If you replace 1,000 workers with 50 and a very expensive machine, should you pay each worker who remains 20 times as much? Because that’s the assumption in the article.
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.
If efficiency has gone up why hasnt rent gone down?
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.
I would guess this speaks more to political mismanagement than an intentional goal. No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages. Increased rents, at least, are usually caused more by good intentions gone bad than by intentional malice
>No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages
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.
As bad as Prop 13 is for California, it's silly to put the whole blame on high rents on it. It's enough to note that rents are high in NYC, Boston, DC, and Seattle, and none of these places have Prop 13. If you can have skyrocketing rents without Prop 13, why would you think that it's Proposition 13 that's bearing the whole blame in California?
San Fran also has rent control, good weather, and high income jobs.
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.
Lowering taxes on renters can raise rents, if new housing is banned, because renters then have more money to compete for limited housing with. Likewise, the recent corporate income tax cuts raised wages at the bottom.
If you can find an NYT article in the last two years using AEI as the source of a story I’ll buy you a nice bottle of whiskey. The media will systematically ignore sources like AEI, that use actual numbers, in favor of soundbites like the one in this Common Dreams article.
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.
CNBC isn’t NBC, and it’s not a general-interest media outlet. It’s a specialized outlet for financial and business people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNBC
> 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?
Do we think that increasing minimum wage will hasten or slow down this trend?
If the United States government wanted to speed up or slow down this trend or even halt it altogether it could do so tomorrow no matter what the minimum wage did. Currently it views offshoring as a geopolitical threat and is opting to slowly repatriate supply chains. No matter what happens to the minimum wage that opinion is unlikely to change.
I don't think it makes sense to treat an explicit political choice as a fait accompli.
I'm all in favor of a 100% land value tax but I'll happily take a higher minimum wage to compensate for a lack of it while the political system gets its act together.
This makes me think of this passage by Bertrand Russell wrt. increases in efficiency and working hours:
"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?"
Those displaced (50% in the example above) can go and provide services in another area... Why should only the pin producers get 4 hour weeks. What about those have to toil in the field for 8 hours a day to produce food?
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.
> Those displaced (50% in the example above) can go and provide services in another area... Why should only the pin producers get 4 hour weeks. What about those have to toil in the field for 8 hours a day to produce food?
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.
Sure people can work less hours, but right now people choose to want more things - better healthcare, larger houses, more entertainment and choose to work more hours.
Certain areas are clearly broken - education, medicine, and housing -- but that's largely due to government interference.
> Sure people can work less hours, but right now people choose to want more things - better healthcare, larger houses, more entertainment and choose to work more hours.
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.
From my experience building very expensive industrial machines, the gain is more like 2x-4x not 20x, and that assumes that the game of telephone in the engineering pipeline actually gets it right.
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.
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.