The Productivity Paradox: Why Technology Makes the Economy More Efficient But Most People No Richer

Comments

• Armand1@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Let me guess:

  Its because all.the money goes to billionaires.

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  • luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yep without even reading the article I was going to guess wage theft and billionaires.

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• CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  Who owns the means of production that make industris more efficient? Bingo.

  I swear it‘s like people don‘t even know who or what Karl Marx is.

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• captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ChristerMLB@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    “real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled”

    GDP measures a lot of things that are not consumer spending.

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    • captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works ⁨32⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      That’s true. My point was that the article is claiming that since the share of GDP which is consumer spending decreased, total consumer spending also decreased. But since GDP per capita increased at the same time, the actual total consumer spending per person increased (the 7 percentage point decrease does not outweigh the doubling of real GDP per capita). This could be misleading in its own right, with the richest spending more and the median spending less even in total numbers, but the article doesn’t claim that. It claims that total spending has gone down, which is just not true.

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  • rimu@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I can confirm - it is slop.

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• org@lemmy.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Greed. Full stop

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• Lexam@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  A rigged system is not a paradox.

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• Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The problem is capitalism

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