[kumarvvr]

Yeah, working conditions have become much worse. I am not sure if there is data to prove this, but my gut feeling is that employees are more productive and their compensation has not kept up to the increased productivity.

Alternatively, I would really love to keep the same pay levels, but reduced working hours, to account for increased productivity.

[mtberatwork]

> I am not sure if there is data to prove this, but my gut feeling is that employees are more productive and their compensation has not kept up to the increased productivity.

You are not wrong, from the BLS:

"For several decades beginning in the 1940s, productivity had risen in tandem with employees’ compensation. However, since the 1970s, productivity and compensation have steadily diverged." [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/understanding-the-labo...

[dudul]

Is compensation really meant to derive from productivity? In practice, your compensation is a factor of how difficult it is to find someone else to do your job.

[JackPoach]

Yep. If compensation was a function of productivity, farmers would be the richest people in the world, because their productivity is something like 50-100 times than it was pre-mechanization and pre-green revolution.

[SketchySeaBeast]

You're not wrong about farmers, but it's in a tons of different professions. I mean, think how much more productive software devs are right now than the age of punch cards.

[rightbyte]

It was probably some efficiency involved in having computer clerks running mainframes for calculations and card deck (database) processing.

Nowadays people are supposed to do their own Excel sheets and use complex internal systems, instead of letting specialists do it.

So devs are way more efficient but are too fine dining to do every day Excel.

[ReactiveJelly]

Measuring productivity is unintuitive because it's not linear.

Sure, if there were no farmers, there'd be no food.

But if there were no mechanization, the current number of farmers would be wildly insufficient.

We're adding 1 + 1 and getting 102, and the tricky part is dividing the extra 100 points amongst everyone.

[Viliam1234]

> We're adding 1 + 1 and getting 102, and the tricky part is dividing the extra 100 points amongst everyone.

If Georgism is right, in long term the extra 100 points go to those who own the land, via rent.

Not just the rent you pay directly for the place where you live, but also indirectly whenever you buy someone's product or services, because that other person also had to include their rent in the cost of their product or service. Thus when the rents increase, everything gets more expensive, and ironically that makes it more difficult to notice that most of that money ultimately goes towards paying someone's rent.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...