| I'll take a stab at it. I think we can get to this answer by looking at a couple of questions from an accountant's perspective. The first: Where does profit come from? Somewhere there must be an arbitrage. Next question: Why isn't that arbitrage competed away? Further to the point, there must be some universal arbitrage available to all industries to create "profit" in every single case. There are very few commodities that are universal across industries, such as electricity, land, and workers. Because of the universality of profit (or else all businesses would not exist long term), some universal input would be a prime candidate for a source of such universal arbitrage. The next step is to think about Commoditize Your Complement [0]. Given that selling work is a universalized commodity, and sheer numbers of workers competes away all profits, what is the complementing field? Employment. Employers monopolize Work to extract the value away from their complement; workers. With being a commoditized complement brings with it the cutthroat competition just to keep the lights on, while value floats to all the businesses in the complement. However none of this is permanent in the Macro. During boom times all boats float. All firms hire from the same pool of workers, driving available workers down and prices/wages up. This drives employers into the arms of productivity machines to control the spiraling costs of labor. This is a trap. While you might gain productivity, it shifts more of your investment away from the Universal Arbitrage (workers) towards productivity machines, thus becoming the commoditized complement of the makers of productivity machines. Finally, I want to point out that these are general forces and not destiny. Also Reality is fuzzy, and none of this addresses stuff like Bailouts and other extra-economic interventions. Just because something is profitless in the long term does not mean it can't be profitable to you in the short-to-medium. [0]: https://gwern.net/complement |