“ There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms.”
Sure there is. The hoard of money is called “profits”. Companies pay higher wages and have less profits or possibly (if they can) raise the prices of their goods to compensate.
That depends on how you measure things. I think what people want most of all is to have access to the stability of production guaranteed by modern industrial practices.
Our society converts stability and abundance in the production process into precarity and reward/punish incentive structures in the access controls to consumption.
These represent fundamentally different modes of interaction with the economy and social environment. They're different worlds. And what does talk about production in "real terms" say about the value of one over the other?
Re:Why is U.S. labor supply so low?
by AnimalMuppet on Sunday December 26, 2021 @04:55PM
(#29696759)
If we're running out of people, then shouldn't the companies that produce less per person be the ones that die? Anything else would be sub-optimal.
There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That's inherently limited by the availability of actual stuff, and the super-wealthy just aren't a high enough proportion of overall consumption that there's any way for them to that. Maybe if we were in a 2008-style crisis where unemployment was high and the problem was the financial system there'd be clever solutions involving redistributing money or something, but that's not the reality we're living.