What about the people who build and service the technology which allows these improvements to be implemented?
The people who build and service the technology are paid well. They’re techies who live in Silicon Valley, etc. But there are just very few of them compared to the 950 newly obsolete workers.
Since rent has been pushed up by political means why not wages?
Also, why are we assuming that technology brought down wages when offshoring has skyrocketed. What makes you think it wasn't competition from the third world labor rather than robots? There is a political position embedded in the assumption that robots are responsible for the missing jobs.
Have you noticed how little the media focuses on the actual platforms of most politicians and focuses on the spectacle and drama of politics instead? That distraction serve a purpose (for the owners of said media).
Also, a platform of higher rents and lower wages will usually be called "lower taxes" and "freedom from onerous regulations". If you want to see more of this type of propaganda, look at https://www.aei.org/ for instance.
This type of thing falls apart when analyzed too closely, which is partly why the media will use it to drive soundbites but won't dive in too deep.
Politicians get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages because the donations they rely upon come from people who want it and the media coverage they rely upon come from people who want it.
Lowering taxes doesn't lower wages.
Higher rents are caused by regulations, not freedom from regulations. You have to ask permission for something as simple as building places to live.
Prop 13 wasn't run on a platform of raising rents, was it?
And, Boston, NY, etc. rents are NOT as high as San Fran.
But while Prop 13 also affects politics around new construction, it's a far reach to use its long term effects on voter behavior to associate general concepts of lower taxes and less regulation with higher rents or lower wages.
Notably, it's a law that taxes people unequally.
i would be mildly surprised if "liberal" CNBC had even one person from common dreams on.
i'm not gonna dig through the new york times for examples where they cited somebody from AEI coz it's paywalled but it wouldn't surprise me if they, like CNBC do, routinely.
Do we think that increasing minimum wage will hasten or slow down this trend?
I don't think it makes sense to treat an explicit political choice as a fait accompli.
"The War showed conclusively that by the scientific organization of production it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If at the end of the War the scientific organization which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that, the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
What happens is that those 4 can go do something else; now in reality that something else is often not as good as what they were doing before or else they would have already been doing it.
But people are not static and can improve, develop skills, and learn new things. Also prices normally go down, which encourages innovation, and can create whole new classes of jobs.
For instance before medical imaging we didn't have x-ray technicians, etc - But I'm glad that new field was created.
So for the sake of fairness, no one should get to work less hours?
It's pretty clear that Russell's sentiment is that this should be expanded to society as a whole.
Certain areas are clearly broken - education, medicine, and housing -- but that's largely due to government interference.
That has not been proven. If anything the opposite. I'm sure that a significant portion of the population would choose less time at work over non-essential consumption given the choice. There's a reason that full-time working hours are always changed universally - having the leverage and the economic base to individually request part-time is a privilege. Furthermore there's usually a disproportional economic punishment when one's working hours doesn't reach some "full-time" threshold, not to mention the likely social punishment like having a harder time to get promoted and similar.
People like to assume that people choose non-essential goods over leisure but for some reason they are never very keen on trying to prove it by giving workers the choice without undue punishment.
A good experiment could be to allow people to choose to whether they'd like to get their raise (or if lucky, convert the yearly bonus) in time or money, or perhaps some split.
> but that's largely due to government interference.
Only in the US it seems.
In a recent HN discussion, someone suggested that step one of emulating successful tech companies (Netflix was used as an example) was to fire half your workforce and pay the remaining half double. That logic meshes with my experiences; the machines made you more efficient, but you needed more intelligence to use them than the tools they replaced.
But the surplus value should definitely not go 100% to the workers and 0% to the owners. Otherwise, there is no reward for creating the surplus value, and productivity gains will not happen, which in general is no way to run a society. Plus productivity helps reduce scarcity, and scarcity disproportionately affects poorer people.
idk about the owners specifically, but I think it's fair that the lion's share of the gains go to the people who made it happen. in this example at least, the widget maker didn't do anything to increase their productivity.
This method of organizing labor and value which disallows workers' to gain anything from increases in their own output keeps them from ever being able to participate in it, leading to alienation from their jobs and living in a perpetual cycle of poverty.
They also capture these gains because the increased productivity of the company results in more products of greater value on the market. In short, they benefit as consumers.
No, and neither is that the case. The increased profit is the wage the technology earns for the investor who wisely chose to make a successful investment. Other investors made different, less wise automation decisions and in so doing, earned less (or negative) profit.
The remainder of the surplus value is captured by the consumer who now has available to him or her a greater variety of higher quality products at lower prices. They capture this value when they go to market and get more better and newer things.
> What about the people who build and service the technology which allows these improvements to be implemented?
They are typically more skilled workers who get paid more because they are performing a higher skilled job. The old way of doing things was less productive and required less skill from the workers. The new way is more productive and requires greater investments in capital and skilled labor.
Thus, technology isn’t the cause of companies capturing a higher percentage of the increased efficiency due to automation.
Now everybody is rich enough that we can afford to debate the relativism of the capitalist social contract...but that’s only thanks to the advancements brought about in the first place.