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by YPCrumble
3495 days ago
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You provide no evidence for your claim that building houses and producing food is fundamentally more valuable than building websites. If there are more than enough homes already why would building an extra home be more valuable than building a website? If there is enough food why would producing more food be more valuable than building a website? If a hundred workers picking vegetables can be automated by a machine programmed by a developer is these workers' labor more valuable than the developer's labor? The best indicator we have for the value of one's labor is the free market. There is an exceptionally high scarcity of people smacking rocks together; if I founded a rock-smacking startup I might not be able to find an investor to bankroll my endeavors. |
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I meant that in the sense of [basic] human needs, if there is already enough food and housing, then there is of course not much value in producing even more. And I certainly did not want to advocate paying people high wages to pick oranges just for the sake of it.
But this touches my exact point, we use the price as a scarcity signal to steer production and it is certainly a good thing for products so that we are not overproducing things. But I am less convinced for the price of work. While it is good in the longer term to push people into the direction of jobs with unsatisfied demand, it seems bad in the shorter term because it leads to the devaluation of work in case of a high supply of work.
If a hundred workers picking vegetables can be automated by a machine programmed by a developer is these workers' labor more valuable than the developer's labor?
The value for consumers remains unchanged, the effort required to produce this value decreases drastically. In my book the developer should not get paid 100 times the salary of a worker just because he managed to produce the same value as 100 workers, he should get paid the same as one worker because they did the same amount of work, at least in a first approximation just looking at working hours. The benefit of the automation should go to the consumers reducing the price by a factor of 100.
You my argue that in this situation there is no incentive to innovate and that this is a bad thing and I agree with that, the benefit for you is indeed pretty slim, you only get to enjoy the lower vegetable prices. Therefore in reality the the thing should probably be not that black and white to incentivize innovation, but I don't think you should get 100, 50 or even 10 times the wage of a worker.
And just in case, I am none of the downvoters, I don't downvote things I disagree with.