The problem is that, as states, we are not translating these increased profits into increased quality of life for citizens. UBI is the most obvious way to start doing it.
What we want is to in effect charge companies in relation to how much profit they're making off replacing workers (increasing productivity). When a company is able to replace 10 workers with technology, they should pay at least enough taxes for 5 workers to live off UBI. Repeat until everyone that wants to can live comfortably off UBI. While other people voluntarily work to make a lot more money than UBI.
Are you sure about that? For example, air travel used to be a luxury only for the wealthy, and you wore your best clothes for a flight. Now airplanes are filled with people dressed in sweats and paying very cheap fares. Tourist destinations are buried in tourists the world over.
Buying a home computer used to cost $3,000. Now you can get one for a couple hundred, and that's in inflated dollars.
What you get when you buy a car is enormously better than what was available in the 1960s. I love old cars, but I'm well aware of the overall poor quality of them, lousy crash resistance, high maintenance, crummy handling, etc.
Clothes are historically cheap as dirt. My mom would sew layer after layer of patches on my jeans. Nobody does that anymore. My aunts would knit socks for me. Nobody does that anymore. (Still have the socks, they're treasures now.)
In general, things are so cheap it makes no sense to fix or maintain them. Just get another one.
Kids get a small mountain of toys for Christmas. Back in the 60's you got a handful of items, and did not feel deprived at all.
You can get a color TV for a couple hundred bucks, one that is far better than the $$$$ ones from the 1960s.
Think about all the entertainment you can get for free from the push of a button. You can get an MIT education for free in your home. You can get any question answered by typing into your computer.
Steak is much, much cheaper than when I was a boy. Then it was a luxury.
Fresh food from all over the world, 12 months a year, at your local grocery.
Our homes are much bigger than they used to be.
Car stereos used to be so expensive people stole them all the time. Today car stereos are so cheap they are worthless.
I built a home theater in my basement from equipment I got at the thrift store for $50. The HD projector was $600 new, and is probably even cheaper today. The screen was $50. The same setup would have cost $20,000 25 years ago, and wouldn't have been HD.
I remember when home stereos were expensive, like $thousands. Now you can buy excellent equipment at the thrift store for $20.
I remember buying stuff mail order from Sears with 3 to 6 weeks delivery time. Now I am spoiled rotten by getting it in 2 days.
Teenagers were expected to work starting at age 16, at least up through the 70s. Now a person's first job is often after college.
Nobody had a microwave or dishwasher when I grew up. Every meal meant time at the sink washing everything by hand. People rarely ate out. My how that has changed.
Seriously, we live in a golden age.
You used to be able to cover tuition and living expenses on a single part time job as a college student.
A single family household from a single high school educated worker could support a house, a car, children, a non working spouse, food and utilities.
Healthcare did not used to be this ruinously expensive.
Our TVs being cheaper, bigger and more colorful is cold comfort in comparison. It's great the tech, car, logisitics and textile industries has delivered more for less, but the rest have gone the opposite direction. Many would be very happy if they could buy a 1970s lifestyle at 1970s prices.
I live in a neighborhood full of 50's era ranch houses that are ~800sq feet and between 80-120k. It's an industrial area surrounded by factories and shipping yards, for that authentic, disco-era experience. Without the internet, cable, and cell phone bills, you could probably keep monthly living expenses under $1500. There's a grocery store within walking distance and bus service (not sure how great it is though).
Depending on what you call "high school educated," this is doable and more on a single income. Not for a McDonalds fry cook, but someone making $40k/yr could raise a family here. It would just be a sacrifice. I'm surrounded by single parents doing this everyday.
Health insurance is still fucked though.
Building codes require houses to be middle class houses. That means they cost more. If there are any left, take a look at homes in your area that were built before 1960. Quite a different. It would be illegal today to build the house I first bought, in almost every aspect. But it was a typical mass produced house built around 1970.
Secondly, at least in Seattle, the city government regularly heaps more and more expensive burdens on landlords. For example, recently they passed a law that the landlord is financially responsible for damage to an apartment caused by domestic violence. Regardless of your feelings about that, that causes rents to go up. Ever increasing restrictions on evictions causes rents to go up, again, regardless of whether those restrictions are justified or not.
It's not until the land is completely used that cities turn to revitalizing their core. But even then, new construction favors the upper class. If you're going to tear down a bunch of old bungalows, they need to be replaced with something pretty expensive to make the project economically viable.
> they need to be replaced with something pretty expensive to make the project economically viable.
Which implicitly requires there being lots and lots and lots of people who can buy them.
One thing to note, what we often think of as luxury housing or new building regulations adding cost tends to be %10 of the cost of new housing. Expensive housing typically comes from expensive land and zoning bureaucracy delaying things.
I call it the lexus effect. A luxury lexus vs the camry it was based on is often a %10-%20 BOM difference vs. bigger margin it has when sold.
People have more money available, the resource is scarce, and the bare minimum to live costs less. This means that people are willing to pay more of their income and these people end up taking up the supply.
Housing is more general of a problem, probably because it's also considered investment (with zoning as a way to add value), renting is a business...
In Canada for example, housing is significantly more expensive on a cost/hours_worked basis than large chunks of the USA, and many households have debt load levels higher than the US. Cost of normal goods such as gas, utility bills, food, consumer goods, etc are also more expensive than the USA. You can see similar dynamics in Europe too.
IIRC you were talking about regular people's problems. Europe is not uniform, but in the richest countries you can live comfortably off a blue collar salary, no matter the taxes or cost of living. Actually it's infuriating how our government compares our taxes (Spain) to northern countries in percentage, omitting the fact that what you make after taxes and expenses is still higher because raw salaries are much higher there.
Since the price of housing is more land than the building itself typically, a house that is literally double or triple the size in interior sqft (1500 to 3000 sqft for ex) can cost 'only' %25-%50 more.
There is also an availability factor, most of the US & Canada is suburban, you don't really have much of a choice to buy a small house. And with the price dynamic described above, it doesn't matter as much. You need a house to live in either way.
I've also heard that housing is crazy expensive in places like stockholm, and people do crazy ass stuff in amsterdam like no principal payment mortgages, but I'm not as familiar with the real dynamics there.
I'm not sure things are much different today vs back then. Two working parents were always the norm, even in the mythical 50/60s.
https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2...
Prior to that most households were single income.
For example, these days said couples tend to be older, more educated and with less kids on average. Which may explain why they're more likely to be dual income. You don't have time for a second job when you have 5 kids to raise. But that's less likely to happen today, statistically speaking.
So your comparison most likely compares people in different stages of life, not the same people across generations.
But in any case, the worker participation rate has stayed between 58% to 68% over the last 70 years, with around 63% today. Doesn't sounds that big of a difference to me.
I missed the note about the grinding cost-increases of college that people don't apparently need to work to pay for (and everyone apparently goes to!).
And the entry for the increasing deaths-of-despair rate that is turned the US life expectancy rate negative.
And the one for young folks' increasing need to delay what used to be normal young adult things, like home purchase and marriage. And...
I think what you mean is that, if you have money and are over 40, the world will cater to you. (And to be clear, I'm in that category, as are many here.)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...
About 10 years more than 1960.
Try this: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm
I also notice your time scales jump back 50+ years to the 1960s ... But, do all of your same observations hold up within the last 30 years? Some, maybe. How about 20? Much fewer. How about 10 years? Almost none.
Funny, that must be why attempting to make objective arguments with anecdotes does not actually qualify as "objective". Huh, imagine that.
housing - a couple factors at work here. Increasing population means housing is going to cost more. There's no getting around that.
education - you can get an MIT education for free on youtube. I've been filling in gaps in my education that way. For FREE!!! How awesome is that? The cost of attending college has indeed gone way up - due to government policy.
healthcare - this cost increase is driven by government policy.
Which is a very relevant form of regulation with regards to housing costs, because this regulation tends to exist more in places with high housing demand. So, you can still buy a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where there also is likely (gasp) no regulations on housing. Not sure what the causal relationships are exactly but the correlation seems to be there for sure.
I just sum it up as the baby boomers fucking over their kids for a quick buck, but shrug what do I know?
novok, by contrast, makes all the same points, correctly, and without all the histrionics.
It can simultaneously be true that the technical 'dividend' is enjoyed by practically everyone in the developed world, and that the necessities of ordinary life have become more expensive, saving rates have plummeted, and precarity has been normalized.
Indeed, this appears to be the case. Expecting every comment on the Internet to cover everything salient about a given topic is unrealistic. Good thing we have the nested forum format, so that other people can fill things in!
Please do not make personal attacks against people on HN. There is literally no reason to tell someone that their on-topic and very-relevant comment/response "is low quality doesn't add to the discussion". It is petty.
> Expecting every comment on the Internet to cover everything salient about a given topic is unrealistic. Good thing we have the nested forum format ...
Again, my response was utilizing the HN format to fill in some missing information and make a very relevant point about improved formatting of arguments in general.
> It can simultaneously be true that the technical 'dividend' is enjoyed by practically everyone in the developed world, and that the necessities of ordinary life have become more expensive, saving rates have plummeted, and precarity has been normalized.
It CAN be true, yes. It can also be true that the technical dividend is far out-weighed by rising costs. It can ALSO be true that globalization has changed the pricing dynamic mentioned in GP more so than a "technical dividend".
> Sigh ... I hope this style of commentary comes to a swift end on the internet (and especially places like HN)
?
The birth rate going down will help a lot in making things more sustainable long term.
> In general, things are so cheap it makes no sense to fix or maintain them. Just get another one.
> Steak is much, much cheaper than when I was a boy.
> Fresh food from all over the world, 12 months a year,
This is terrible for the planet. I'm on board with the other stuff but our disposable economy and distant supply chains are a disaster.
Or to put it another way, most people don't have to work 16+ hours/day just to stay alive.
What people choose to spend that time doing is up to them. Most will use it to watch TV/Netflix/etc while a much smaller number will work on skills and things to make their lives better.
They almost never had to, so that's a pretty lousy bar to use.
If you're working a ton of hours in a low wage job, there's a good chance you can't get a stable home if you cut back to a reasonable amount of hours. In a situation like that it's not "optional", even if you wouldn't actually die.
Even if you have a solid 40 hours a week job, and you get paid well enough that you'd be happy cutting back to 32 hours a week, it's very hard to arrange something like that. It's only optional if you have an especially good negotiation position or you're lucky, not if you're a normal worker.
> a much smaller number will work on skills and things to make their lives better
It's pretty awful to expect someone that's already working far more than full time to spend even more time practicing work skills on top of that. Anyone that can do so is amazing, but anyone that doesn't do so should not be blamed.
Edit: To the dead reply to this: No one with an ounce of self respect is going to incentivize leisure? Even if you have no humanity in you, and don't think people deserve a single free hour in the week, it's less efficient to work people until they're worn out. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face because the poors don't "deserve" it. People don't get depressed because they lack 100+ hours of labor to slog through in a week. The ennui of feeling no purpose kicks in a hell of a lot lower than that.
That's a pretty naive thing to say IMO. Humans almost always had to work that much, especially after agriculture was invented.
If you limit your perspective to the last ~120 years, you are correct. I did not.
There were a couple periods where the norm for many was horribly long factory hours. But in the long view it was definitely not normal to work 16 hour days, year round, with modern minimal break lengths.
As automation becomes more pervasive, billionaires and VCs are not the only ones who should be benefitting from it. Wage laborers should also get rewards from that, meaning higher wages, and no need to work 40+ hour weeks. We should be working on improving QOL for all people, not just wealthy asset holders.
But sure, just call them lazy so you can feel good about yourself when you keep treading all over them.
So, it is a stretch to say that these are the productivity-boosters that have brought us into a post-scarcity+UBI phase of humanity. The real problem in our modern economy is very clearly our lack of productivity booster innovations. Most recent advancements in standard of livings have been in mobile apps and games. Wowzers.
True job productivity innovations are near nil in recent times, specifically for very physical businesses like a Resorts. Globalization does make certain things much cheaper, however. But, that doesn't really help the Resort and that is entirely different conversation all together.
My sister is a fitness instructor and it leads to some interesting effects on her time. She's busiest between 6am and 9am and 5pm to 10pm. Middle of the day? Nothing to do, everyone's at work.
Hiring people is costly, and if everybody works fewer hours you need to hire more people to get the same output. More people also means more communication and management overhead. So suddenly changing your scheduling approach is probably net negative in the short term, if other businesses continue with the previous workload.
If most of the population agrees that 5x8 is reasonable work hours, then that's what employers pursue with scheduling. If you pursue to change the status quo (say, 3x8 or 5x6), then you should be ready for people who still think that 5x8 is perfectly reasonable and fine for them so they are going to continue doing it their way. And to the market which may not adjust to lower individual output during a significant part of your lifetime.
Of course it the entire humanity just woken up tomorrow and everybody decided that it is enough to work only 3 days per week and anything more is slavery, then the scheduling will just adjust and more people will be hired to fill the time slots.
I think it works with healthcare because it's very shift work friendly. Each customer is a discrete appointment and independent and thus more flexible.
Only for the smallest of businesses. Your commercial rent is costly, your insurance is costly, your materials are costly. People are the least costly resource for any non union (most of world) work. Training is costly, in many cases, granted. Maybe that should be the focus, in the cases where it applies. Saying workers are costly across the board is incorrect.
Their hourly rate isn't the issue. It's about the commitment to fulltime, which SEs often avoid via contracting.
Seriously, where is this "hiring is costly" sentiment coming from? Especially when it's for a job that other people are already doing.
For technical roles, I can think of some downsides. It would presumably mean more employees, each with shallower institutional knowledge, and more general management+communication challenges (think Mythical Man Month).
I'm reminded of the question of whether it's a good idea to overwork junior doctors to the point they're undeniably sleep-deprived (which I understand is standard practice). I believe studies found that although sleep-deprived doctors do get patients killed, it's worse to increase the number of times patients are passed between different doctors.
If you're doing 'stateless' work, like retail, the game changes.
One compares 28 hour shifts to shifts that were 'reduced' to 24 hours, for example. You're going to be zonked long before that, so the change has a fairly small benefit. Handoff is also something could be presumably be fixed with better training and/or technology, whereas sleep deprivation is bumping into fundamental limits of human physiology.
It baffles me that the medical field is so attached to these hours when there's tons of laboratory experiments and real-world data (pilots, long-haul truckers, armed forces, etc) showing people don't do well.
Yes, ideally each worker would work half the hours for double the pay, but that is not free to the resort owner.
But from your own example, it is completely unfeasible for the resort, and myriad other businesses where there is no "productivity booster" - you just need bodies in slots :/