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Comment by ta1243 | Hacker News Reader

If the not-working : working ratio increases, that leads to work being more valuable. A billionaire can have a pile of gold to make Smaug envious, but if you have 10 billionaires and just 1 person willing to wipe their ass, then they're going to be outbidding each other.

That itself drives wage inflation, and it's great, it moves money to those doing useful work. What you're saying with inflation is basically "the value of an hour of work 20 years ago is less than the value of an hour of work now". That could be because of improved productivity, or could be because of a reduction in supply.

It's the only thing that's going to save western society from the scourge of the concentration of wealth in the handful of a few.

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>If the not-working : working ratio increases, that leads to work being more valuable. A billionaire can have a pile of gold to make Smaug envious, but if you have 10 billionaires and just 1 person willing to wipe their ass, then they're going to be outbidding each other.

What happens is where before you had e.g 3 working people for every non-working (retired person), now you have 1 working person for every retired person, but productivity has not improved much, so the working person has to spend 3x more of what they produce supporting retired people than before, leaving them less. Everyone's standard of living is worse because you have less overall production (due to fewer people working) to support the same population.

It's not hard to understand that a society with 10 people working to support 50 people has worse living standards than a society with 50 people working to support 10 people, assuming the same level of technological development in both.

Productivity of work has increased extremely in all the years though, which easily could compensate for that if it wouldnt be wasted for less important things: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-productivity-grow...

I do not see how one can easily make that claim.

The amount of healthcare, and other services that someone can consume while not being able to work, is massive and has not been automated away. From daily things like cooking, feeding, bathing, etc to healthcare providers providing physical therapy, massages, consultations, to work around the residence like plumbing and electrical and otherwise swinging a hammer.

I do not see automation picking up these tasks in the near future, and the number of man hours demanded for them seem to be getting larger my whole life (more old people, living longer, and more healthcare options).

The elderly will have it worse. And it’s about time. You make things demonstratively worse for your

Imagine a high school leaver being able to live in a 4 bed suburbia with a couple of cars, stay at home spouse and 3 kids. That was the norm in the 70s. Not today. Money has been taken from the workers and given to the parasites for the last 30 years, it’s about time it flipped back the other way.

If this is true then immigration is fundamentally an attack on your country's labor class.

It is (depends). If I'm looking to fill a position and have 5 candidates who demand X but if I can import 5 more candidates from abroad that will accept X-10%X, then great for me, I just eroded their bargaining power, and sucks for those 5 locals who will have to look elsewhere. Once enough employers have access to the external labor pool, then the bargaining power of the locals is reduced permanently, and so does their quality of life, if they don't have the skills to move upmarket in jobs that don't have competition from outside.

Immigration is great when private investments and the economy is growing faster than the labor market can absorb them (like the US) because then it fuels the fire and lifts everyone up. But, if you're in a meh economy (parts of Europe), stagnating wages, high taxes, high bureaucracy, low investments, high CoL, expensive real estate, then importing extra workers only increases inequality as it puts downward pressure on wages and only enriches the upper class who can now affords a platinum trim on their superyachts instead of a gold trim.

Immigration is a very complex topic that doesn't have a right or wrong answer but depends on the economy of a country and the situation of housing and public services which the immigrant population will need.

Generally yes, unless your labor class doesn't want to, or can't, do the jobs those immigrants do, but your labor class wants to benefit from them.

The technical term for this idea is the “lump of labor fallacy”.

Contrary to the idea that there is only a fixed amount of work to do, increasing an economy’s population tends to increase its aggregate output at an even greater rate than the headcount, ie average wages increase. One of the reasons is that it increases the ability for greater specialization. If some other economy paid for the unproductive years of childhood, the benefit is even greater.

>increasing an economy’s population tends to increase its aggregate output at an even greater rate than the headcount, ie average wages increase.

That's true only if you cherry-pick certain countries with already booming economies, like the US, where adding more workers adds more fuel to the fire, especially in the low interest environment of the past 10 years.

But most other countries with much slower economies, won't benefit from even more workers the way you described ( average wages increase) but more like average wage decreases. Adding more workers won't benefit a stagnating economy.

Yeah if it is closed system like in the example but modern economies rarely are.

Isn't that essentially what drove large swaths of people to support Trump? Bogeyman "illegals" crossing the border to "take their jobs"?

Fundamentally, people don't immigrate to countries where they think their lives will be worse. They move to places with more economic opportunities. That introduces more labor supply into the destination country. At controlled immigration levels, this is healthy and necessary.

On the free market side of things, that is reasonable. The danger I see is that not working people will outnumber working ones so much politicians will cater to them at the expense of the working population. Taken to extremes, this could lead to such extreme wealth transfer that nobody working can afford a family, the feedback loop goes positive, and the culture self terminates.

Yes, exactly, see my other comment. "economic growth" is a code word for profit that makes it all sound less greedy.

They do not want labor to have power. And all this can be linked in with AI. They love AI because it takes power away from a lot of labor, including code jockeys.

You should see what computers did to take the power away from a lot of labour. Or before that you'd never guess what the tractor did. Remember when the Ox started ploughing a field rather than people?

Increasing productivity is a great thing. In the US post war environment people shared that increased productivity fairly evenly. It was only once the Regan years arrived that workers in general stopped participating in the boom.

> You should see what computers did to take the power away from a lot of labour. Or before that you'd never guess what the tractor did. Remember when the Ox started ploughing a field rather than people?

Why do you think I do not agree that those were also bad. Maybe not as bad, but they all led us here.

> Increasing productivity is a great thing. In the US post war environment people shared that increased productivity fairly evenly. It was only once the Regan years arrived that workers in general stopped participating in the boom.

What make you think that where we are now is not because we "increased productivity?

Have you ever question the need for increased productivity? Who is telling you you need to be more productive? (Let me help you, the people who profit off your labor are telling you to be more productive.)

> Why do you think I do not agree that those were also bad. Maybe not as bad, but they all led us here.

Seems reasonable to assume most people consider advances in healthcare, emergency response, communications, etc that were possible due to computers as “good”. Ditto for the tractor and the ox.

There are many historical accounts of bad things that came from "most people" thinking something was good.

I do not care for the appeal to popularity as my past comments here can testify on their own.

These "advances in healthcare" have led to an aging population who are now considered a burden. If there is good there is bad. When you stop seeking the good, you will create no more bad.

I increase double my productivity and I only have to work 20 hours rather than 40. That’s a good thing, everyone from Marxists to Monopolists agree that it’s good

Marxists think the benefits of the increased productivity should go to the labour. Monopolists think it should go to the owners.

Im not aware of anyone who thinks it’s better for a human to spend 10 hours work to produce enough food to eat that day rather than 1 hour.

As pointed out in previous comments, increases in productivity have not gone to reduce labor hours, only to increase ownership's profits.

This is true of the computer, the tractor, the healthcare system, and the loom as made famous by the Luddites.

Healthcare in the US leaves more people bankrupt than any other cause while massivley enriching ownership. Tke for example Rick Scott, who was the CEO of Columbia Healthcare during the era in which it was convicted of the largest (at that time) medicare fraud in US history. Then he bacame Florida's governor, and is now a US senator.

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