4 ms·

Yet since as long as I can remember, I see business claiming we need to raise productivity before workers can expect a rise in wages.

filoleg 4y ago
I would assume that's because the standards of living and quality of life for an average person has gone quite up over the past couple of centuries as well. Sure, you can produce the same amount of stuff today with much less effort than it required back then. But we also require more of the same stuff produced and also plenty of stuff that wasn't even possible to produce back then. That is, if we want to maintain the current standards of living and quality of life (instead of that from two centuries ago). And, turns out, people vastly tend to prefer average standards of living and quality of life from today over those from 1800s.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  That living standard could be considered a raise. What would someone in 1800 pay to have my air conditioned house with a fridge full of beer, frozen pizzas galore, and a car that can drive me 300 miles approximately 200 times before I need to do maintenance. And I could afford that as a pizza delivery guy 20 years ago. A raise implies you're richer than someone, but a rising tide seemed to have lifted all boats.
- janef0421 4y ago
  They haven't, actually. Standards of living were terrible in the 1800s because enclosure had forced most people off farmland and into overcrowded cities where they were effectively forced to work long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions. Actually wellbeing has at best returned to the level of the early modern period in the global north, with standards in the global south being worse by an order of magnitude.
  - abeppu 4y ago
    Wasn't enclosure basically a British (English?) issue? This post oddly zooms from an observation about one relatively small country and then tries to make a sweeping claim about the global north and global south. What do you mean when you say "actual wellbeing"?
    - janef0421 4y ago
      Perhaps it is, but the overall trend in the 18th and 19th centuries was away from peasant farming towards urbanisation and industrial wage labour, and I don't have a better term to refer to that. I was also assuming knowledge of European colonialism. By actual wellbeing, I mean the subjective experience of overall happiness, as distinct from material possessions.
      - bergenty 4y ago
        Well overall happiness is intangible. If we base it on tangibles like easy access to food, convenient and cheap transportation, safety and security, health care, recreation, mortality rate, access to information etc. there’s no comparison.
      - abeppu 4y ago
        Even if the industrial revolution came with a trend towards urbanization and away from peasant farming, if we're talking about people's happiness, the difference between being coerced off the land by enclosure vs being drawn towards economic opportunities in the city seems like an important distinction. I'm curious -- how can you be so confident in making broad statements about "actual wellbeing" today vs the early modern period? I would have thought at a minimum, a smaller proportion of the population being literate, plus actual costs of paper, ink, light, etc would mean there would be just a lot fewer records of subjective experience of lower class people from the early modern period. And you know ... whose happiness counts? I'd have further expected that half the population having drastically greater liberty today than in the early modern period ought to substantially improve some people's subjective wellbeing even without considering material possessions. Same for the move away from child labor, or child corporal punishment. I'm guessing no one has 15th century survey data of peasants being asked "on a scale from 1 meaning 'strongly disagree' to 7 meaning 'strongly agree', how would you rate the sentence 'I am happy most days'". And I'm in no way trying to disregard or minimize the possibility that just a different way of living made people better off at some points in the past. But I also think we risk romanticizing or projecting onto past populations.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    > Standards of living were terrible in the 1800s If your issue was that I picked 1800s specifically, then let me clarify. I stand behind the same statement holding up for any other point in time predating 1800s as well.
    - janef0421 4y ago
      You're probably broadly correct if we compared to, say, 1600.
djbebs 4y ago
Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to capital investments if it wants raises. Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at what it does. If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.
- janef0421 4y ago
  Capital is itself a product of labor.
  - djbebs 4y ago
    Great, then surely labor will be able to pay for it.
    - janef0421 4y ago
      Labour won't be able to pay for it, because money is a representation of social power, not value, and in our current society labourers do not hold social power. See "Debt: The first 5,000 years", or the video by second thought on the subject.
  - ericd 4y ago
    It’s a product of well coordinated labor. It’s much, much easier to make the wrong thing than the right thing. And the wrong thing can eat a huge amount of labor and be worth much less than nothing.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Capital is often a product of labor plus input capital. Most startups understand this well. It's basically impossible to bootstrap something with labor alone
    - janef0421 4y ago

filoleg 4y ago

I would assume that's because the standards of living and quality of life for an average person has gone quite up over the past couple of centuries as well. Sure, you can produce the same amount of stuff today with much less effort than it required back then. But we also require more of the same stuff produced and also plenty of stuff that wasn't even possible to produce back then. That is, if we want to maintain the current standards of living and quality of life (instead of that from two centuries ago). And, turns out, people vastly tend to prefer average standards of living and quality of life from today over those from 1800s.

jvanderbot 4y ago
That living standard could be considered a raise. What would someone in 1800 pay to have my air conditioned house with a fridge full of beer, frozen pizzas galore, and a car that can drive me 300 miles approximately 200 times before I need to do maintenance. And I could afford that as a pizza delivery guy 20 years ago. A raise implies you're richer than someone, but a rising tide seemed to have lifted all boats.
janef0421 4y ago
They haven't, actually. Standards of living were terrible in the 1800s because enclosure had forced most people off farmland and into overcrowded cities where they were effectively forced to work long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions. Actually wellbeing has at best returned to the level of the early modern period in the global north, with standards in the global south being worse by an order of magnitude.
- abeppu 4y ago
  Wasn't enclosure basically a British (English?) issue? This post oddly zooms from an observation about one relatively small country and then tries to make a sweeping claim about the global north and global south. What do you mean when you say "actual wellbeing"?
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Perhaps it is, but the overall trend in the 18th and 19th centuries was away from peasant farming towards urbanisation and industrial wage labour, and I don't have a better term to refer to that. I was also assuming knowledge of European colonialism. By actual wellbeing, I mean the subjective experience of overall happiness, as distinct from material possessions.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      Well overall happiness is intangible. If we base it on tangibles like easy access to food, convenient and cheap transportation, safety and security, health care, recreation, mortality rate, access to information etc. there’s no comparison.
    - abeppu 4y ago
      Even if the industrial revolution came with a trend towards urbanization and away from peasant farming, if we're talking about people's happiness, the difference between being coerced off the land by enclosure vs being drawn towards economic opportunities in the city seems like an important distinction. I'm curious -- how can you be so confident in making broad statements about "actual wellbeing" today vs the early modern period? I would have thought at a minimum, a smaller proportion of the population being literate, plus actual costs of paper, ink, light, etc would mean there would be just a lot fewer records of subjective experience of lower class people from the early modern period. And you know ... whose happiness counts? I'd have further expected that half the population having drastically greater liberty today than in the early modern period ought to substantially improve some people's subjective wellbeing even without considering material possessions. Same for the move away from child labor, or child corporal punishment. I'm guessing no one has 15th century survey data of peasants being asked "on a scale from 1 meaning 'strongly disagree' to 7 meaning 'strongly agree', how would you rate the sentence 'I am happy most days'". And I'm in no way trying to disregard or minimize the possibility that just a different way of living made people better off at some points in the past. But I also think we risk romanticizing or projecting onto past populations.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > Standards of living were terrible in the 1800s If your issue was that I picked 1800s specifically, then let me clarify. I stand behind the same statement holding up for any other point in time predating 1800s as well.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    You're probably broadly correct if we compared to, say, 1600.

djbebs 4y ago

Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to capital investments if it wants raises. Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at what it does. If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.

janef0421 4y ago
Capital is itself a product of labor.
- djbebs 4y ago
  Great, then surely labor will be able to pay for it.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Labour won't be able to pay for it, because money is a representation of social power, not value, and in our current society labourers do not hold social power. See "Debt: The first 5,000 years", or the video by second thought on the subject.
- ericd 4y ago
  It’s a product of well coordinated labor. It’s much, much easier to make the wrong thing than the right thing. And the wrong thing can eat a huge amount of labor and be worth much less than nothing.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Capital is often a product of labor plus input capital. Most startups understand this well. It's basically impossible to bootstrap something with labor alone
  - janef0421 4y ago