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The Wealth of Dragons
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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In many ways, we have been. The average person has casual access to goods and services that would have been immensely inaccessible without industrialization. Consider the average car for example. The engine alone has hundreds of tightly toleranced parts working in a mechanical dance to harness thousands of controlled explosions per second. That doesn’t even touch on the complex support systems required for engine management or chassis/suspension. I can buy a well running used car for less than the cost of a month’s rent.
Compare that to the pre-industrial era, when a simple shirt would have taken a single person 500-600 hours in manual labor to make starting from raw wool. That’s more than three months’ work with a 40 hour work week.
It’s truly amazing that any minimum wage worker in the USA can buy multiple used cars, a monumentally complex piece of machinery by any historical standard, for less labor than it would take to get a new shirt a few hundred years ago.
That said, I do believe we have the capacity to get these benefits PLUS reduced work hours. We will see that when we demand better worker protections from lawmakers and stop equating a human’s value to society with the number of hours they work each week.
I've seen this argument before.
Maybe if you shill for billionaires a bit harder they'll give you one of their yachts.
If you think we are materially worse off now than we were before the introduction of automation you are either pushing hardcore propaganda or absolutely delusional.
Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s. However, with automation the variety of goods available at that income level have dramatically improved. This is the benefit that the consumer sees and pretending it’s not a real benefit is disingenuous at best.
You really think so? That would be amazing
"Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s"
That's the entire point that was being made in the first place! Productivity has increased massively, income has "stayed constant" - So, we're working harder and producing more for the sole benefit of the rich.
While it's true that new inventions do make people's lives materially better, the point that's being missed is... this is an inevitable consequence of the development of society, we'd have these new inventions regardless of our economic systems or choices of where to tax people, or economic policy. Those benefits aren't caused by the widening wealth gap, and the wealth of billionaires isn't required for new inventions to be made.
What we're talking about here, specifically, is that people are producing more wealth, but not getting wealthier. The wealth of people has "effectively stayed constant since the 1980s" but the total wealth we're creating has gone up significantly. It's certainly nice that we have more things we can spend that wealth on, but that's a distraction from the issue of where the rest of the wealth is going.
If you actually look at people's lives, "materially" and look past the inevitable march of technology, what else is happening? 70% of people are "living paycheck to paycheck"; poverty, and child poverty are massively increasing; many schools can't afford to give children textbooks; and teachers have to buy school supplies out of their own meager paychecks; the cost of healthcare is increasing, leaving many unable to afford it (or in non-USA countries, where everyone can afford healthcare, waiting lists are increasing due to poor funding); Towns are bankrupt and can't afford to repair infrastructure; the quality of most goods (clothes, houseware, and furniture especially) are decreasing to the point where they fall apart in a few years; and most public services are on the verge of collapse.
The cost of housing is so high that younger generations don't even aspire to own a home any more, the cost of higher education is so high that people expect their student debts to never be paid.
So yes, it's nice that we have Facetime and Playstations, Those things do make our lives better... but you have to consider, if the "increased productivity" of workers was going towards society and making our lives better instead of enriching billionaires, could we address some of this?