Aw man, imagine using technology to reduce the amount of time people had to spend working, rather than making rich people more money… what a crazy world.
It’s crazy. I’ve read in a few books (fiction, of course) that mention, in passing, that the 40 hour workweek was now replaced by a 32 hour workweek, or something similar.
When do we get to reap the benefits of all of these boosts to productivity?
“Worker productivity” has been going up for 50 years, but compensation hasn’t been. That extra money goes into the pockets of the board and shareholders and CEOs.
80 years ago, the average CEO pay was about 20x the lowest pay in his company. Now, instead, we have billionaires.
We have had ultra-rich people and major wealth inequality for most of American history. Rockefeller (1838-1937) amassed a fortune in the 1800s in excess of $400B inflation adjusted dollars. By most measures, he was the richest American of all time.
The second richest American of all time is up for debate but contenders include Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), Henry Ford (1863-1947), or Bill Gates (1955-present).
Wealth inequality has obviously grown over the past 50 years but it’s worth noting that wealth inequality in general is not a uniquely modern problem. It is also exaggerated by comparing to the 1970s, where wealth inequality was at a historical low point (see graph below)
There were some fairly major studies in the UK last year, across many companies and multiple industries, where they reduced the 5 day workweek to a 4 day workweek, whilst keeping the compensation of workers the same overall (i.e. salaried workers got the same salary, hourly workers got 25% more per hour)
The majority of companies involved in the study found that their workers were significantly healthier and happier after adjusting to the new schedule… and as a result significantly more “productive”. Profits even went up despite the reduced working time. Most of them elected to keep with the new system once the study ended.
Obviously you can’t do this with every industry, certain industries need 24/7 coverage or the like… you can’t run an ER 4 days out of 7 - but the takeaway is that it’d be better to employ more people for less time and pay them well - you’ll get better results than you will with an exhausted and depressed workforce
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.
When we hit peak population. This will be the next historical epoch which dramatically changes the fabric of society, because it will lay bare the finite nature of surplus labor, as well as dramatically skew the ratio of workers to retirees. It won’t completely eliminate capitalism, but it will largely be the end of consumption driven economics, and will force more and more of this surplus productivity to go towards supporting populations instead of enriching a privileged few.
There will simply be no other option. In some places this will happen violently, but in many places it will be a slow but peaceful transition.
I mean, knights weren’t exactly poor people. This knight found a way to make his serfs make him more money.
Yeah, IIRC a knight’s suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari
Iron and steel were a precious metals at one point in time.
Funnily enough, not because iron isn’t abundant (it’s super abundant). Rather, because the medieval process of smelting required a LOT of fuel for even a small amount of iron.
Very similar to how aluminum was a rare metal.
“But if I keep sending more wheat to the dragon, I’ll get to be a dragon one day. They told me so on the Internet.”
Thats not fair. Gizmo became a vampire and then decided he’d rather be human.
It’s actually quite fitting that the knight, part of the aristocraty, isn’t interested in Kapital
eh, knights were a tad more worldly and should at least realize that it’d be fucking brilliant to not starve when going to war, which has historically been a massive issue.
The arts also tend to flourish with technological innovation making other tasks less time-consuming. More comics with this cool dragon could be made.
I can’t go back to the princess with this nerd shit
LOL!
