Couldn't help but imagining Darryl getting mad at you.
Thanks for the story!
The faster the LLM spits out garbage code, the more time I get to spend reviewing slop and dealing with it gaslighting me, and the less time I get to spend on doing the parts of the job I actually enjoy.
Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.
Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.
Samsung TV purchasing power has skyrocketed, though, so there's that.
As long as accommodation isn't 100% of your basket of goods and services you use to measure inflation, accommodation can rise in price faster (or slower) than the basket. This ain't exactly rocket science.
You cannot have rising inflation adjusted wages and worse spending power, unless the inflation is not being measured meaningfully.
Also any comparison of wage growth vs corporate profit growth over the last 30 years shows that wages have not kept pace with the increase in productivity.
So incomes are only just barely keeping up, when they should be booming.
The USA is rather unique in its low pensions compared to countries in the EU or Australia (notable for its high contribution rates).
About 18% is owned by foreign entities.
It's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here.
I'm all in favour of lowering barriers to entry, too. We need more competition.
Be that from startups, from foreign companies (like from China), or from companies in other sectors branching out (eg Walmart letting you open bank accounts).
Would you rather sell one widget for $1000 or 1000 widgets for $10? Does the answer depend on costs?
If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.
(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.
The labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)
The oligarchy of the CxOs and boards and cross-pollination has led to concentration of the rewards of companies into the their hands, compared to 40 years ago.
All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.
The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.
What your evidence for that? See https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... for a good account.
> [...] and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.
You seem very confused about how capital markets work. Are you also suggesting buy backs are morally different from dividends?
In any case, the whole point of investing (at least to the investor) is to eventually get more money back than you put in. Returning money to investor is not a bug, it's the point.
> The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.
Blame voters.
We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.
Total employee compensation includes things like the value of employer provided health insurance.
Karl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour.
Quoting Marx is a bit like quoting Aristotle or Ptolemy.
This isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee.
I don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example).
yeah but it's clear that we're not doing that, and are arguably going the other direction as hard as possible
How could that possibly work?
At some point I could see white collar work trending down fast, in a way that radically increased the value of blue color work. Software gets cheaper much faster than hardware.
But then the innovation and investments go into smart hardware, and robotics effectiveness/cost goes up.
If you can see a path where AI isn't a one-generational transition to most human (economic) obsolescence, I would certainly be interested in the principle or mechanism you see.
Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".
They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".
If they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”!
Totally agree with you.
and not every job needs to be top-shelf.
Betty in Accounts-Payable just sorta needs to be there and not screw up too often. I don't need a super-star, and if we have to move her to another part of Accounting that's fine; I'll save my money for a solid CPA or two, etc.
Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.
in practice hiring and firing is expensive and often very risky. Bjorn the office worker may now be redundant and have a room temperature IQ but he's shown he'll show up on time, sober, and is liked by his coworkers enough, so throwing $5k to retrain him may be a far, far smarter investment then blowing $7k to hire a rando for another position...
And later other trades did the same. Some of the things in contracts trickled down to the law. But still some laws apply only to companies where at least a certain % (is it 50%?) are unionized.
The general picture is more or less like that, but please verify the details.
This is also an example of the same kind of law.
How are we all worse off when fewer people have insurance?
Forcing everyone to buy such insurance forces everyone to fully pay for the expected cost of the danger inherent in their house. Over time, this causes houses to be constructed in a safer manner. If people are not forced to buy insurance, they don't buy it, and so this evolution over time does not happen. Also see [1].
Some financial tools are amazingly clever - whether they are morally good or bad. Bits about Money is a great blog to build insight into some of these constructions [2].
Another example for your initial question is car seats for kids. If you don't force em, nobody buys em. Then their kids die.
For car seats, I'm not sure how we could know that people wouldn't buy them. I don't expect anyone would propose dropping the requirement to see how the market responds, and probably rightfully so. If car seats are much safer though (and I'm obviously not disputing that), people that can afford one would buy it anyway.
I agree that in an ideal world that would be sufficient. But in practice, governments rarely deploy trained actuarial to make decisions, rather relying on politics and shoddy studies. Government codes also change very slowly. Insurance companies (whether private or public), under the financial incentive, are constantly changing their policies and rates in response to new data and calculations. I would be open to looking at studies that resolve this question one way or another.
> ... car seats...
I grew up in a poor global south country. Rich people, who clearly can afford them, don't buy car seats. Many people who live in countries where they are forced to buy car seats, when they come back on vacation don't use car seats for their kids. People can be very irrational.
The car seats one is tough. If you've seen first hand examples of people actively choosing to forgo car seats, I'm not sure if that's a problem governments should solve. Unless the state directly claims "ownership" as it were in the child, the parent is their legal guardian and if the parent makes a terrible choice they have to live with the repercussions. We don't regulate all decisions that can harm a child, that's a tough line to draw.
If you “game” it, it breaks the whole system.
Now some of you might be thinking “why should a young and healthy guy like myself subsidize the old sick people?” The answer is that you will also get old.
But it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that.
The efficiencies are always to the benefit of the wealthy, the wage gap grows. You work hard, you still get fired.
Cap top wages to 5x the lowest, companies can't own housing except socially beneficial housing, individuals get 2 house maximum.
Also we had to introduce some fixed locations and storage placement recommendations. Our storage workers almost revolted. After a few months it settled though.
The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up.
There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.
At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.
Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.
One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk.
I assumed I’d be welcomed and appreciated for helping make their work more efficient, but the reality was not that simple. The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.
Mind you, the original process was extremely slow and non-parallel so they had a lot of time to wait. The job was still very easy. I spent weeks doing it myself to test and optimize and to this day it’s the easiest manual labor job I’ve ever worked. Yet I as the anti-hero for ruining the good thing they had going.