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Comment by expertentipp | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays within couple of hours while sitting in front of the computer I can plan and book my holidays, submit a bank transfer, submit tax declaration, buy new clothes, and extend the insurance. Unthinkable until the late 90s. This technological leverage is created pretty much by a "median worker". Where the margins from this turbo-raise of productivity go? Because they certainly don't vanish neither reach the worker.

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You can do all of this in one evening instead of over the course of a month. That is how it reached the average person. The average worker did not contribute to making this happen, but they benefit a lot.

The margins go in the consumer's pocket and that of the owner of the services you are consuming + you are consuming higher quality services/products. Also, as the consumer, you pay with your own free time: every time you self check-out, do your own accounting, tax fillings and so on, you are doing (a bit less) work that was done by an employee in the past. So the margins mostly go to the owners of the services you are consuming (i.e. tax haven accounts).

Self checkout doesn't cost free time. Lines are shorter than in past and you still have to wait if a clerk scans your products.

Self checkout at as implemented in local shops has odd value proposition for the shopper. Basically it is more hassle and marginally faster for the benefit of allowing the shop owner to fire some people. Compare this to handling bank transfer at your own home computer or mobile phone versus going to the bank during business hours.

The people who created that technological leverage are far from median workers, and earn many times the median wage.

So I, the tool maker, deserve ALL of the extra profits you generate via the use of my tools, from now until the end of time?

I'd hardly call the time since the invention of computers and the Internet "from now until the end of time".

And what the toolmaker "deserves" is decided in negotiations between the toolmaker and the people who pay for the tools. It seems they've decided that these tools are worth quite a lot.

It seems you're telling me that stagnating wages for increased productivity is fine, because the extra productivity is from better tools, not more work, which means the workers don't deserve the extra revenue from their increased output, is that right?

So if you're a farmer, and you're given a new kind of tractor that doubles the yield of your fields, you'd be totally fine if your landlord just took the extra crop for himself, leaving you with exactly the same amount as you would have had without the new machine?

The average worker today produces far more in an hour than the average worker from the '70s did in the same time. And while I get that the increase is not uniform across all workers I am sure it is an increase.

What is the reason for keeping wage tied to time rather than productivity or work, other than a quest for ever increasing profits? And if the wage can't be increased why not decrease the time? This way the worker gets a reduction in time for the same wage and the employer still gets a hefty productivity increase over a few decades ago for the same wage.

I see some countries have actually kept wage and productivity tied to each other and it doesn't look like it was detrimental to the economy.

I'd appreciate dissenting opinions in a more productive format like counterarguments rather than a wave of downvotes.

> The people who created that technological leverage are far from median workers, and earn many times the median wage.

If the issue was, as you are implying, one of distribution, we should be seeing income inequality growing while the wage share of the national income stagnates.

That's not at all what is happening. The wage share has been steadily declining since the 80s. The truth is that shareholders not workers got the lion share of the productivity increase.

More and more aggressively creation and maintenance of these systems are being outsourced and nearshored to the cheapest available location, ideally employing on-demand workforce.

Even when the work is sent to other locations where the median wage is lower, the workers are still far above the median in those locations.

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