I'm not making any moral judgement on whether any of this is good or bad in any direction.
For example, how active is Hacker News during what would be expected to be work hours. How many people are taking time out of their work day to post on facebook, reddit, twitter, or here? People aren't doing 8 hours of technical work for 5 days a week. They have a certain amount they're expected to produce over the course of a week, and they spend their time accordingly. If they had 4 days to do it instead of 5, with the same length of a day, they would spend more of those 4 days doing productive work, and enjoy their 3 days off more, without feeling guilty during work hours about "slacking" when people really can't stay this technical, or creative, productive for 40 hours a week.
This is also why tech CEOs and managers are so paranoid about people working from home. They know that the job doesn't really require 40 hours of work. They just want to make sure they're getting 40 hours of captive time.
We've been making rich people wealthier with the middle-class taxes (including inflation, the most regressive tax ever invented), feeding all kinds of corporate welfare, including, but not limited to, the military industrial complex.
It is about time we start thinking about taxing the rich.
Alternatively, the rich can keep hoarding their money, pretending not to notice that their first-world economies are becoming increasingly similar to Somalia and that they will soon need armored vehicles and fortified condos to protect themselves from the desperate and famished masses.
Yes, maybe they would end up worse in the end. But I would be dead—a terrible score by my standards.
My goal is to avoid a revolution. People like you merrily stride towards it by being wholly insensible and fighting people like me. Ask the Romanoff royal family if they don't think they should have been less stubborn in hindsight.
why are these the only possible choices? Why can't the third option, one where the poor also get richer (compared to their poorer past) through growth, and improvements in tech?
because that was what has been happening for the past several hundred years, and a lot of it in the past 100 years. Some people didn't get ahead as far as some others - but the poor of today are still better off than poor of several centuries ago.
if you look at countries that have had revolutions that stripped the rich of their wealth, how have they fared today?
There's already plenty for everyone, it's just distributed in a way where the top class of people has cash to burn on bored apes, yachts and thousand dollar white tee shirts. The poor work for scraps.
We needed growth when no one had anything. That's not the world we live in today. Let's start recirculating that money instead of leaving it in people's treasure hoards.
Edit: I also want to say that growth will never lift all of the poor out of poverty. Poor is a relative term. If all prices target the median earner say, they will keep rising faster than the lowest incomes do and the poor will never catch up. We need a smaller spread of wealth to keep things affordable.
Of course, the reason why Marx is popular is that his criticism of capitalism is actually very close to the truth. Capitalists produce for the sake of profit. No profit means no production. Market economies try to optimize profits to 0%. Thus, capitalists will simply stop producing well before the market is being served. This is why farmers need subsidies from the government. They would try to keep a small fraction of the population under the threat of starvation to maintain high enough profits to justify private production. So poverty is actually considered a non problem. Anyone who has to go without their basic needs being met is there to increase profitability and justify further growth.
Now, one should ask oneself. If markets exist to eliminate profits where are these hyper competitive industries that threaten to eat up/shut down your corporation if your profit is too low? Why doesn't their profit shrink to zero as one would expect? As mentioned above, extortion is a very easy way to maintain high profits. No entirely voluntary economic transaction can compete with extortion in terms of profit. So any capitalist economy with too many products will actually get worse than if there was a slight shortage of products. This is because the entire economy will shift towards extortive industries. Every industry will adopt a certain amount nastiness to stay competitive. Industries will try to consolidate into monopolies because they allow a greater degree of extortion.
That's why they don't believe in growth - it gives them a job where they can act morally superior while skimming a chunk of output for themselves.
It's the middle class equivalent of giving a man a fish, rather than teaching them to fish.
Productive growth, of course, is doing more with less, and just getting things to cycle faster.
Nobody thinks the carbon cycle is unsustainable, however if you can find a way to get plants to do that cycle twice in a year rather than once you've doubled growth. That's where future growth needs to come from. Improvements in the speed of turn amongst sustainable production cycles.
You can create growth simply by moving financial numbers between computers faster. Or changing the numbers.
Growth, like inflation is one of those humpty dumpty words that means different things to different people.
- shorter week is part of compensation; (possibility to atract more or/and better employees).
- more people will start working/get hired;
- productivity is not uniform thoughout a day/week (tiredeness);
My best counterpoint at the same time is that intuitively I think that 1 person doing 5 days is more productive then 5 persons doing one day each, because communication/coordination does have a cost.
(Surely tradeoffs and optimal points vary from role to role; some tasks are easier to parallelise)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
Why could a 4 day week result in similar / higher GDP? (not saying it WILL, just pointing out how it COULD)
+ A big chunk of the jobs are white collar / don't require you to physically be somewhere. If you're a security guard (and you're there mostly for deterrence reasons), then your productivity won't likely change much. Say you get a white collar worker that has a burnout, you'll be producing 10% of your potential. If that extra day of rest prevents the burnout you get x10 for that person. In less dramatic fashion, someone more energized and happy can easily increase productivity by 25% (at least in many of the white collar jobs I'm familiar with) + Network / dynamic effects. Some people won't be more productive, but they might spend the extra day off building something new / learning something new. Even if it's just, say 1/20 that do that, that might offset some of the decreased time working
Sounds reasonable. But how do you measure "worker productivity?" Is a retail employee standing in an otherwise empty store "productive?" If you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without sleep, are you "productive?" If you spend the weekend working on a side project, could that be "productive?"
I could make a $1 widget, then the two of us could exchange it back and forth to produce an arbitrarily High Gdp. At the end of the day, we would still have just one widget. [Edit: see valid criticism below]
This becomes very clear when you look at economic breakdowns of GDP, where things like Finance and government are included
As an aside, be careful with tone that sounds too sure. If I hadn't know, I would have guessed you knew a lot of this topic based on the tone you're using here. I personally try to sound more doubtful on topics I don't know enough about.
[1]: https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/19-1-mea....
In reality, I think a vast amount of double counting occurs.
That said, the point that I was trying to get across was the decoupling of GDP from what most people would consider material well being.
This mostly revolves around the growing proportion of GDPs being made up by finance and services. [think widget backed financial instruments, widget insurance, widget services, ect]
If people are less productive things get more expensive which is good for GDP. GDP hates all of us.
It's like saying, yeah, you might be technically correct about the mass of an electron but i was just saying anecdotally. There is no reason to ever talk about that that isn't technical.
>I could make a $1 widget, then the two of us could exchange it back and forth to produce an arbitrarily High Gdp.
This isn't kind of sort of correct if you look from a different angle or something. It's wrong. Its always wrong. It's wrong in every context. It's 1+1 = 17 wrong.
It's okay to admit when you are wrong.
>That said, the point that I was trying to get across was the decoupling of GDP from what most people would consider material well being.
I readily admit that I used a bad example in my response post, and even added an edit admitting so much in the original.
>GDP is a technical concept. There's no other meaningful way to be correct about it besides technically.
There is a concept and then there is practice, and they do not always align.
Also, reducing the work week can mean that people do not want further economic growth and prefer free time over more products and services.