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>You are complaining about the very thing you benefit from now. It's dubious that anyone except the most wealthy benefits from this. Even though productivity h

>You are complaining about the very thing you benefit from now. It's dubious that anyone except the most wealthy benefits from this. Even though productivity has exploded, wages hasn't followed and the rewards of productivity has gone to a small few. I don't know how anyone can look at wealth inequality today and think most people should be "grateful". It's more likely to me that rest of America will start to look like San Francisco.

brookst 4y ago
You really don’t think you live with any of the benefits from productivity gains? You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on? None of those things would exist if productivity was at the same level as the 1800’s.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  All you’re saying (by implication), besides not discussing numbers (which can show widening gap), is that you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted. I don’t think modern anthro research agrees with this. Catch up on Graeber & Wengrow
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    > you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted. Where did the parent say anything like this at all? I believe you're attacking a strawman.
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  Although that's true, it's important to acknowledge that you've shifted the conversation from time, which was the original topic, to merely having things in a world where most people have little flexibility in the amount they work anyway. Even if I hadn't bought that phone, I wouldn't necessarily have any more time to myself.
  - krab 4y ago
    There are many ways our lives are better. See for example infant mortality. To be born mere sixty or eighty years earlier would mean for me personally to die at three months of age. All my time is extra time if you look at it from this perspective.
    - claudiawerner 4y ago
      I don't think anyone disputes that such metrics are better than before; the issue is staying complacent with what we have in a world where we are seeing yet another wave of potential productivity gains being captured by people who can afford to use it to gain more time. Saying "Things are better than they've ever been, why complain?" feels like the wrong approach. "Hey, at least I'm not dead." as the answer to "Why haven't we seen meaningful increases in free time for first world workers over the past three decades?" is a real head-scratcher.
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        Who is staying complacent? We don't have increases in free time because work is not zero sum; technology enabled more productive work to be done (human computers versus, well, electronic computers) but we still have a lot more work to do. We haven't even reached type 1 on the Kardashev scale, meaning that we have yet more to do. AI will similarly increase out productivity but the work will still continue, because humans are an inexhaustible species, we always want to do more and more.
      - krab 4y ago
        I mean that we, as a society, had chosen more goods and higher standard of living instead of free time. It's not an exclusive choice either. At least in Europe, the amount of free time grows with each generation. 37.5 hours per week, 5 weeks vacation and many bank holidays is a significant change from how much people worked in the fifties. Yes, we can do better. But both our wealth and our free time are visibly improving.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I disagree. Having that phone means I do not have to go to the grocery store, etc. having the TV means I don’t drive to the theater. My very nice smoker means that not only do I not drive 20 miles to the nearest good BBQ, but I get time for myself to cook. Many of these advances in consumer goods absolutely create more time for relaxation and enjoyment.
- stavros 4y ago
  This is a red herring. The reality is that the benefits from all this productivity are distributed to a few billionaires, rather than everyone. Imagine how different the world would look if the richest person's net worth was a few million, and wealth was distributed much more evenly. You don't even need to look at productivity for this.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    It wouldn't look substantially different. Wealth is not cash, you can't just redistribute it. And even if you could, say, take the top 100 billionaires' wealth (let's say they collectively have 1 trillion USD in assets) and redistributed it, the US tax base itself contributes something on the order of 2 trillion a year. So, great, for one year you increased people's incomes by 33%, increasing inflation as well, mind you. Now the next year everyone who's rich and invests in larger projects would leave to a country that doesn't have wealth redistribution measures, and the US would basically turn into Cuba. We gain a lot more from investment innovation through technology, empirically, than we lose through wealth inequality. The current system we have is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
    - stavros 4y ago
      Oof, if you think the US is a model of human prosperity, our cultural divide is just too great to talk about this topic. Why would I increase inflation if I redistributed existing wealth, by the way?
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        I don't mean the US model of capitalism particularly, I just used its tax base calculation as an example (and either way, doesn't seem like you addressed the situation of what happens when you redistribute funds). I mean the modern system of free trade, regulated markets of supply and demand, comparative advantage, and so on, how most modern countries' economies function today. For example, India after opening up their markets in the 80s (having previously followed the communist Soviet model) has seen massive growth in terms of the wealth of their population. Inflation occurs when the supply of money flowing in the economy grows. Bezos' wealth for example is tied up into Amazon, it's not liquid. But suddenly if you gave everyone and extra 10k a year from that money? They'll spend it, causing prices to increase. That's inflation. Not to mention converting Amazon stock to cash would cause the price to crater. The way to get around that would be to directly issue the stock to the government or to the people, as some countries do. However, again, people could simply sell the stock to use the money as cash, again causing inflation. Norway and Alaska have a decent model, a sovereign wealth fund that issues dividends to its populace, but again, it can cause inflation.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  I disagree, technological progress and productivity do not seem to be so tightly linked. If we woke tomorrow and started making all goods to be long-lived, nothing single-use, fixed up the designed-in obsolescence, open-sourced everything, then we'd release people and resources for a great focus on innovation whilst simultaneously cutting production levels.
  - underdeserver 4y ago
    Release is an interesting choice of word for "fire". Why aren't these people already working on "innovation"?
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      Because we spend a whole heap of our productivity on making crap, basically separating people from money as effectively as we can fit as little development as we can get away with. Our financial system (UK, I'd say The West is all the same too) is tailored to make rich people richer, everything else is a by-product. Yes, people would work less (and produce less waste). No, I don't have all the answers on how that would work out. Greed would probably cause it to fail.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Wages have not scaled with productivity. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
  - vc8f6vVV 4y ago
    Why should they? You make more things, but you consume more things too and they are cheaper.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  >You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on? Bread and circuses? I mean sure, some things are cheaper, but other things are also much, much more expensive. And maybe it's because I'm older now, but I don't think "flat screen TVs" are a good benchmark for overall wealth (I don't even own a TV). Yet, things like healthcare, housing, childcare and education have exploded in price despite the gains of "productivity". The former are necessities to live and it's dubious that to argue that I've "gained" from productivity if you have traded the ability for me to own a home with an iPhone. The balance isn't there - and I think you have a political undercurrent of people waking up to this. What good is a flat screen TV, if I can't own a home? Have I really benefitted from productivity gains if the equation is so out of whack? Simple math tells me that while a 50in has gone from $9,000 to $1,000, a "starter home" has gone from $200,000 to $800,000. Telling me I've benefitted in this situation is to take me for a fool.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Don't conflate lack of wage growth to the underlying reasons for those costs exploding. Why have those exploded? Housing: NIMBYism and lack of ability to build, mainly by strict government zoning and people who petition their local governments to not build more lest it devalue their house. Healthcare: insurance companies trying to get away with as much as they can, while hospitals try to charge as much as they can, effectively creating a price bidding war with the consumer in the middle. Childcare: More people working, lower supply of childcare services but demand goes up, thus price goes up. Education: Government effectively making student debt undischargeable in a bid to get more people to get college degrees but this backfired. Administrator costs for colleges ballooning. So, even if wages had kept up with productivity, if you don't solve the underlying reasons as to why these costs exploded, you'll have the same issues as before.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      Anything the government subsidizes (healthcare, mortgages, education) has exploded in cost because it’s built on a foundation of moral hazard. In essence the policies, which try and mix central economic planning with free markets, are lining the pockets of banks (guaranteeing mortgages), university endowments and admins (giving anyone with a pulse tons of money to learn), and healthcare providers (Medicare and Medicaid demand saturating resources by paying under market for the highest risk people). I’m not saying socialized or free market approaches are better than one another. But the approach we have taken is the worst of both. You can’t just insure the sickest demographics - you need a distribution. Either make it universal or let the free market compete for it. You can’t just give anyone a ton of cash to learn what they want. Either make it free for all or let the free market lend to students based on expected return. You can’t just guarantee every mortgage which keeps interest rates artificially low. Either build social housing or let the free market set interest rates.
pythonaut_16 4y ago
I really hate how the wealthy benefit from my washer, dryer, dishwasher, Internet, air conditioning, access to a huge variety of food... When will the wealthy start passing the benefits of progress on to the rest of us? We've got big problems in our economy and income inequality is certainly one of them, but it's asinine to pretend that most individuals in society have not benefitted from technological progress.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  It's weird that in the face of growing evidence[1][2], people will still argue that it's "asinine" that a lot of people got the short end of the stick. Imagine we both went fishing and I took 80% of the fish and gave you 20%, when you turned around and asked for 50% if I said "look you were hungry yesterday and you clearly benefitted from 20% of the fish, why are you complaining" I assume you wouldn't just say "ok you're right". Even your list is out of touch; many of my friends in San Francisco don't have in-unit washer or dryers. Look I don't even think I'm even making a crazy observation; I'm just continuing the trend - as AI gets better and more pervasive it's only natural that wealth will concentrate without some force to redistribute it (either through wages or taxes). [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Your fishing example assumes a zero sum economy, when one of the first things you learn in economics classes is that the economy is not zero sum, that comparative advantages enable positive sum outcomes. A better example is, we go fishing, I catch fish, you chop wood, we build a fire with my wood and eat with your fish. We are both better off than we were before.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      The metaphor is not the economy - it's about being told to shut up in the face on inequality. At the end of the day if I can't raise my concerns and negotiating, then I might as well be under a monarchy and we can erase all pretense about this being fair.
ajmurmann 4y ago
Another commentator calls out all the things we didn't have at all in the past, but our wealth in regard to pre-existing things also has gone up. In the 50s there were 3 cars/10 Americans. Now it's 9. Homeownership went for 55% to 66%. College degrees 6% -> 38%. We used to spent 20% of income on food. Now it's around 8%. Poverty among 65+ went from 35% to 10%.
- Kye 4y ago
  We need that many cars because our walkable cities were bulldozed to build highways through them. We need the college degree because jobs don't train you anymore and the few jobs you can get with little/no training were automated away or don't pay enough to live. The cheap food sucks and is killing us.
  - vc8f6vVV 4y ago
    We need that many cars because having own home and living in a suburb is an American dream, isn't it? How many people want to live in a high rise building with noisy neighbors? Yes, it is expensive, but living in a cave is pretty cheap, somehow nobody wants it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    I'm 100% in on walkable cities, public transit, massive zoning reform etc. But were American cities more walkable in the 50s? Yes, more jobs today require more knowledge. My grandpa worked in a factory full of boring, repetitive work where he also got to inhale bad fumes every day. I went to college for 6 or 7 years and my employers combined have probably spent less than 10k on training for me. I get to work at a sit/stand desk, get snacks provided, ergonomic equipment and do work that has much more variety than anything my grandpa did. Even if I ignore the astronomical income difference between me and my grandpa, I'd still not trade this for his job. Was the food actually healthier in the US in the 50s? Did food not come from factory farms? Wonder Bread has been around since the 20s and in the 40s had to have vitamins added. Seems like we already were far away from the serene pastures we all like to imagine food came from. Looking outside the US, famines were incredibly common until quite recently. Edit: some photos of how great life looked outside of movies and advertisements as recently as the 80s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119136
laserlight 4y ago
Supporting evidence: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

brookst 4y ago

You really don’t think you live with any of the benefits from productivity gains? You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on? None of those things would exist if productivity was at the same level as the 1800’s.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
All you’re saying (by implication), besides not discussing numbers (which can show widening gap), is that you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted. I don’t think modern anthro research agrees with this. Catch up on Graeber & Wengrow
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  > you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted. Where did the parent say anything like this at all? I believe you're attacking a strawman.
claudiawerner 4y ago
Although that's true, it's important to acknowledge that you've shifted the conversation from time, which was the original topic, to merely having things in a world where most people have little flexibility in the amount they work anyway. Even if I hadn't bought that phone, I wouldn't necessarily have any more time to myself.
- krab 4y ago
  There are many ways our lives are better. See for example infant mortality. To be born mere sixty or eighty years earlier would mean for me personally to die at three months of age. All my time is extra time if you look at it from this perspective.
  - claudiawerner 4y ago
    I don't think anyone disputes that such metrics are better than before; the issue is staying complacent with what we have in a world where we are seeing yet another wave of potential productivity gains being captured by people who can afford to use it to gain more time. Saying "Things are better than they've ever been, why complain?" feels like the wrong approach. "Hey, at least I'm not dead." as the answer to "Why haven't we seen meaningful increases in free time for first world workers over the past three decades?" is a real head-scratcher.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Who is staying complacent? We don't have increases in free time because work is not zero sum; technology enabled more productive work to be done (human computers versus, well, electronic computers) but we still have a lot more work to do. We haven't even reached type 1 on the Kardashev scale, meaning that we have yet more to do. AI will similarly increase out productivity but the work will still continue, because humans are an inexhaustible species, we always want to do more and more.
    - krab 4y ago
      I mean that we, as a society, had chosen more goods and higher standard of living instead of free time. It's not an exclusive choice either. At least in Europe, the amount of free time grows with each generation. 37.5 hours per week, 5 weeks vacation and many bank holidays is a significant change from how much people worked in the fifties. Yes, we can do better. But both our wealth and our free time are visibly improving.
- brookst 4y ago
  I disagree. Having that phone means I do not have to go to the grocery store, etc. having the TV means I don’t drive to the theater. My very nice smoker means that not only do I not drive 20 miles to the nearest good BBQ, but I get time for myself to cook. Many of these advances in consumer goods absolutely create more time for relaxation and enjoyment.
stavros 4y ago
This is a red herring. The reality is that the benefits from all this productivity are distributed to a few billionaires, rather than everyone. Imagine how different the world would look if the richest person's net worth was a few million, and wealth was distributed much more evenly. You don't even need to look at productivity for this.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  It wouldn't look substantially different. Wealth is not cash, you can't just redistribute it. And even if you could, say, take the top 100 billionaires' wealth (let's say they collectively have 1 trillion USD in assets) and redistributed it, the US tax base itself contributes something on the order of 2 trillion a year. So, great, for one year you increased people's incomes by 33%, increasing inflation as well, mind you. Now the next year everyone who's rich and invests in larger projects would leave to a country that doesn't have wealth redistribution measures, and the US would basically turn into Cuba. We gain a lot more from investment innovation through technology, empirically, than we lose through wealth inequality. The current system we have is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Oof, if you think the US is a model of human prosperity, our cultural divide is just too great to talk about this topic. Why would I increase inflation if I redistributed existing wealth, by the way?
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      I don't mean the US model of capitalism particularly, I just used its tax base calculation as an example (and either way, doesn't seem like you addressed the situation of what happens when you redistribute funds). I mean the modern system of free trade, regulated markets of supply and demand, comparative advantage, and so on, how most modern countries' economies function today. For example, India after opening up their markets in the 80s (having previously followed the communist Soviet model) has seen massive growth in terms of the wealth of their population. Inflation occurs when the supply of money flowing in the economy grows. Bezos' wealth for example is tied up into Amazon, it's not liquid. But suddenly if you gave everyone and extra 10k a year from that money? They'll spend it, causing prices to increase. That's inflation. Not to mention converting Amazon stock to cash would cause the price to crater. The way to get around that would be to directly issue the stock to the government or to the people, as some countries do. However, again, people could simply sell the stock to use the money as cash, again causing inflation. Norway and Alaska have a decent model, a sovereign wealth fund that issues dividends to its populace, but again, it can cause inflation.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
I disagree, technological progress and productivity do not seem to be so tightly linked. If we woke tomorrow and started making all goods to be long-lived, nothing single-use, fixed up the designed-in obsolescence, open-sourced everything, then we'd release people and resources for a great focus on innovation whilst simultaneously cutting production levels.
- underdeserver 4y ago
  Release is an interesting choice of word for "fire". Why aren't these people already working on "innovation"?
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Because we spend a whole heap of our productivity on making crap, basically separating people from money as effectively as we can fit as little development as we can get away with. Our financial system (UK, I'd say The West is all the same too) is tailored to make rich people richer, everything else is a by-product. Yes, people would work less (and produce less waste). No, I don't have all the answers on how that would work out. Greed would probably cause it to fail.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
Wages have not scaled with productivity. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
- vc8f6vVV 4y ago
  Why should they? You make more things, but you consume more things too and they are cheaper.
nemothekid 4y ago
>You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on? Bread and circuses? I mean sure, some things are cheaper, but other things are also much, much more expensive. And maybe it's because I'm older now, but I don't think "flat screen TVs" are a good benchmark for overall wealth (I don't even own a TV). Yet, things like healthcare, housing, childcare and education have exploded in price despite the gains of "productivity". The former are necessities to live and it's dubious that to argue that I've "gained" from productivity if you have traded the ability for me to own a home with an iPhone. The balance isn't there - and I think you have a political undercurrent of people waking up to this. What good is a flat screen TV, if I can't own a home? Have I really benefitted from productivity gains if the equation is so out of whack? Simple math tells me that while a 50in has gone from $9,000 to $1,000, a "starter home" has gone from $200,000 to $800,000. Telling me I've benefitted in this situation is to take me for a fool.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Don't conflate lack of wage growth to the underlying reasons for those costs exploding. Why have those exploded? Housing: NIMBYism and lack of ability to build, mainly by strict government zoning and people who petition their local governments to not build more lest it devalue their house. Healthcare: insurance companies trying to get away with as much as they can, while hospitals try to charge as much as they can, effectively creating a price bidding war with the consumer in the middle. Childcare: More people working, lower supply of childcare services but demand goes up, thus price goes up. Education: Government effectively making student debt undischargeable in a bid to get more people to get college degrees but this backfired. Administrator costs for colleges ballooning. So, even if wages had kept up with productivity, if you don't solve the underlying reasons as to why these costs exploded, you'll have the same issues as before.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Anything the government subsidizes (healthcare, mortgages, education) has exploded in cost because it’s built on a foundation of moral hazard. In essence the policies, which try and mix central economic planning with free markets, are lining the pockets of banks (guaranteeing mortgages), university endowments and admins (giving anyone with a pulse tons of money to learn), and healthcare providers (Medicare and Medicaid demand saturating resources by paying under market for the highest risk people). I’m not saying socialized or free market approaches are better than one another. But the approach we have taken is the worst of both. You can’t just insure the sickest demographics - you need a distribution. Either make it universal or let the free market compete for it. You can’t just give anyone a ton of cash to learn what they want. Either make it free for all or let the free market lend to students based on expected return. You can’t just guarantee every mortgage which keeps interest rates artificially low. Either build social housing or let the free market set interest rates.

pythonaut_16 4y ago

I really hate how the wealthy benefit from my washer, dryer, dishwasher, Internet, air conditioning, access to a huge variety of food... When will the wealthy start passing the benefits of progress on to the rest of us? We've got big problems in our economy and income inequality is certainly one of them, but it's asinine to pretend that most individuals in society have not benefitted from technological progress.

nemothekid 4y ago
It's weird that in the face of growing evidence[1][2], people will still argue that it's "asinine" that a lot of people got the short end of the stick. Imagine we both went fishing and I took 80% of the fish and gave you 20%, when you turned around and asked for 50% if I said "look you were hungry yesterday and you clearly benefitted from 20% of the fish, why are you complaining" I assume you wouldn't just say "ok you're right". Even your list is out of touch; many of my friends in San Francisco don't have in-unit washer or dryers. Look I don't even think I'm even making a crazy observation; I'm just continuing the trend - as AI gets better and more pervasive it's only natural that wealth will concentrate without some force to redistribute it (either through wages or taxes). [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Your fishing example assumes a zero sum economy, when one of the first things you learn in economics classes is that the economy is not zero sum, that comparative advantages enable positive sum outcomes. A better example is, we go fishing, I catch fish, you chop wood, we build a fire with my wood and eat with your fish. We are both better off than we were before.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    The metaphor is not the economy - it's about being told to shut up in the face on inequality. At the end of the day if I can't raise my concerns and negotiating, then I might as well be under a monarchy and we can erase all pretense about this being fair.

ajmurmann 4y ago

Another commentator calls out all the things we didn't have at all in the past, but our wealth in regard to pre-existing things also has gone up. In the 50s there were 3 cars/10 Americans. Now it's 9. Homeownership went for 55% to 66%. College degrees 6% -> 38%. We used to spent 20% of income on food. Now it's around 8%. Poverty among 65+ went from 35% to 10%.

Kye 4y ago
We need that many cars because our walkable cities were bulldozed to build highways through them. We need the college degree because jobs don't train you anymore and the few jobs you can get with little/no training were automated away or don't pay enough to live. The cheap food sucks and is killing us.
- vc8f6vVV 4y ago
  We need that many cars because having own home and living in a suburb is an American dream, isn't it? How many people want to live in a high rise building with noisy neighbors? Yes, it is expensive, but living in a cave is pretty cheap, somehow nobody wants it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  I'm 100% in on walkable cities, public transit, massive zoning reform etc. But were American cities more walkable in the 50s? Yes, more jobs today require more knowledge. My grandpa worked in a factory full of boring, repetitive work where he also got to inhale bad fumes every day. I went to college for 6 or 7 years and my employers combined have probably spent less than 10k on training for me. I get to work at a sit/stand desk, get snacks provided, ergonomic equipment and do work that has much more variety than anything my grandpa did. Even if I ignore the astronomical income difference between me and my grandpa, I'd still not trade this for his job. Was the food actually healthier in the US in the 50s? Did food not come from factory farms? Wonder Bread has been around since the 20s and in the 40s had to have vitamins added. Seems like we already were far away from the serene pastures we all like to imagine food came from. Looking outside the US, famines were incredibly common until quite recently. Edit: some photos of how great life looked outside of movies and advertisements as recently as the 80s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119136

laserlight 4y ago

Supporting evidence: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com