No amount of automation has ever seemed to result in a net reduction in work to do thus far
[1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
But it would intuitively suggest that the total amount of work to do would reduce. Instead, somehow, we have always found new stuff to do in the past.
Given the number of people I've seen you spend more time on chat and social media instead of work task I would say that we have found more new ways to not work while getting paid.
Income going up does not actually mean anything without taking into consideration that people are less likely to be able to buy a house now than 50 years ago.
Your chart shows "real median personal income" increased by ~50% from 1975 to now (27k to 40k).
One of the links you're nope-ing says "From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%)."
Both of these can be true, and median personal income increasing by just 50% when the income of the wealthy increased by far, far more sure sounds a lot like "the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers."
> Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers.
Or also people like working, for some value of "like":
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
Just any person who retired (many of whom take on part-time jobs, not for primarily for money, but for the social aspects).
(Not to deny that, in a capitalism society, the capitalisms often get the 'excess' value created.)
Imagine your job is producing chairs. You make 1 chair per day. Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase, instead the executives pocket all of it!
But what about the 3 extra chairs? Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day.
Wealth is about stuff, not money. If more stuff is produced (that is useful) then people become wealthier. So unless those executives are somehow taking all those extra chairs themselves there must be done other beneficiary from the extra productivity.
It's far more likely that regular people have a growing desire for more stuff than the executives using up all those extra products themselves.
I didn't know I wanted a smartphone. Ads didn't make me want a smartphone. But when I got a smartphone I knew I wanted one.
You are looking from a single worker's perspective. A more realistic example is 4 workers used to make 4 chairs per day, and now 3 workers can make the same number of chairs. Boss makes more money. No net gain for the remaining 3 workers (and the laid off worker has to find another job, potentially for a lower salary).
I hope you noticed that this somebody is someone else and not you. It could be another executive from another company.
The thing is, people don't care about stuff, because stuff is cheap. They need money to pay for housing and they need only the money, because if people stop consuming and spend more money on housing, the housing gets more expensive even for those who would have otherwise spent their money on consumption. Those people also need more money, not stuff, to spend on housing.
When things get more expensive for no reason, the economy must grow regardless of whether people want to consume more. Most wealth is about the allocation of already existing stuff and transforming it into something convenient. Humans didn't create the oil or iron ore in the soil. They just dug it out. Stuff is never produced, only transformed, so economics will always be about fighting for getting that initial endowment.
I understand why you would want brand new chairs. My brain also does want them because they are pretty, because they goes well with your interior etc ...
But brand new chairs are far from a need we need to solve. And we are destroying our planet and our workers health for more chairs than there is asses on this planet.
As an exercise of thought, if we magically stopped the economy now like, everyone stopped working and paying for housing and credit and given a magic influx of food, most humans in the world would not need anything else to be happy for a long time.
Of course it’s just an exercice of thought, we do need to replace some objects sometimes, we do need people to fix things. But apart from food, there is barely any object that we would need that isn’t already available somewhere in the world.
The thing is, mostly nobody is a farmer : most people in the world are producing or helping producing things we already have.
Initially there's the same amount of work, but if they don't find something else to do, they won't be able to pay their bills or buy food, and they'll be out on the street.
So we end up with crappy, low pay service jobs that only exist so people have some way to scrape out a living.
The business owners benefit from automation, the employees lose.
I mean, nowadays we solved pretty any need the average human had 100 years ago.
Our leaders are convinced that we must grow and grow, but we basically have everything we need to be a happy species in the long term.
What we are doing now is working (here 6 days a week) to solve inexistant problems marketers are creating while going full throttle both in burn-out and in the environmental wall.
In the meantime, while we are working hard releasing SaaS softwares, there have never been fewer farmers which, historically, have been the job of pretty any human in the last millennia.
If we don’t change this paradigm, we are at risk of dying stupidly from climate induced famine or wars just because we needed the latest smartphone.
Don’t get me wrong : I understand how at the end of the day, in the current system, all of this supports our basic needs. But we need to think about another system because we are going to destroy environment and human psyche.
When needs and wants get all mixed up, there is always more to be done.
Yes: less work primarily.