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haldean | 2 years ago
> But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages.
and later
> As it happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the means of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all societal wealth from the people who do the actual work – the proletariat. This is another fallacy that simply will not die no matter how often it’s disproved by reality. But let’s drive a stake through its heart anyway.
He's just lying! There's no evidence to support this at all in the modern US economy. The gains in wealth from automation over the last 50 years have almost _exclusively_ gone to the owners of the means of production. The median US household income went up less than 20% between 1983 and 2016 while the 95th percentile more than doubled.[0] This is just VC pump-and-dump nonsense pure and simple; it seems incredibly likely that any financial gains from AI making workers more productive will flow directly to the same people who have been reaping all of the gains from our increased productivity: Andreesen and his billionaire colleagues.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
robocat|2 years ago
Possibly because it is measured in some economic dollar-figure that removes all quality-of-life figures as part of the measure.
If you were offered to live in the same house you live in, with twice the income BUT you could only buy goods and services at 1970s equivalent prices and 1970s quality and functionality, I wonder how many people would think that was a good bargain? (Ignoring retro-fiends).
I remember a 1970s dishwasher, a 1970s car (certainly not two), 1970s TV, 1970s medical care, 1970s stereo, 1970s occasional takeaway highlight was KFC (I was young), etcetera. A tinny transistor radio that ran out of batteries was the equivalent of EarPods.
You don’t even get a Sony Walkman 50 years ago (plus sound was shit with tape hiss and poor dynamics, and crappy headphones).
What price would a newly produced VW beetle fetch (at 70s features and quality), assuming they had to sell 200000 cars in a year (how many would be bought for scrap)? How many Ford Maverick’s could you sell for $1000?
We all have immense quality gains from automation, we are just blind to the slow improvements in quality of life (and some decreases too).
The past at the same price (adjusted) is a lot lot worse than many modern people think.
What is the consumer surplus of a modern laptop? You couldn’t buy an Apple ][ 50 years ago. Automation has given us a lot, but those gains are not usually measured because we can’t compare because there was no equivalent to most modern technology.
robocat|2 years ago