Otherwise what you’re saying is increased efficiency creates no value.
But I would also argue, that these efficiency gains are tiny. That most businesses spend 90% of their labor effort fighting for control of existing value, not creating new value.
When A robot automates somebodies job away, a shareholders business is run more efficiently and shareholder value increases. But the robots value to society is not realized until the unemployed person goes on to do something else of value. Sometimes they will, but not always. These displaced people could be either a benefit or a burden to society. The value of robot labor is ambiguous.
When Google and Apple make tools for us to work more efficient I can see a clear path to value creation. (Even if very small)
When Amazon sells us more cheap junk from China that we didn't need anyhow, the value creation is a lot less clear.
I guess we are starting to get into the realm where my definition of value is not the same as everybody else. Apologies if I'm rambling, It's an interesting topic and I enjoy thinking about it as I write.
I’m a lot less worried about automaton than I used to be. There’s just zero evidence that it actually leads to any systemic unemployment in practice. Absorbing China into the labour market has been hard on low end wages, but that effect seems to over already. Increasing capacity and efficiency grows the pie for everybody and humans are very adaptable. When there’s under utilised labour, as long as the economy as a whole is healthy somebody will find a way to take commercial advantage of it and all of a sudden you’ve got full employment again. Sure there can be pain, I remember 3m unemployment here in the UK in the early 80s but we’re already back up to near full employment.
I think it will be a huge step forward in human culture when we finally accept that that not everybody has to work, and the productivity of society at large will make everything so cheap that money is really not important.
The only question is how we get from here to there. That's not clear at all.
Can the government simply take from the rich and distribute it evenly to everybody? Can the government even distribute money without inflation eating the value of everything, leaving people feeling miserable and poor. Should the government provide food, shelter, medicine, infrastructure directly? Does the government need to own the means of production?
Yes sure, but to have claimed to "create" the value, it can't simply be taken from someone else. If other people were already selling apples and sausages and you move in a put them out of business then you haven't created anything, you have just captured and monetized value for your own shareholders.
Whats more, If the folks that used to sell apples, also sold bananas, but you drove them out of business, and now bananas are no longer available, value may have been lost.