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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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People have been complaining about technology forever. The south complained about machinery that would make slavery obsolete. There's no pleasing these people.
This guy wants all of the benefits of technology at a low price, but doesn't want any of the change that occurs from that benefit. What happens if you make everyone work 20 hrs in his example? Everyone makes half what they did before and can't afford anything. What happens if you fire half the workers in his example? Half the workers can afford the tech but no one else. Which one allows the company to keep selling the tech? The scenario where half are fired.... BUT How about we keep all the people like he claims is possible? Then the price of the tech must double. But this guy doesn't want that because that must be a greedy company. So how will they pay all those employees? What happens when someone else makes the tech with fewer employees and thus lower cost?
So yeah... Tech always requires some to retrain. But society always benefits as a whole.
The only certainty in life is that life is uncertain. To complain about change is just being lazy and refusing to accept change.
|What happens if you make everyone work 20 hrs in his example?
If they are paid for what they make and not the time they spend, everyone earns the same and the workers have more free time. It is this insistence that pay = time which divorces productivity gains from benefiting the worker.
Competition. Someone is highly likely to figure out how to shave costs. Then the company can't even sell the thing and the people lose their jobs.
The point of an hourly wage is that it's a contract to be paid some hourly amount regardless of how many things are sold. The company bears most of the risk. Sales are always dynamic. So how can the company pay the employees for every widget made if the things they make aren't selling for a price that covers the cost of paying the employees?
Any thing created will never sell consistently and never sell forever. So again, skill must change. Marketable skills are always changing. During tech change, the price and demand of the old product drops.
From 1900 to 1920 millions of people lost their jobs to cars. They spent their entire lives around horses. Leather work, carriages, blacksmiths, farm equipment, etc. In just 20 years the horse and carriage was toast. Everyone had to reskill for cars and other jobs because cars took fewer people to make than trending to all the horse stuff.
A modern example is computers. Until the 80s and 90s there were huge work forces processing everything with paper. It wasn't just those workers that had to reskill. The paper mills had to reduce output. Fewer printing houses. Fewer printing press repairmen. Fewer parts manufacturers for the presses. Less ink. Less forestry management for paper. And so on.
Then how do we incentivize the non-shareholders into more efficient practices? Remember, Occam's Tweezers