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.
The Productivity Paradox: Why Technology Makes the Economy More Efficient But Most People No Richer
Submitted 2 weeks ago by JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.fullstackpm.tech/blog/productivity-paradox-capital-lockup
Comments
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
4am@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
They don’t. Schools teach that “Karl Marx didn’t want anyone to have any money, and to be owned by the state. They quickly ran out of food because no one was motivated to work.”
Why do you think guys who purchased “Truck Nuts” all screech on Twitter about “socialism is when you do all the work and they take all the profits” when that’s exactly what capitalism is and they are too dumb to notice? Why do you think the Tetris movie wasn’t really about Tetris but instead about “Soviets bad”?
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Your comment only works for those who don’t live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it’s western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.
captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks 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.
ChristerMLB@piefed.social 2 weeks 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.
captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks 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.
rimu@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I can confirm - it is slop.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
stem/“skilled” labor isnt benefiting from improved tech, it all goes to ceos, and billionaire/millionaires.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s a lot of words for “greed”.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Different system, same problem.
Lexam@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A rigged system is not a paradox.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It makes the class pyramid narrower and taller at the top.
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Productivity means doing more relative to input. It is only a paradox to the those who know what it exactly means.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Computers cost 92% less than they did in 2000.
Until the current RAM, storage and GPU crisis.
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes, RAM crisis will make computers cost 12,5 times more.
This is not adjusted for computing power.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
The problem is capitalism
iopq@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A statement without any meaning
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Lol nope, it’s the direct result of an economic system that funnels wealth to the top
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Unless capitalists are forced to share their gains, they won’t.
atcorebcor@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The real reason is that monopolies or other forms of market power prevent competitive pricing, wages and rents.
ranzispa@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Didn’t read the article yet.
I have a good friend who is homeless and begs for money. He says his life is much better than the life of the richest people of just a few centuries ago.
lemmyk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s not even true, even when accounting for the advance in technology, because your friend is likely dirt poor.
There are still lots of people much better off financially than your friend who work to keep wages low, work benefits low, and prices high. A daydream about the past doesn’t matter, because his and 90% of people’s material conditions are shit, and this financial and class oppression is what matters, not what fancy technology we have that makes us think we’re “kings”.
ranzispa@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Food is very cheap and available everywhere. Clothing is basically free, and clothes are now easily high quality.
his and 90% of people’s material conditions are shit
Other people is richer than you does not mean your conditions are bad.
org@lemmy.org 2 weeks ago
Greed. Full stop
iopq@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
People have always been greedy. The difference is systems to encourage people to be useful to others so that greedy people have to provide something good to make more money
Good: legal systems that uphold contracts
Bad: regulatory capture where corps make money without doing anything useful
Bazell@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Short review directly from this source for those, who don’t want to read the whole article:
The Core Problem, Simply Stated
Technology is making distribution dramatically more efficient.
But efficiency gains are being captured by whoever controls the bottleneck — the platform, the marketplace, the search engine — rather than distributed to the workers who enable production or the consumers who fund it.
Without wages, workers can’t consume. Without consumption, capital has nowhere productive to go. So it piles up in buybacks and data centers. GDP growth slows. And we wonder why a world of genuine technological marvels feels economically stagnant for most people.
That’s the paradox.
As AI accelerates the substitution of capital for labor, the dynamics described here are likely to intensify rather than resolve. The question isn’t whether the technology works — it clearly does. The question is whether the institutions and incentive structures around it will evolve fast enough to distribute what it creates.
That’s the harder problem. And it’s not a technology problem at all.
Don_alForno@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
The reason is rich people.
InsightSeeker@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
This isn’t just a “technology redistributes value” story; it’s a market design and incentive problem. Platforms didn’t accidentally capture the gains; they were structurally positioned to own demand, data, and distribution.
Also, the “consumption ceiling” feels directionally right for physical goods, but less convincing for digital and AI-native categories, which can expand usage in ways that traditional economics underestimates.
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Most people ARE richer.
Median wage growth since 1990 is over 40% and the quality of products significantly increased.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
That’s definitely true, but the cost of some things have greatly out paced that like housing or travel.
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hours of work/sqf ratio is pretty much unchanged since 1990, BUT the quality of housing now is much better than it was 36 years ago.
Travel cost almost exactly followed inflation in the last 36 years, but again, travel now is significantly better than it was back then.
Most of the percieved price increase comes from the lifestyle inflation and just idolizing childhood.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Inflation. You are putting your labor in and getting a money that your government can almost literally print for free in their basement. When you do it, it’s called counterfeit and you can be sent to jail for many years or killed. If they do it, it’s called inflation and is perfectly acceptable. STOP USING THEIR CURRENCY and your life WILL get better. Use Monero, Gold, or Silver. Since the government can’t print those things, they will retain their value.
Armand1@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Let me guess:
Its because all.the money goes to billionaires.
luthis@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Yep without even reading the article I was going to guess wage theft and billionaires.
iopq@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wage theft is not merely being underpaid relative to the work you do. It’s actually not paying someone who worked
jimmy90@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
amazing good maths
next they’ll be writing articles about “if i vote for jill stein becaue palestine. why do fascists stay in power” level maths