[jlebar]

> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.

In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.

In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.

This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.

You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.

Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".

[skew-aberration]

From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?

[ncallaway]

Right, but a day off would reduce supply.

And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2).

So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that.

There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.

[jlebar]

> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.

The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)

But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".

[JuniperMesos]

> But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".

I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.

Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.

[musicale]

> I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs:

"replacing workers with technology “explains 50 to 70%” of the increase in inequality from 1980 to about 2016."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/21/1067563/automati...

They point out a disappointing aspect of some technologies (self-checkout), which seems to be that not only are workers displaced, but customers also experience degraded service (probably without a new benefit such as a discount for using self-checkout.)

[jlebar]

> The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs

As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.

But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.

I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.

[musicale]

> As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer

What you seem to be saying is that consolidation of the farming industry into fewer producers with higher productivity was good for food buyers and society at large, which might be true but doesn't contradict GP's point that when their company earns $100 more due to improved employee productivity, approximately $0 of that will be paid to the employees, so they find little reason to celebrate.

The link I posted makes somewhat different yet important points: first, the arc of automation seems to tend toward increased inequality (and a hollowing-out of the middle class); second, automation may provide a markedly worse (but cheaper) replacement for the thing it replaces. Even in the case of farming, many fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they were 100 years ago - perhaps effects of selective breeding (such as for size, shelf-life/durability, resistance to pests/pesticides/herbicides/etc.), soil depletion, environmental changes, etc.

[musicale]

see also: "The Record Divide Between Corporate Profits and Worker Pay"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330421

[TFYS]

> In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.

That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.

[ncallaway]

> I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

That would be relevant if I stood for that premise, but I don't and I wasn't putting it forward.

I was responding to your earlier claim:

> But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.

I was disagreeing that this was what was being asked in the present moment. What was being asked in the present moment ("can we have a day off") is very similar to what was being demanded in the past.

In the past, workers demanded to share in the wealth and productivity that was being created through technological gains. And so, I agree with you, workers in the modern era have benefited massively from past technological gains. But that wasn't an accident. Those gains were earned through the blood and sweat of workers demanding to be included in those gains.

And so, to ensure that these present gains continue to be distributed more equally, we need to continue applying the pressure that was applied in the past.

But that's not a rejection of the the laws of supply and demand, it's at a social layer before the economics of supply and demand apply. It's at the political and social layer of how much work we expect an individual worker to put forward into society, which is a major factor in determining the amount of supply of work available.

It's a political decision—totally separate from a rejection of capitalism—of how many hours a "full week of work" is. It is not a rejection of capitalism to set the "full work week" to 48 hours, or to 40 hours, or to 32 hours.

[komali2]

> The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy.

Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar.

And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000.

Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.

In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life?

On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.

[jlebar]

> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.

Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun

Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.

[komali2]

Capitalists invented metrics to show how awesome capitalism for the world, and then said "see, against these metrics, the world is better!"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...

Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into?

People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement?

https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-...

People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement?

These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.

[jlebar]

> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.

Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."

That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.

https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun

The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.

I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.

[blackjack_]

Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.

However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).

[komali2]

> I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.

It is, though, if we talk scale. The rich went from having big houses in the 1920s to being sent into space, or building private libertarian colonies, or buying elections, or potentially increasing their lifespan a few decades, in the 2020s. The working class went from working 40hrs a week until age 64 when they retire in a house they own, to working 60hrs a week until they die, but hey, that death might be at an older age!

The improvement disparity between the two makes the improvement for the working class insignificant enough to be dismissible. I don't buy into the idea that the working class should be grateful that the scraps now have better seasoning.

I mean really, just look at the wealth gap. Imagine how much better the lives of everyone could be if that wealth was distributed better! Fuck a 20 hr workweek, what about 5?