight. But the consequnce is increased inequality as profits get marginalized at the top. This might lead to a decreased quality of life even for those harvestingthe net gain. It's a delicate balance.
Eridrus 9y ago
It depends on how you frame the issue, if you look at an individual worker it is easy to ask if they are deserving, but if you look at broader society a more natural question should be whether we think the benefits of technology should be spread across the majority of our society or concentrated in the hands of the few. I don't know about you, but my techno-utopian fantasy involves everyone living off the labor of robots rather than struggling to house and feed themselves and their families because the elites no longer need the labor they can provide.
- bad_user 9y ago
  That's basically Marxism. Good or bad, it's an instant red flag.
  - scroot 9y ago
    Can't tell if this pun was intentional, but I'll give it to you anyway
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Well you know Marx said it was inevitable so maybe we're hitting on a contradiction in capitalism that is too big to handle - the desire of individual firms to automate away their labor on a micro scale has the macro scale effect of eliminating all your consumers. It's not even good for business within a capitalist system.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      Forgive me, but "Marx said it was inevitable" is not something I find part of a convincing argument.
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        Why?
        lucozade 9y ago
        Possibly because he was so catastrophically wrong about the form of the society that would inevitably follow from state socialism? In a sense he was partly right i.e. almost all state socialist societies transformed in a very similar way. It was just that they transformed into totalitarian dictatorships rather than stateless utopia.
        AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        "Appeal to authority" is a well-known fallacy. There's no exception in it for when the authority happened to be Marx. And Marx wasn't so clearly right on everything he said that just "Marx said" settles the question.
Bucephalus355 9y ago
What about executive entitlement? Hasn’t their pay expanded by thousands of percent while workers wages haven’t expanded at all in 40 years? Why is asking for more money now considered such a sin? It’s argued very frequently that the CPI vastly underestimates inflation by not including things like rent and healthcare, so workers wages are dropping if anything. What makes companies entitled to think they don’t have to address this? Why can they buy technology that delivers higher results, not raise wages, and then wind up lowering wages? Eventually there will be a “#metoo” moment in business and many, many people will find themselves blacklisted for years for what is now being called “economic hate crimes”.
- JabrZer0 9y ago
  I'm not arguing that this is the way it SHOULD be, but as far as I can tell the difference stems from a perceived difference in "area of effect". For example, an assembly line worker's job is to physically make as many widgets per hour as possible at high quality. Maybe the limit of human ability is 100 widgets/hr. If the company CEO replaces half of the workers with robots that can make 1,000 widgets/hr, the workers won't benefit from that because they're still making 100 widgets/hr, while the executive just 5x'd the factory's output, which is likely to be worth a bonus. That's simple enough, but there's a problem with this line of reasoning. What if, rather than replacing the workers, the CEO gives half of them a WidgetTool3000, which allows workers to make 1,000 widgets/hr with no extra training or effort? From the executive's position, she just did the same thing: She adjusted the process to 5x the factory's output by adding a piece of technology. But half of the workers are now producing 10x more widgets, so shouldn't they get a piece of the newly created wealth too? (Here's where I toss in the disclaimer of "this is how it works, but I'm not going to comment on the morality of it") The answer is no, according to corporate tradition. The market has already determined that the value of a worker with a set level of training and ability is $X. Amplifying the worker's output doesn't change anything about the value of the worker (in fact, nothing has changed about the worker at all. He could be swapped with someone not using a WidgetTool with no loss in value for the company) - the WidgetTool is what has created the extra value for the company - it doesn't matter who uses it. On the other hand, it sure as hell feels like crap to be the guy making 10x the widgets for the same pay.
Retric 9y ago
Automation makes jobs more complex. Going from 100 workers at a factory to 50 workers means the 50 workers remaining have harder and more valuable jobs. In a hypothetical case of a single worker at a factory they need to know how everything works vs a single station. Really it's not automation that's destroying the middle class. It's information, a doctor can in theory look up symptoms without sending you to a specialist. In the case of information asymmetry the side with more information tends to collect more value and it's not workers who have gained the most information.
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  >Going from 100 workers at a factory to 50 workers means the 50 workers remaining have harder and more valuable jobs. This is not necessarily true. It could mean turning 100 people doing skilled labor and turning them into 50 workers doing visual inspection (QA) at likely lower pay.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Someone is going to need to inspect output at both versions of the factory. Anyway, everyone can be limited to visual inspection someone needs to maintain the machines and deal with issues that develop.
    - alexbeloi 9y ago
      Maybe, my point is that isn't not a 'win' for the laborer like you seem to suggest, that maybe 50% of the people losing their jobs get to work better jobs. The people losing their jobs that are lucky enough to not be laid off are more likely be relegated to lower paying and lower skill inspection jobs rather than the higher skilled machine maintenance/development. IMO, the most likely outcome of your scenario is: 19/100 of the workers become visual inspection team, (maybe) 1/100 of the workers becomes a manager for visual inspection team, 5 external machine specialists get hired, 80/100 of the workers get laid off and 75/80 of those will continue same line of work for even less pay (supply/demand) and 5/80 will burn through any personal savings/credit to retrain themselves with the hopes of becoming one of the '5 external machine specialists' hired somewhere else. These numbers are definitely made up by me based on my own world view. From the original 100 laborers, 94/100 of the original people are worse off than before and in exchange we have 5 (maybe 6) new skilled positions. I'm not against automation or productivity or higher skilled work, I'm personally invested in all three, I just think that if we aren't aware of all the consequences that we are likely to be blind-sided by a resurgence of Luddite riots.
leereeves 9y ago
Workers aren't paid what they deserve, they're paid as much (or as little) as they're able to negotiate. Why shouldn't workers, either individually, as a union, a trade guild, or society as a whole, attempt to negotiate higher wages when productivity increases make more wealth available for distribution?
- rhino369 9y ago
  They should be able to try, but the guy who picks up the golden egg hatched by a chicken isn't going to be able to successfully negotiate a cut of the gold.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    Perhaps not individually, but if the society is a democracy and 51% of people are employed picking up golden eggs, they have more negotiating power.
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  >Workers aren't paid what they deserve, they're paid as much (or as little) as they're able to negotiate. Deserve is a tricky notion. The capitalist will argue that workers deserve precisely their market rate, e.g. what they are able to negotiate (collectively or otherwise).
  - marnett 9y ago
    capitalists, at least in America, were very effective at destroying unions (known as union busting) and pro-worker political movements starting back in the 1940s.
    - aianus 9y ago
      Monopolies and cartels are also busted, and for the same reason. They distort markets and lead to worse outcomes for consumers and the country at large.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Where does this idea come from that we must delegate all moral decision making to the market and anyone who desires to break out of market-allocated morality is entitled?
- marnett 9y ago
  The Chicago School of Economics.
- stale2002 9y ago
  People are free to create their own products and factories, and decide how the product of labor is distributed. If someone wants to build a factory, and give all of the profits to the laborers, then they should feel free to do so.
tdb7893 9y ago
Generally the market will pay someone what their productivity is or some other company will poach that worker. This is an oversimplification but in general the market should price workers at roughly what their productivity is, assuming the market is working correctly
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> Where does this idea come from that if a worker is granted a novel piece of technology which makes him/her more productive... I think the first half of your first sentence shows... something. A bias? A misconception? I think it appears most strongly in the word "granted". Technology isn't like getting buffs in a video game. Workers aren't just "granted" new tools. They have to learn how to use them. In doing so, the workers become more productive, and therefore more valuable. A new tool improves productivity. That productivity creates more money. That money needs - deserves - to get shared in three different directions. Some goes to the tool maker. Some goes to the tool owner (the one who paid to get the tool). And some goes to the workers who use the tool. It seems to me that leaving any of the three out is unjust. Leaving anybody out of the gains is also likely to lead to fewer new tools being created and put into use, which means lower productivity gains, which means a lower level for the economy as a whole, which means lower standards of living.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  I guess the problem comes when the tool is so good that it no longer requires the worker who uses it, i.e. automation. When all jobs that can be automated are automated, where are we left? As a society? Do we argue against automation because it destroys jobs? Then you're into government-paying-people-to-dig-holes-then-refill-them land. Do we just let the majority languish in poverty while the owners of the capital continuously concentrate their wealth? That's no way to build a future, or a healthy nation. Do we say everyone gets "mincome"? That's pretty-darn socialist, which is something many Americans have... extremely strong feelings about.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    I think of this differently. I think in terms of "spending" people instead of "employing" them. As a society, you've only got so many people. What are you going to spend them on? Well, traditionally, the answer was that you had to spend a lot of them on your food supply. But we found that, with better tools, we could spend only something like 3% of our people on food supply, and the rest could do something else. Some of them had to make the tools that the farmers used. Some could make a whole range of other new things. And we - the whole society - got richer as a result. Now we're finding that, with newer tools, we don't have to spend as many people in factories. We can do something else with them. The whole society can become richer as a result - if we can find something useful for them to do. I'm optimistic, but I must admit that I see the problems. We seem to be losing a lot of people into despair and poverty and feelings of uselessness. (I don't know if the same was true at the start of the industrial revolution, so I don't know if this is something to kind of expect at a transition, or whether this is something new.) I see that the income distribution is way out of whack. (I'm pretty sure that was true at the start of the industrial revolution, and it got corrected, but it took unionisation to do it.) Do we spend most of our people on space exploration? On better medical care? On herding robots? I don't know. But I'm optimistic that there will be something useful for them to do, which will improve our society as a whole. I don't know what it will be, though. (If you wish to maintain pessimism, there's your opening...)
rhino369 9y ago
I don't think it's entitlement. But it's naive to think they would would a significant portion of productivity gains caused by other factors.
rossdavidh 9y ago
Let's put it another way: why shouldn't workers try to hold back and/or destroy any sign of automation? Why should they not vandalize any attempt at using technology to make things more efficient? There are way more of them than there are innovators or CEO's, either one. The reason is, the same reason that everything else in society works: we all have a stake in this, because if society is better off, we are all better off. But, what if when more is produced, I don't get more, but now you have more to push housing prices in my neighborhood out of my reach? Society, and especially free-markets, rely on widespread support. A society of 50% thieves will collapse; a society of 10% thieves will probably not do much better. You need broad consensus to maintain the conditions necessary for a free market and innovation. You don't get that broad consensus, if all the gains in productivity go to the top.
SilasX 9y ago
This is a good point and shouldn't be downvoted. (I assume that was for tone?) We shouldn't expect that a productivity improvement purely due to capital should result in higher real worker compensation [1]. If the lawnomatic can mow one lawn per hour, and an upgrade permits it to mow two lawns per hour, then the labor of pressing its activation button isn't somehow more valuable. [1] Technically, it should result in employers bidding more for workers, but in a way that's far less than proportional to the total gain in output.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  But why should management then expect to see increases in revenues? If labor is not going to see increased wages, then why are they now doing more work?
  - SilasX 9y ago
    >But why should management then expect to see increases in revenues? There's no universal answer, but in the canonical example of better machines, then part of the higher productivity is likely due to the judgment in recognizing where machines could be deployed, which is managerial labor. >If labor is not going to see increased wages, then why are they now doing more work? I'm not sure what you mean, but I was just explaining why we shouldn't expect higher total output to mean proportionally higher wages; it all depends on the cause of the productivity. If the worker is pushing the same buttons and the machine is doing more, wages should not be expected to increase and there's no mystery. If the productivity is from workers becoming more versatile and able to handle a bigger variety of situations with the same capital, then we should expect higher wages without a higher return to capital.
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      "There's no universal answer, but in the canonical example of better machines, then part of the higher productivity is likely due to the judgment in recognizing where machines could be deployed, which is managerial labor." And using those machines was labor labor. "but I was just explaining why we shouldn't expect higher total output to mean proportionally higher wages" But why not? "If the worker is pushing the same buttons and the machine is doing more, wages should not be expected to increase and there's no mystery." Why not? The company is doing better; why shouldn't those who contributed, including the workers who made the widgets, share in that? "If the productivity is from workers becoming more versatile and able to handle a bigger variety of situations with the same capital, then we should expect higher wages without a higher return to capital." That is almost never seen.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
To me, the attitude reeking of entitlement is that you shouldn't have to pay more for a worker who is providing more value for your business. And regardless, someone who is more productive is providing more value. Don't believe so? Simple test: Are you now bringing in more revenue, producing more product, or reducing the cost of your product? Then more value has been produced. The alternative, which sadly has been taken all too often, is that management pockets that difference.
eecc 9y ago
Why are you so hostile to human beings? Employees are not merely selling time (actually that’s the most precious a living person has) but their ability to turn it - through the mastering of technology - into valuable goods. That they’re not entitled to a fair share, but just to whatever was agreed back in the day, without demonstrable acts of servile devotion, reeks of... dunno, feudalism?
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Prices are useful to indicate whether or not supply should be increased or decreased. Decreasing prices (wages in this conversation) indicate that people should be looking to sell their product (time and effort) to another market or buyer. Rather than force buyers to pay more than what the market says, the better option would be for societies to provide opportunities for people to re-tool and become more valuable again, for where this sufficient demand.
egypturnash 9y ago
So let's say that you and I go into business together making artificial flowers. Initially we are both sewing them entirely by hand and selling them. We're barely making enough to scrape by, working twelve hours a day. It kind of sucks. One day, I win a thousand bucks in the lottery and buy a couple of sewing machines for us to use. We can now make, oh, fifty flowers in the time it took us to make one. Let's assume that the demand for artificial flowers is far higher than we can fulfill. We could work as many hours as we used to and start selling fifty times as many flowers. But instead we work a little less and sell thirty times as many. We're still we're making a lot more money than we used to. Now. Since I bought the sewing machines with my own money, clearly I should be the one reaping all of the benefits of this new order. I'll take all the money and pay you exactly the same amount of money you were making when we were both sewing flowers by hand. So I'm getting about fifty-nine times as much as you are. "Hey, Egypt," you say. "Thanks to those sewing machines, I'm creating a lot more value than I used to. Maybe I should be getting, I dunno, twice what I used to get? Or a hell of a lot more?" And I sneer down at you from atop my golden toilet. "Your attitude reeks of entitlement," I say. "Get back to your sewing machine, Thenews." Three weeks later, you're fired, and replaced by a guy living in a tent under the Interstate who'll make flowers for half of what you were paying. It's my sewing machines, after all.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > It's my sewing machines, after all. that you've also got to maintain, insure, save funds to replace at the end of their life, etc. all while not earning 7% on the original $1000 by letting it sit in the stock market long term.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    Yes! Clearly these considerations are worth the entirety of the profits generated by Flowr, Inc's new equipment.
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  > It's my sewing machines, after all. It's also your idea, your implementation, your risk. You made the operation more productive, and that is worth money. It's perfectly fair, after all, your partner can also buy a sewing machine and start his own business competing with you. The fact that he does not is indicative that you provided the value, not him.
specialist 9y ago
You're overthinking this. It's just a coincidence that corporate profits skyrocketed while wages stagnated?

jhoechtl 9y ago

Your attitude is understandable at first sight. But the consequnce is increased inequality as profits get marginalized at the top. This might lead to a decreased quality of life even for those harvestingthe net gain. It's a delicate balance.

Eridrus 9y ago

It depends on how you frame the issue, if you look at an individual worker it is easy to ask if they are deserving, but if you look at broader society a more natural question should be whether we think the benefits of technology should be spread across the majority of our society or concentrated in the hands of the few. I don't know about you, but my techno-utopian fantasy involves everyone living off the labor of robots rather than struggling to house and feed themselves and their families because the elites no longer need the labor they can provide.

bad_user 9y ago
That's basically Marxism. Good or bad, it's an instant red flag.
- scroot 9y ago
  Can't tell if this pun was intentional, but I'll give it to you anyway
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Well you know Marx said it was inevitable so maybe we're hitting on a contradiction in capitalism that is too big to handle - the desire of individual firms to automate away their labor on a micro scale has the macro scale effect of eliminating all your consumers. It's not even good for business within a capitalist system.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Forgive me, but "Marx said it was inevitable" is not something I find part of a convincing argument.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Why?
      - lucozade 9y ago
        Possibly because he was so catastrophically wrong about the form of the society that would inevitably follow from state socialism? In a sense he was partly right i.e. almost all state socialist societies transformed in a very similar way. It was just that they transformed into totalitarian dictatorships rather than stateless utopia.
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        "Appeal to authority" is a well-known fallacy. There's no exception in it for when the authority happened to be Marx. And Marx wasn't so clearly right on everything he said that just "Marx said" settles the question.

Bucephalus355 9y ago

What about executive entitlement? Hasn’t their pay expanded by thousands of percent while workers wages haven’t expanded at all in 40 years? Why is asking for more money now considered such a sin? It’s argued very frequently that the CPI vastly underestimates inflation by not including things like rent and healthcare, so workers wages are dropping if anything. What makes companies entitled to think they don’t have to address this? Why can they buy technology that delivers higher results, not raise wages, and then wind up lowering wages? Eventually there will be a “#metoo” moment in business and many, many people will find themselves blacklisted for years for what is now being called “economic hate crimes”.

JabrZer0 9y ago
I'm not arguing that this is the way it SHOULD be, but as far as I can tell the difference stems from a perceived difference in "area of effect". For example, an assembly line worker's job is to physically make as many widgets per hour as possible at high quality. Maybe the limit of human ability is 100 widgets/hr. If the company CEO replaces half of the workers with robots that can make 1,000 widgets/hr, the workers won't benefit from that because they're still making 100 widgets/hr, while the executive just 5x'd the factory's output, which is likely to be worth a bonus. That's simple enough, but there's a problem with this line of reasoning. What if, rather than replacing the workers, the CEO gives half of them a WidgetTool3000, which allows workers to make 1,000 widgets/hr with no extra training or effort? From the executive's position, she just did the same thing: She adjusted the process to 5x the factory's output by adding a piece of technology. But half of the workers are now producing 10x more widgets, so shouldn't they get a piece of the newly created wealth too? (Here's where I toss in the disclaimer of "this is how it works, but I'm not going to comment on the morality of it") The answer is no, according to corporate tradition. The market has already determined that the value of a worker with a set level of training and ability is $X. Amplifying the worker's output doesn't change anything about the value of the worker (in fact, nothing has changed about the worker at all. He could be swapped with someone not using a WidgetTool with no loss in value for the company) - the WidgetTool is what has created the extra value for the company - it doesn't matter who uses it. On the other hand, it sure as hell feels like crap to be the guy making 10x the widgets for the same pay.

Retric 9y ago

Automation makes jobs more complex. Going from 100 workers at a factory to 50 workers means the 50 workers remaining have harder and more valuable jobs. In a hypothetical case of a single worker at a factory they need to know how everything works vs a single station. Really it's not automation that's destroying the middle class. It's information, a doctor can in theory look up symptoms without sending you to a specialist. In the case of information asymmetry the side with more information tends to collect more value and it's not workers who have gained the most information.

alexbeloi 9y ago
>Going from 100 workers at a factory to 50 workers means the 50 workers remaining have harder and more valuable jobs. This is not necessarily true. It could mean turning 100 people doing skilled labor and turning them into 50 workers doing visual inspection (QA) at likely lower pay.
- Retric 9y ago
  Someone is going to need to inspect output at both versions of the factory. Anyway, everyone can be limited to visual inspection someone needs to maintain the machines and deal with issues that develop.
  - alexbeloi 9y ago
    Maybe, my point is that isn't not a 'win' for the laborer like you seem to suggest, that maybe 50% of the people losing their jobs get to work better jobs. The people losing their jobs that are lucky enough to not be laid off are more likely be relegated to lower paying and lower skill inspection jobs rather than the higher skilled machine maintenance/development. IMO, the most likely outcome of your scenario is: 19/100 of the workers become visual inspection team, (maybe) 1/100 of the workers becomes a manager for visual inspection team, 5 external machine specialists get hired, 80/100 of the workers get laid off and 75/80 of those will continue same line of work for even less pay (supply/demand) and 5/80 will burn through any personal savings/credit to retrain themselves with the hopes of becoming one of the '5 external machine specialists' hired somewhere else. These numbers are definitely made up by me based on my own world view. From the original 100 laborers, 94/100 of the original people are worse off than before and in exchange we have 5 (maybe 6) new skilled positions. I'm not against automation or productivity or higher skilled work, I'm personally invested in all three, I just think that if we aren't aware of all the consequences that we are likely to be blind-sided by a resurgence of Luddite riots.

leereeves 9y ago

Workers aren't paid what they deserve, they're paid as much (or as little) as they're able to negotiate. Why shouldn't workers, either individually, as a union, a trade guild, or society as a whole, attempt to negotiate higher wages when productivity increases make more wealth available for distribution?

rhino369 9y ago
They should be able to try, but the guy who picks up the golden egg hatched by a chicken isn't going to be able to successfully negotiate a cut of the gold.
- leereeves 9y ago
  Perhaps not individually, but if the society is a democracy and 51% of people are employed picking up golden eggs, they have more negotiating power.
alexbeloi 9y ago
>Workers aren't paid what they deserve, they're paid as much (or as little) as they're able to negotiate. Deserve is a tricky notion. The capitalist will argue that workers deserve precisely their market rate, e.g. what they are able to negotiate (collectively or otherwise).
- marnett 9y ago
  capitalists, at least in America, were very effective at destroying unions (known as union busting) and pro-worker political movements starting back in the 1940s.
  - aianus 9y ago
    Monopolies and cartels are also busted, and for the same reason. They distort markets and lead to worse outcomes for consumers and the country at large.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Where does this idea come from that we must delegate all moral decision making to the market and anyone who desires to break out of market-allocated morality is entitled?

marnett 9y ago
The Chicago School of Economics.
stale2002 9y ago
People are free to create their own products and factories, and decide how the product of labor is distributed. If someone wants to build a factory, and give all of the profits to the laborers, then they should feel free to do so.

tdb7893 9y ago

Generally the market will pay someone what their productivity is or some other company will poach that worker. This is an oversimplification but in general the market should price workers at roughly what their productivity is, assuming the market is working correctly

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

> Where does this idea come from that if a worker is granted a novel piece of technology which makes him/her more productive... I think the first half of your first sentence shows... something. A bias? A misconception? I think it appears most strongly in the word "granted". Technology isn't like getting buffs in a video game. Workers aren't just "granted" new tools. They have to learn how to use them. In doing so, the workers become more productive, and therefore more valuable. A new tool improves productivity. That productivity creates more money. That money needs - deserves - to get shared in three different directions. Some goes to the tool maker. Some goes to the tool owner (the one who paid to get the tool). And some goes to the workers who use the tool. It seems to me that leaving any of the three out is unjust. Leaving anybody out of the gains is also likely to lead to fewer new tools being created and put into use, which means lower productivity gains, which means a lower level for the economy as a whole, which means lower standards of living.

mfoy_ 9y ago
I guess the problem comes when the tool is so good that it no longer requires the worker who uses it, i.e. automation. When all jobs that can be automated are automated, where are we left? As a society? Do we argue against automation because it destroys jobs? Then you're into government-paying-people-to-dig-holes-then-refill-them land. Do we just let the majority languish in poverty while the owners of the capital continuously concentrate their wealth? That's no way to build a future, or a healthy nation. Do we say everyone gets "mincome"? That's pretty-darn socialist, which is something many Americans have... extremely strong feelings about.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  I think of this differently. I think in terms of "spending" people instead of "employing" them. As a society, you've only got so many people. What are you going to spend them on? Well, traditionally, the answer was that you had to spend a lot of them on your food supply. But we found that, with better tools, we could spend only something like 3% of our people on food supply, and the rest could do something else. Some of them had to make the tools that the farmers used. Some could make a whole range of other new things. And we - the whole society - got richer as a result. Now we're finding that, with newer tools, we don't have to spend as many people in factories. We can do something else with them. The whole society can become richer as a result - if we can find something useful for them to do. I'm optimistic, but I must admit that I see the problems. We seem to be losing a lot of people into despair and poverty and feelings of uselessness. (I don't know if the same was true at the start of the industrial revolution, so I don't know if this is something to kind of expect at a transition, or whether this is something new.) I see that the income distribution is way out of whack. (I'm pretty sure that was true at the start of the industrial revolution, and it got corrected, but it took unionisation to do it.) Do we spend most of our people on space exploration? On better medical care? On herding robots? I don't know. But I'm optimistic that there will be something useful for them to do, which will improve our society as a whole. I don't know what it will be, though. (If you wish to maintain pessimism, there's your opening...)

rhino369 9y ago

I don't think it's entitlement. But it's naive to think they would would a significant portion of productivity gains caused by other factors.

rossdavidh 9y ago

Let's put it another way: why shouldn't workers try to hold back and/or destroy any sign of automation? Why should they not vandalize any attempt at using technology to make things more efficient? There are way more of them than there are innovators or CEO's, either one. The reason is, the same reason that everything else in society works: we all have a stake in this, because if society is better off, we are all better off. But, what if when more is produced, I don't get more, but now you have more to push housing prices in my neighborhood out of my reach? Society, and especially free-markets, rely on widespread support. A society of 50% thieves will collapse; a society of 10% thieves will probably not do much better. You need broad consensus to maintain the conditions necessary for a free market and innovation. You don't get that broad consensus, if all the gains in productivity go to the top.

SilasX 9y ago

This is a good point and shouldn't be downvoted. (I assume that was for tone?) We shouldn't expect that a productivity improvement purely due to capital should result in higher real worker compensation [1]. If the lawnomatic can mow one lawn per hour, and an upgrade permits it to mow two lawns per hour, then the labor of pressing its activation button isn't somehow more valuable. [1] Technically, it should result in employers bidding more for workers, but in a way that's far less than proportional to the total gain in output.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
But why should management then expect to see increases in revenues? If labor is not going to see increased wages, then why are they now doing more work?
- SilasX 9y ago
  >But why should management then expect to see increases in revenues? There's no universal answer, but in the canonical example of better machines, then part of the higher productivity is likely due to the judgment in recognizing where machines could be deployed, which is managerial labor. >If labor is not going to see increased wages, then why are they now doing more work? I'm not sure what you mean, but I was just explaining why we shouldn't expect higher total output to mean proportionally higher wages; it all depends on the cause of the productivity. If the worker is pushing the same buttons and the machine is doing more, wages should not be expected to increase and there's no mystery. If the productivity is from workers becoming more versatile and able to handle a bigger variety of situations with the same capital, then we should expect higher wages without a higher return to capital.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    "There's no universal answer, but in the canonical example of better machines, then part of the higher productivity is likely due to the judgment in recognizing where machines could be deployed, which is managerial labor." And using those machines was labor labor. "but I was just explaining why we shouldn't expect higher total output to mean proportionally higher wages" But why not? "If the worker is pushing the same buttons and the machine is doing more, wages should not be expected to increase and there's no mystery." Why not? The company is doing better; why shouldn't those who contributed, including the workers who made the widgets, share in that? "If the productivity is from workers becoming more versatile and able to handle a bigger variety of situations with the same capital, then we should expect higher wages without a higher return to capital." That is almost never seen.

s73v3r_ 9y ago

To me, the attitude reeking of entitlement is that you shouldn't have to pay more for a worker who is providing more value for your business. And regardless, someone who is more productive is providing more value. Don't believe so? Simple test: Are you now bringing in more revenue, producing more product, or reducing the cost of your product? Then more value has been produced. The alternative, which sadly has been taken all too often, is that management pockets that difference.

eecc 9y ago

Why are you so hostile to human beings? Employees are not merely selling time (actually that’s the most precious a living person has) but their ability to turn it - through the mastering of technology - into valuable goods. That they’re not entitled to a fair share, but just to whatever was agreed back in the day, without demonstrable acts of servile devotion, reeks of... dunno, feudalism?

lotsofpulp 9y ago
Prices are useful to indicate whether or not supply should be increased or decreased. Decreasing prices (wages in this conversation) indicate that people should be looking to sell their product (time and effort) to another market or buyer. Rather than force buyers to pay more than what the market says, the better option would be for societies to provide opportunities for people to re-tool and become more valuable again, for where this sufficient demand.

egypturnash 9y ago

So let's say that you and I go into business together making artificial flowers. Initially we are both sewing them entirely by hand and selling them. We're barely making enough to scrape by, working twelve hours a day. It kind of sucks. One day, I win a thousand bucks in the lottery and buy a couple of sewing machines for us to use. We can now make, oh, fifty flowers in the time it took us to make one. Let's assume that the demand for artificial flowers is far higher than we can fulfill. We could work as many hours as we used to and start selling fifty times as many flowers. But instead we work a little less and sell thirty times as many. We're still we're making a lot more money than we used to. Now. Since I bought the sewing machines with my own money, clearly I should be the one reaping all of the benefits of this new order. I'll take all the money and pay you exactly the same amount of money you were making when we were both sewing flowers by hand. So I'm getting about fifty-nine times as much as you are. "Hey, Egypt," you say. "Thanks to those sewing machines, I'm creating a lot more value than I used to. Maybe I should be getting, I dunno, twice what I used to get? Or a hell of a lot more?" And I sneer down at you from atop my golden toilet. "Your attitude reeks of entitlement," I say. "Get back to your sewing machine, Thenews." Three weeks later, you're fired, and replaced by a guy living in a tent under the Interstate who'll make flowers for half of what you were paying. It's my sewing machines, after all.

sigstoat 9y ago
> It's my sewing machines, after all. that you've also got to maintain, insure, save funds to replace at the end of their life, etc. all while not earning 7% on the original $1000 by letting it sit in the stock market long term.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Yes! Clearly these considerations are worth the entirety of the profits generated by Flowr, Inc's new equipment.
skookumchuck 9y ago
> It's my sewing machines, after all. It's also your idea, your implementation, your risk. You made the operation more productive, and that is worth money. It's perfectly fair, after all, your partner can also buy a sewing machine and start his own business competing with you. The fact that he does not is indicative that you provided the value, not him.

specialist 9y ago

You're overthinking this. It's just a coincidence that corporate profits skyrocketed while wages stagnated?