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This cannot be true. Imagine your job is producing chairs. You make 1 chair per day. Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 c

This cannot be true. Imagine your job is producing chairs. You make 1 chair per day. Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase, instead the executives pocket all of it! But what about the 3 extra chairs? Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day. Wealth is about stuff, not money. If more stuff is produced (that is useful) then people become wealthier. So unless those executives are somehow taking all those extra chairs themselves there must be done other beneficiary from the extra productivity. It's far more likely that regular people have a growing desire for more stuff than the executives using up all those extra products themselves.

barbariangrunge 2y ago
What about advertising?
- Aerroon 2y ago
  I don't think advertising is what creates a desire for a product. I think that desire exists beforehand and advertising mobilizes it. I didn't know I wanted a smartphone. Ads didn't make me want a smartphone. But when I got a smartphone I knew I wanted one.
selcuka 2y ago
> Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase You are looking from a single worker's perspective. A more realistic example is 4 workers used to make 4 chairs per day, and now 3 workers can make the same number of chairs. Boss makes more money. No net gain for the remaining 3 workers (and the laid off worker has to find another job, potentially for a lower salary).
- Aerroon 2y ago
  And the net benefit to society is that now that fourth person has time to do some other beneficial activity for society.
  - beretguy 2y ago
    No. Now that fourth person is struggling to pay bills, possibly losses house and becomes homeless. Are you a troll or out of touch with reality?
Dylan16807 2y ago
I think you're underestimating how many chairs a single person can have. And cars and houses and services. And obviously some businesses will grow or shrink relative to others based on how elastic the demand is. Also it's a bigger range than just the executives.
imtringued 2y ago
>Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day. I hope you noticed that this somebody is someone else and not you. It could be another executive from another company. The thing is, people don't care about stuff, because stuff is cheap. They need money to pay for housing and they need only the money, because if people stop consuming and spend more money on housing, the housing gets more expensive even for those who would have otherwise spent their money on consumption. Those people also need more money, not stuff, to spend on housing. When things get more expensive for no reason, the economy must grow regardless of whether people want to consume more. Most wealth is about the allocation of already existing stuff and transforming it into something convenient. Humans didn't create the oil or iron ore in the soil. They just dug it out. Stuff is never produced, only transformed, so economics will always be about fighting for getting that initial endowment.
imiric 2y ago
Those extra chairs aren't just given away for free for the benefit of humanity. The company sells them, and hence directly profits from the increased productivity. Meanwhile, the workers who actually make them likely never see their net worth increase because of it, and the executives do. This is a story that's been repeated for centuries.
pjerem 2y ago
Sure but do you know someone who doesn’t have chairs ? I mean, sure, there are people setting up in their first house, people who broke their existing chairs … but there is a lot of available options on the aftermarket. I understand why you would want brand new chairs. My brain also does want them because they are pretty, because they goes well with your interior etc ... But brand new chairs are far from a need we need to solve. And we are destroying our planet and our workers health for more chairs than there is asses on this planet.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  Chairs are just an example. This applies to every product that gets a productivity increase from chairs to batteries to apples to computers to planes.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    My point is that, with the exception of food and possibly medicine, this reasoning applies to basically everything. As an exercise of thought, if we magically stopped the economy now like, everyone stopped working and paying for housing and credit and given a magic influx of food, most humans in the world would not need anything else to be happy for a long time. Of course it’s just an exercice of thought, we do need to replace some objects sometimes, we do need people to fix things. But apart from food, there is barely any object that we would need that isn’t already available somewhere in the world. The thing is, mostly nobody is a farmer : most people in the world are producing or helping producing things we already have.

barbariangrunge 2y ago

What about advertising?

Aerroon 2y ago
I don't think advertising is what creates a desire for a product. I think that desire exists beforehand and advertising mobilizes it. I didn't know I wanted a smartphone. Ads didn't make me want a smartphone. But when I got a smartphone I knew I wanted one.

selcuka 2y ago

> Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase You are looking from a single worker's perspective. A more realistic example is 4 workers used to make 4 chairs per day, and now 3 workers can make the same number of chairs. Boss makes more money. No net gain for the remaining 3 workers (and the laid off worker has to find another job, potentially for a lower salary).

Aerroon 2y ago
And the net benefit to society is that now that fourth person has time to do some other beneficial activity for society.
- beretguy 2y ago
  No. Now that fourth person is struggling to pay bills, possibly losses house and becomes homeless. Are you a troll or out of touch with reality?

Dylan16807 2y ago

I think you're underestimating how many chairs a single person can have. And cars and houses and services. And obviously some businesses will grow or shrink relative to others based on how elastic the demand is. Also it's a bigger range than just the executives.

imtringued 2y ago

>Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day. I hope you noticed that this somebody is someone else and not you. It could be another executive from another company. The thing is, people don't care about stuff, because stuff is cheap. They need money to pay for housing and they need only the money, because if people stop consuming and spend more money on housing, the housing gets more expensive even for those who would have otherwise spent their money on consumption. Those people also need more money, not stuff, to spend on housing. When things get more expensive for no reason, the economy must grow regardless of whether people want to consume more. Most wealth is about the allocation of already existing stuff and transforming it into something convenient. Humans didn't create the oil or iron ore in the soil. They just dug it out. Stuff is never produced, only transformed, so economics will always be about fighting for getting that initial endowment.

imiric 2y ago

Those extra chairs aren't just given away for free for the benefit of humanity. The company sells them, and hence directly profits from the increased productivity. Meanwhile, the workers who actually make them likely never see their net worth increase because of it, and the executives do. This is a story that's been repeated for centuries.

pjerem 2y ago

Sure but do you know someone who doesn’t have chairs ? I mean, sure, there are people setting up in their first house, people who broke their existing chairs … but there is a lot of available options on the aftermarket. I understand why you would want brand new chairs. My brain also does want them because they are pretty, because they goes well with your interior etc ... But brand new chairs are far from a need we need to solve. And we are destroying our planet and our workers health for more chairs than there is asses on this planet.

Aerroon 2y ago
Chairs are just an example. This applies to every product that gets a productivity increase from chairs to batteries to apples to computers to planes.
- pjerem 2y ago
  My point is that, with the exception of food and possibly medicine, this reasoning applies to basically everything. As an exercise of thought, if we magically stopped the economy now like, everyone stopped working and paying for housing and credit and given a magic influx of food, most humans in the world would not need anything else to be happy for a long time. Of course it’s just an exercice of thought, we do need to replace some objects sometimes, we do need people to fix things. But apart from food, there is barely any object that we would need that isn’t already available somewhere in the world. The thing is, mostly nobody is a farmer : most people in the world are producing or helping producing things we already have.