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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

That's not new or controversial (in economics circles).

This really took off in the Reagan years where real wages stagnated [1]. It was from the 1980s where you started to hear statements like "wage incresaes should be tied to productivity increases" [2]. If you parse that statement, it means no cost-of-living increases ie a decrease in real wages.

All of this is wealth transfer to the very rich and entirely intentional.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

[2]: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

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"Real" wages are driven by the "real" supply and demand of labor, not by nominal numbers.

If the number of qualified workers increases significantly, you will end up with lower real wages. There were three major factors increasing labor supply around this time in the US. Immigration from Mexico, women continuing to enter the labor force, and reduction in demand/increase in (global) supply for lower skill labor via globalization of manufacturing

Not casting any judgment on whether these things are good, but they are far more likely to be the primary factor than inflation.

> women continuing to enter the labor force.

One thing that's occurred to me recently is that demands for a 4 day working week seem entirely reasonable in the context that the labour force has, if not quite doubled, dramatically increased (due to more women participating) over the last few decades (and that time has been taken away from time that was previously available for the completion of domestic chores).

This is the solution to the "two-income trap".

Wouldn't a 2.5 day work week actually be the solution to the "two-income-trap"?

but you would be out-competed by people who work 5 days. The reason things like housing is expensive is because there are lots of people willing to pay higher. This implies that those people _have_ become wealthier. You would not hear them complain about being poorer (or it's an insincere form of complaint).

Oh look, enough time in the week for 2 jobs!

That only works if it is a global change in work practices.

I don't think that's true. We already have significantly varied working hours between countries. China has 996. The US has a 40 hour standard work week and the culture is such that people often work longer hours. Whereas in Europe 35 or 37.5 hours or even less is common. Different countries have different numbers of public holidays, etc.

and we didn't even get the productivity increase, if we had the computer revolution should have massively increased everyone wages due to increased efficiency.

Did the computer revolution really make things that much more efficient? Great savings and new possibilities on many fronts, but also enormous expenses and a whole lot of lost flexibility and individual agency.

I'm sure it is an efficiency win on the total, but perhaps not as gigantic as often assumed.

Do you see typing pools in every large office anymore? Nope, word processors replaced all of them. Do accountants spend several weeks calculating desk sized spreadsheet by hand anymore? no because excel and other digital spreadsheets are able to tabulate data automatically. that's all major efficacy savings

Yep, major savings from those two things. But then someone in this efficient office decides to automate a few more workflows and spend 200k building a digital paper form that is used four times per year and misses a crucial field so that is not "supposed to be needed", so that every use of the form requires a phone call or five. This would not have happened with a paper form and human first recipient.

There is an efficiency gain in total, but a lot of losses that eat at the actual wins.

I mean, how much we talking here? We're not in Atlantis with flying cars, but there's immense efficiency gains in logistics.

That is a tricky one. I've been told early on that in most discussions one may not ask netzen to do anything for you.

We could have been mowing your lawn or filling my taxes. That is how I remember it anyway. If you just help drink my beer we both get things out of it.

GOOD point!

One can always argue the computer is doing more of the work. Sitting there watching the production line doesn't look very productive or challenging?

Enabling or keeping productivity going is also important. That is what people watching line and fixing minor things are paid for. Alternative is that someone would be pinged from home and they would drive to line each time. While during time productivity of line was lost.

Labour productivity in economics is output per labour hour, it doesn't matter what is doing the work. As an extreme example, if robots took over and human labour is no longer required for anything then (human) labour productivity would be infinite, it doesn't matter if no humans are actually doing any labour.

> massively increased everyone wages due to increased efficiency

a computer won't increase the wage of someone whose work is unrelated to the procurement of the computer/system (even if their work was made more efficient).

For example, a checkout clerk now dont need to compute, because of the efficient Point-of-Sale system (when previously they'd need to recall prices). So even if the output of the clerk is now higher, they could be less skilled and so the supply increases, leading to lower wages.

The people whose job is to procure the computer systems _do_ get increased wages. That's why so many software engineers are rich.

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