To paraphrase Bill Gates, measuring wealth production by hours of work is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
The "production per hour" metric gets more and more meaningless and deceitful for more and more jobs, mostly for the most productive ones. Obsessively measuring $/hours misleads us into thinking that spending more hours will get us more $, which is false for most jobs which actually creates significant amounts of wealth.
I've automated away dozens to hundreds of menial jobs (hard to count): what sense is there in comparing my one-shot engineering hours to those of the technicians I've definitely made redundant? Each of my hours will have saved thousands of technician hours over the years: does that make me and my time worth thousands of time more than them?
> we still have to work some hours
Some of us have to work some hours, but there are more and more poeple whose hours simply can't be converted into wealth. And that's good news, not a tragedy, because we don't _need_ those working hours. What we need is a way to distribute wealth complementary to, and less obsolete than, salary.
The "production per hour" metric gets more and more meaningless and deceitful for more and more jobs, mostly for the most productive ones. Obsessively measuring $/hours misleads us into thinking that spending more hours will get us more $, which is false for most jobs which actually creates significant amounts of wealth.
I've automated away dozens to hundreds of menial jobs (hard to count): what sense is there in comparing my one-shot engineering hours to those of the technicians I've definitely made redundant? Each of my hours will have saved thousands of technician hours over the years: does that make me and my time worth thousands of time more than them?
> we still have to work some hours
Some of us have to work some hours, but there are more and more poeple whose hours simply can't be converted into wealth. And that's good news, not a tragedy, because we don't _need_ those working hours. What we need is a way to distribute wealth complementary to, and less obsolete than, salary.