Technology

This reads like a lazily written article to me. The em dashes don't increase my enthusiasm. Just in the opening I noticed:

Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% today. technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consume

Of course, real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled (more since it increased by 7pp). Is most of this billionaire yachts? I have no clue, but if you want to convince me you should try to not claim total amounts when you mean relative amounts.

A physical bookstore in 2000 took in $100 from a book sale and distributed it roughly like this: about 60% went to labor (store staff, publisher employees, authors), 30% went to capital (owner profit, rent), and 10% covered other costs. The money circulated locally through wages.

Amazon today takes in that same $100. The distribution looks fundamentally different: warehouse and tech labor receives roughly 25%, Amazon’s infrastructure and profit captures around 55%, and the remainder flows to publishers and authors. Labor’s share of that transaction dropped by more than half.

... unless you count the publisher and authors like you did for the 2000s data, in which case it decreased from 60% to 45%. And that's persumably not counting the manufacturing of server farms, refinement of minerals, purchase of the actual reading tablet. Amazon has high margins but not 55% margins.

The labor share of US GDP fell from approximately 64% in 1980 to around 58% today — a 6-percentage-point shift. Applied to a $28 trillion economy, that gap represents roughly $1.7 trillion per year that once flowed to workers but now flows to capital.

Once again, since the GDP per capita has doubled the labor dollars per person has actually increased. The label for the $1.7 trillion is similarly misleading, those dollars never "once flowed to workers", they just would have if the economy had grown without any changes to its composition.

If I were the author of the article, perhaps I would say that since 1980, real median wages have only grown by about 20% which seems very slight given the technological improvements made in that time. But how much of that 20% increase would have been possible without technological improvement, and how much has the quality of the things people spend their money on grown in that time? No clue, that's beyond the thinking budget I have for this article.

EDIT: I've decided I'm not going to be overly charitable towards the article since it got an overall positive response from here. I'm very certain the article was written partially or fully by an LLM, and that it was written to advertise the portfolio of whoever wrote it. The article doesn't make a good effort to make an argument capable of convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with the thesis. The counter arguments are bunched up at the end and barely countered at all:

Absolute living standards have genuinely improved. Longer lifespans, better medicines, access to information that would have cost thousands of dollars in library fees

Free services — Google Search, Wikipedia, WhatsApp — create enormous value that doesn’t show up in GDP at all. The consumption ceiling argument partially breaks down for digital goods with near-zero marginal cost.

So does the article's author actually think technological improvements have failed to benefit regular people? They don't seem interested in arguing these benefits are fake, or outweighed by negative aspects. If they want to argue that the 1% have captured most of the growth that technology has given, their article doesn't support that. It gives a lot of explanations why this might happen but the first part meant to cement that it does happen is based on unfounded conclusions which the "What This Isn’t Saying" part then lists reasons not to trust.