Within some constraints, the decision on how to distribute these excess productivity benefits is basically arbitrary. There is some minimum you need to pay peop

Within some constraints, the decision on how to distribute these excess productivity benefits is basically arbitrary. There is some minimum you need to pay people in order to get them to work. Once that’s done, you have some excess. You could distribute that to front-line workers. You could distribute it to the software teams, but you sure don’t have to. In practice, human nature being what it is, what will most likely happen - in the absence of specific government policies incentivizing other choices - is that management will distribute it to themselves and their shareholders. We in the US once had a number of tax policies that were designed to disincentivize this kind of payout, and encourage companies to maintain full-time workforces with decent benefits, invest in R&D and facilities improvements etc. Other countries still have those policies. But we here in the US got rid of a lot of them. The result is that excess productivity benefits have been distributed in exactly the way you’d expect - with frankly alarming effects on our political stability.