Actually the lesson of optimizing productivity over the last 100 years is that the benifits have almost exclusively gone to the "capitalists" (in the sense of

Actually the lesson of optimizing productivity over the last 100 years is that the benifits have almost exclusively gone to the "capitalists" (in the sense of the people financing work with their capital) and not benifited workers. With the productivity gains that we saw over the last century we should be working 1-2 day weeks for the same standard of living (fun fact many economists of the 1900s were worrying about people not having enough to work in the future). What happened is that people work more for the same standard of living instead, the middle class is disappearing and the gap between rich and poor is widening.