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I don't think this is going to happen. Increases in productivity eventually lead to race to the bottom in terms of prices. Which means whoever owns the means of

I don't think this is going to happen. Increases in productivity eventually lead to race to the bottom in terms of prices. Which means whoever owns the means of production are not incentivized at all to just let their workers work less. The demands of workers will stay the same, if not increase because of lowering barriers to entry on the supply side of job seekers. I wish we as a society would just accept less work as productivity increases, but that is not the way the system is setup to work. One positive thing is that we do end up with more things as it becomes cheaper to produce them.

moffkalast 3y ago
So in short, seize the means of automation.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Yes, comrade
golergka 3y ago
> whoever owns the means of production This 19th rhetoric century doesn't work in modern world, especially when you're talking about creating software. To "produce" most of what HN readers do, you don't need anything more than a laptop and some cloud services — which you would need to scale up proportionally to load, and, therefore, revenue. If you need capital to hire others, it's also never have been more easily available than in the last 10 years.
- goofy_goober 3y ago
  An interesting development as cloud services become increasingly more important (if they aren't critical already for businesses looking to get big) would be cloud services providers structured as mutual companies, like we see in some insurance and financial services companies (Vanguard, State Farm, etc). This would create a fiduciary duty to not soak the customer for everything they've got (no more sky-high public internet egress charges!), but also a structure where the customers of the company are the company's legal owners, so both workers and external customers could technically own a piece of the means of production if they use the services for their hobby projects or business. I would not be surprised if this comes to exist in the future as people want downward pressure on public cloud prices, and it would be an interesting development seeing legal ownership of "the means of production" (public cloud infrastructure) and earnings from it titled to anyone who uses it.
- charlie0 3y ago
  You are proving my point. Advances in productivity have led to a lowering to the barrier of entry. Anyone can code now. So why,(in theory) would a business owner let their workers work less when someone else is willing to work longer hours?
  - latency-guy2 3y ago
    I think you'd take anything anyone says as proving your point just on the basis someone is responding to you at all.
  - golergka 3y ago
    If somebody else is willing to do the same job for less, it means your asking price for your services is too high. Americans love to complain about stagnation of wages, while in reality it just means that people in other parts of the world have reason out of poverty competing with them on a labour market. If you value a Chinese life just as much as an American one, the fact that American worker can now afford one car per family instead of two but a Chinese worker can now eat meat on a regular basis clearly is a benefit to humanity.
    - charlie0 3y ago
      I fully agree, but what does this have to do with letting workers work less as productivity increases? Are you implying that stage would only occur if productivity gains are spread equally across the world?
      - golergka 3y ago
        Letting? Nobody is forbidding workers from taking less shifts. It's workers themselves who decide that higher compensation is more important for them than leisure.
        antifa 3y ago
        The vast majority of workers can't take less shifts, unless they are OK with becoming homeless.
georgemcbay 3y ago
There are a few ways in which the system is self-correcting, though not in a clean or happy-path way. First there's just the fact that when a significant percentage of a population is unable to participate in an economy in a meaningful way the economy falls apart from within. What's the point in controlling the "means of production" when almost nobody can afford what you produce because they are not generating value within that economy? This is something that the industrial era capitalists (who were generally terrible people, don't read this as me trying to make heroes of them) understood enough to deal with in some proactive ways but which for whatever reason we seem to be mostly blind to currently as we rush toward another inflection point for modern capitalism. Secondly, there's the reality that when a significant percentage of the population is becoming unhoused and starving there will be revolt and those owning the means of production will be violently eliminated by any means necessary (absent some sort of collective agreement to keep the majority comfortable). Large masses of people wanting for basic necessities for themselves and their families don't just disappear through the cracks like they do on a smaller scale when a relatively small number of have-nots (relative to the whole of the economy) are easy for society to marginalize and ignore. So it is really in everyone's interest (even the interest of the increasingly consolidated group with the 'means of production') that we figure this stuff out moving forward and sooner rather than later. I'm not confident we will do so before widescale bad outcomes for everyone begin to occur, but when the system begins to become unbalanced enough to start shearing itself apart nobody will be unscathed, so it's rather silly that we aren't already working on real solutions.

moffkalast 3y ago

So in short, seize the means of automation.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Yes, comrade

golergka 3y ago

> whoever owns the means of production This 19th rhetoric century doesn't work in modern world, especially when you're talking about creating software. To "produce" most of what HN readers do, you don't need anything more than a laptop and some cloud services — which you would need to scale up proportionally to load, and, therefore, revenue. If you need capital to hire others, it's also never have been more easily available than in the last 10 years.

goofy_goober 3y ago
An interesting development as cloud services become increasingly more important (if they aren't critical already for businesses looking to get big) would be cloud services providers structured as mutual companies, like we see in some insurance and financial services companies (Vanguard, State Farm, etc). This would create a fiduciary duty to not soak the customer for everything they've got (no more sky-high public internet egress charges!), but also a structure where the customers of the company are the company's legal owners, so both workers and external customers could technically own a piece of the means of production if they use the services for their hobby projects or business. I would not be surprised if this comes to exist in the future as people want downward pressure on public cloud prices, and it would be an interesting development seeing legal ownership of "the means of production" (public cloud infrastructure) and earnings from it titled to anyone who uses it.
charlie0 3y ago
You are proving my point. Advances in productivity have led to a lowering to the barrier of entry. Anyone can code now. So why,(in theory) would a business owner let their workers work less when someone else is willing to work longer hours?
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  I think you'd take anything anyone says as proving your point just on the basis someone is responding to you at all.
- golergka 3y ago
  If somebody else is willing to do the same job for less, it means your asking price for your services is too high. Americans love to complain about stagnation of wages, while in reality it just means that people in other parts of the world have reason out of poverty competing with them on a labour market. If you value a Chinese life just as much as an American one, the fact that American worker can now afford one car per family instead of two but a Chinese worker can now eat meat on a regular basis clearly is a benefit to humanity.
  - charlie0 3y ago
    I fully agree, but what does this have to do with letting workers work less as productivity increases? Are you implying that stage would only occur if productivity gains are spread equally across the world?
    - golergka 3y ago
      Letting? Nobody is forbidding workers from taking less shifts. It's workers themselves who decide that higher compensation is more important for them than leisure.
      - antifa 3y ago
        The vast majority of workers can't take less shifts, unless they are OK with becoming homeless.

georgemcbay 3y ago

There are a few ways in which the system is self-correcting, though not in a clean or happy-path way. First there's just the fact that when a significant percentage of a population is unable to participate in an economy in a meaningful way the economy falls apart from within. What's the point in controlling the "means of production" when almost nobody can afford what you produce because they are not generating value within that economy? This is something that the industrial era capitalists (who were generally terrible people, don't read this as me trying to make heroes of them) understood enough to deal with in some proactive ways but which for whatever reason we seem to be mostly blind to currently as we rush toward another inflection point for modern capitalism. Secondly, there's the reality that when a significant percentage of the population is becoming unhoused and starving there will be revolt and those owning the means of production will be violently eliminated by any means necessary (absent some sort of collective agreement to keep the majority comfortable). Large masses of people wanting for basic necessities for themselves and their families don't just disappear through the cracks like they do on a smaller scale when a relatively small number of have-nots (relative to the whole of the economy) are easy for society to marginalize and ignore. So it is really in everyone's interest (even the interest of the increasingly consolidated group with the 'means of production') that we figure this stuff out moving forward and sooner rather than later. I'm not confident we will do so before widescale bad outcomes for everyone begin to occur, but when the system begins to become unbalanced enough to start shearing itself apart nobody will be unscathed, so it's rather silly that we aren't already working on real solutions.