That is not to say we should discourage home ownership, but we should discourage multiple home ownership for the purpose of rent extraction. Land is a zero-sum market and landlords who are against development and housing construction are effectively stealing value from those who would use thee homes as a residence.
I do not think that is true. The consumers of all goods and services also benefit from technological progress, because they become cheaper, more widely available, higher quality (different ways of saying the same thing).
Technological progress in the last ~200 years has radically improved the lives of everyone, most significantly by freeing them from being subsistence farmers and clothes-makers. Even though most people today do not own a lot of capital, the cost of living well has come down so substantially that even poor people today arguably have much better quality of life than historical kings. For example, the majority of US households below the poverty line own an automobile, have multiple televisions with cable TV, a refrigerator, air conditioning, mobile phones, etc. [1] Despite owning no capital, the life of even those in poverty is astronomically better off than 200 years ago.
Are you familiar with the trope where poor people from the distant past would wear clothes until they literally turned into rags? The reason that happened is because clothing was ridiculously expensive compared to today. There was an article about this on Hacker News about two years ago called "The $3500 Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics" [2]. To summarize, in the pre-industrial age, a single shirt required so much labor that its cost was on the order of $3500 - $4000 in modern dollars. Buying a single piece of clothing could cost you multiple months' wages.
> Back in the pre-industrial days, the making of thread, cloth, and clothing ate up all the time that a woman wasn't spending cooking and cleaning and raising the children. That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job. "I somehow or somewhere got the idea," wrote Lucy Larcom in the 18th century, "when I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." [2]
NPR also published an article on called "The History Of Light" [3] which traces how much light (like candle light or lamp light) you could buy with a day's worth of labor, at various points in history. In Babylonian times, your day's wages could buy you 10 minutes worth of light. Light was therefore relatively expensive and in-affordable. By the 1990s, a day's wages can buy about 20,000 hours worth of light. Light is so cheap everyone has practically unlimited amounts, which led to substantial changes across modern society.
Technological progress has drastically improved the lives of everyone. It has not made everyone rich, but those in poverty today are phenomenally better off than at any time in the past.
[1] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950
[3] http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years-one-t...
I think the point that Pyxl101 was getting at is that your assertion that modern clothes are of vastly inferior quality compared to older clothes is maybe not well-founded.
Whether or not that's true, idk. Whether or not it's fair to pick out one specific bit of your reasoning, idk.
If you have sources for any of your claims, then maybe we could continue discussion.
Which is perhaps the reason people nowadays think they need to shower daily.
Think of how much free open source labor there is, people working together to produce software on their own free time because they like to do it. I see much of the future economy functioning like this, but it only can when automation reaches a level where people can produce enough having fun.
If everyone can purchase a small factory that lives in a room which can built copies of itself, large portions of the economy disappear which is excellent. It could turn most of the economy into small local barter-economies where people did what they wanted and exchanged the outputs with other specialists in their area. (There have been and still are local economies that still function very much like this at least to a degree)
For it to work you have to remove scarcity which is what automation does. Switching from one to the other will be awkward, but it will work eventually.
This is quite a lot like what Marx thought would happen, he was just wrong in his estimation of how effective 19th century automation was going to be.
In practice we only see this when a technology market is straitjacketed by intellectual property laws.
The lack of patentability of software is one reason why the market is so innovative - it diffuses that concentration of power.
uh..? I hate to burst your bubble, but software patents are common. The idea that software (as a representation of math) is not patentable died back in the early 1990s.
Big food processing firms have been decreasing the quality of food over the years to keep the price low. No more yoghurt but "milk preparations". No more raw milk cheese costly but tasty. Biscuits are getting smaller. Fruits are tasteless and full of pesticides. Let's not even talk about swine, which almost no one knows the real taste anymore since it is produced in industrial facilities and then chemically processed to give it the "standard" tase and color. All of these were not happening on such a large scale 30 or 40 years ago.
My point is that there are other variables to take into account other than prices. Quality is one. You think you have more, but is it of the same quality as before?
You said quality food was reserved only for rich people. People with a median income in western countries can comfortably afford to regularly eat locally grown, ethically-produced, non-intensive farm-shop food if that's what they're into. Bill Gates & Donald Trump aren't eating higher quality food than they are.
Personally, I don't find it to be worth it, I don't notice the "quality" as much as some people seem to and I'm not willing to pay even a small premium for it. You've picked a few particular things, some of which only appeal to a very small niche market - you might argue that people have learned out "quality" in their tastes, but that's an opinion, not a fact.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by this. Quality what? Lobsters? Fresh fruit and vegetables; nuts, seeds, and whole grains; animal flesh - these are all relatively inexpensive compared to processsed "value added" food products, regardless of where you are in the world.
So - can I taste the difference? In what way is it "higher quality"? Is it a difference I'm willing to pay for or one that isn't really worth it? I think we've settled with what we have because the quality improvement just isn't that much, if it's noticeable at all.
I've compared many organic and local products side by side with commodity variants and found little to no difference to my tastes, so I have to wonder - is it worth it at all? Certainly not to my cheap palate at least.
This whole "I don't have enough time to not neglect myself" it just excuses all the way down. Everyone can find time to exercise and eat well.
People using "not enough time" as an excuse is just a symptom of low self-esteem and self-neglect, which is the real issue. That's the epidemic, and there's great inequality there, though it isn't tied to socioeconomic status.
I'm glad that you've never been in a position where you were under mental stress.
I have, and distracting myself only made it worse, and made it harder to come up with solutions. Why aren't the people who watch TV meditating instead? Rest isn't why people watch TV.
If the harder you worked, the more entertainment you needed, CEOs would be spending 12 hours a day watching TV.
Again, the root problem isn't socioeconomics. There is an inequality, but it's in mindset. It's inside, not environmental.
If you're working something unskilled or where there's no shortage of workers? And you're living paycheque-to-paycheque in the first place? That's mentally distressing on a long-term scale, on top of requiring more physical work. It's not something that's ever going to get fixed - education is unaffordable even before you realise that your kids are going to starve while you're seeking it.
CEOs do not do physical work most of their workday, by the way, so even if the point was solely about physical exhaustion your point would be moot. They are also broadly not worried about not being able to pay their bills.
Basically - there's an intersection of issues which low-wage workers suffer from. Job insecurity causes many of them. The solution is to ensure that people don't feel like they're going to struggle to keep their living-place and pay their bills when they lose their job.
Capital as the term is usually used is getting a severe beating right along with labor. Goods used to be much more capital-intensive than they are now. Look at the rotting carcasses of factories in Detroit.
And I am sorry - but you immediately switched from "wealth" to "power" and in a service economy, those are disjoint - perhaps in-opposition - things.
Buildings are built to the aesthetics of rich people - in the "mount the TV over the fireplace" style. There's a critic who tears apart crappy McMansion aesthetics all day long. Things like strip malls are an artifact of incentives in real estate development. And good quality food is plentiful and in cases, quite cheap.
If you come to Europe, you'll see that building a nice house wasn't reserved to the rich. And anyway, if we believe GDP figures, a rich man 200 years ago had the purchasing power of a middle-class american living in a McMansion.
Capital can depreciate, of course. It did, and wealth went from the rustbelt to the techies and financiers who own the algorithms.
What the heck are you talking about? Those factories didn't shutter because you don't need a factory to make cars anymore.
Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital : with the new machine you can make 15 buns whereas you made less with the new one. The employee is not paid more : the capitalist earns the cost saved.
Problem is that the capitalist doesn't spend 100% of his income : he will consume some, invest some and save the rest in unproductive accounts or stocks. He may produce 50% more hot dogs, but the demand will not follow.
Economics theory says that in this case prices may go down, but that would mean a lowering of the capitalist's profits. He may in this case reduce quality in order to lower the prices while preserving his margins.
Hence we see here 3 things : accumation of capital in a few hands, an era of deflation and low yields due to low demand and high monetary stock needed to be invested, and a reduction of quality of the product.
The last one is counter intuitive but may be seen in reality : buildings have reached the point where it's commodity, replaced every 30 years, clothes are worthless and the quality of food has been decreasing for the last 30 years (at least in my country, France).
If we get richer everyday, why can't we make buildings that are aesthical, solid and durable anymore? Why is quality food reserved only for rich people?