| >Average wage can go up while national income goes down. Only sustained increase in national income can support sustained wage growth. Wage growth that comes out of increasing labour's share of national income is capped, at whatever capital's share of national income is. Once labour's gone from 60% to 100% of national income, no more growth can come from this source. Wage growth that comes out of growth in national income has no natural limit, since national income has no inherent cap. What this means in practice is that wages will grow far more from growth in national income than from labour growing its share of national income. In other words, growing the pie is a far more effective strategy for fostering wage growth than trying to increase labour's share of the pie. A real world demonstration of this principle is the last 200 years of wage growth history: wages have grown something on the order of 20X since the early 1800s. That is something like 10X more than the maximum growth that would have been possible through only increasing labour's share of the pie. If growing labour's of the pie comes at the expense of even a slight bit of long term average economic growth, then on a long enough time scale, workers will be worse off, as they lose out on a recurring exponential boost for a one-time boost. The former is guaranteed to exceed the latter over the long run. >If you pay your robot maintenance team of 10 each $100k a year to be able to fire 30 workers who used to make $30k a year, total wages go up, average wage goes up, but the group of workers feels worse. It's important to understand that automation does not only help highly skilled workers. Mechanisation/automation make complex work more simple to do, and makes expensive equipment cheaper to buy. This means things like starting an advanced business become far easier and more accessible to the masses. Historically, we've seen increases in productivity, which is mostly a result of increasing automation, be associated with increases in not just average wages, but median wages as well. The typical person, meaning the masses, are better off from automation, and any policy that slows the rate of automation, like taxing those who invest in automation, harms the masses. |