[Panzer04]

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human)

Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

[elmomle]

That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.

[rictic]

Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.

[phyzix5761]

On average, most large cap stocks (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, etc) are owned by millions of retail investors through 401Ks, mutual funds, ETFs, and direct ownership.

[wisty]

> If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits

It's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here.

[eru]

Everybody can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. It's pretty easy.

If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.

(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.

The labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)

[droopyEyelids]

There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades.

[Rzor]

And someone don't need to look further than this quite interesting report by the Rand Corp: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.

[eru]

What's your evidence for that?

[Cthulhu_]

It's narrow vs wide views. Wide views, automation and the like has improved the economies massively. But narrow views, people have lost their jobs, had to retrain and basically restart their career, and some never found another job.

This isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee.

[_heimdall]

I've not seen a correlation between automation and wealth, though there is an extremely string correlation between energy use and wealth.

I don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example).

[red-iron-pine]

> It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards

yeah but it's clear that we're not doing that, and are arguably going the other direction as hard as possible

[j16sdiz]

> removing human labor from production

Karl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

[eru]

You might notice that Karl Marx isn't exactly the pinnacle of economics.

Quoting Marx is a bit like quoting Aristotle or Ptolemy.