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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

I don't know...how much of the increase of productivity is a result of the workers themselves intrinsically increasing their productivity, versus some outside party increasing it through research and capital investment?

Let's say I own a lawn care business, and you gladly accept work raking lawns for $10/hr@8 hr days, and you can rake 2 acres per day(or, $40 per acre). If I decide to plunk down a bunch of money and buy a turbine leaf blower, and you can now do the same job on 6 acres per day, except using the leaf blower for 6 acres is much less physically exhausting than raking 2 acres of leaves, how much money should I as the business owner owe to you for my own investment into increasing your productivity?

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Capital is usually what makes human labor more productive; we aren't getting smarter, faster, or stronger.

For example, if you work in IT you benefit from massive capital investments that researched, developed, and deployed every bit of technology you use, from 18th century research on electricity (and probably earlier research) to every component in your PC to C to the Internet to AI, to the technology used in the global supply chain that makes it all (to much, much more) ... Should you be paid as if you were utilizing no capital, and you were working in a cave by firelight with carbonized wood on the wall?

Almost all of anyone's productivity, I expect, is due to capital investment that they didn't make.

Yet the benefits primarily go to the rich, who also didn't make that capital investment

When viewed through the eyes of capitalism , the answer is 0.

When viewed through the eyes of the jewish religion for example, which says you need to give 1/7 or 1/10 of your income to the poor. So this number is now 3x.

It all depends on what moral system you view things through, and a moral system that encourage sharing of wealth seems like a good thing.

Out of curiosity, how much do you the business owner believe you owe your worker for walking and carrying a leaf blower an additional 4 acres per day?

That was covered in the part where I talked about it being overall less physically demanding than manual raking

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