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This is so horribly flawed. Productivity improvements have been concentrated at the high end, and those that have occurred in low skilled jobs have been almost
by qeternity 6y ago
This is so horribly flawed. Productivity improvements have been concentrated at the high end, and those that have occurred in low skilled jobs have been almost entirely due to technology, not to labor efficiency. Technology gains have always disproportionately been captured by the providers of capital over the providers of labor (given they are the ones who invest in said technology).
- ahoy 6y agoI don't think "this is fine because capitalism privileges capitalists by design" is the rebuttal you think it is.
- idrios 6y agoI think he was just saying "this is what's expected" not "this is fine"
- qeternity 6y agoYes, bummed I had to scroll to end of comments for someone who gets it. Society can change the contract we all abide by. But as it stands right now, this is working as intended. And living standards of the bottom 10% versus 100 years ago are unimaginably better off, which is what we sought a century ago: absolute improvements. Now everybody is rich enough that we can afford to debate the relativism of the capitalist social contract...but that’s only thanks to the advancements brought about in the first place.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoIt's not "by design" but rather an emergent property of an economy.
- sixstrings 6y agoThat view is even more flawed, since everyone who pays taxes is an investor of technology. Most breakthroughs in tech happen at universities. It’s not private equity that funds tech, but taxes. So the beneficiaries of tech breakthroughs should be... everyone.
- qeternity 6y agoUniversity research hasn't been majority funded by taxes in decades. The amount of private money funding public research is enormous.
- lilactown 6y agoWhat value does technology provide other than increasing labor efficiency? If tech helps me build 10x the number of widgets, should all of that surplus value only be captured by the technology owners? What about the people who build and service the technology which allows these improvements to be implemented?
- adrianmonk 6y agoThe surplus value should definitely not go 100% to the owners and 0% to the laborers. Otherwise, as economic output increases, workers' share of the reward can only continually decrease forever. But the surplus value should definitely not go 100% to the workers and 0% to the owners. Otherwise, there is no reward for creating the surplus value, and productivity gains will not happen, which in general is no way to run a society. Plus productivity helps reduce scarcity, and scarcity disproportionately affects poorer people.
- rayiner 6y agoIf you replace 1,000 workers with 50 and a very expensive machine, should you pay each worker who remains 20 times as much? Because that’s the assumption in the article. The people who build and service the technology are paid well. They’re techies who live in Silicon Valley, etc. But there are just very few of them compared to the 950 newly obsolete workers.
- pydry 6y agoIf efficiency has gone up why hasnt rent gone down? Since rent has been pushed up by political means why not wages? Also, why are we assuming that technology brought down wages when offshoring has skyrocketed. What makes you think it wasn't competition from the third world labor rather than robots? There is a political position embedded in the assumption that robots are responsible for the missing jobs.
- dantheman 6y agoHow about let's fix rent and not carry mistakes over to other domains.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Retric 6y agoIn theory competitive markets should force companies to increase automation without long term increases in profits. Grocery stores installing checkout barcode scanners are in competition with other grocery stores which kept the profit margins stable over time. Being ahead or behind the curve impacted individual businesses, but the overall industry saw minimal change. Thus, technology isn’t the cause of companies capturing a higher percentage of the increased efficiency due to automation.