Productivity has risen to the point that the world simply has too many people to meaningfully employ them all. If history is a guide, the correction to this situation will be ugly.
How is VMware mid sized? By what standards?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac...
VMware was also an enormous deal. $61b.
Meanwhile, the HN zeitgeist complains about Tesla not being allowed to sell cars directly to consumer.
Having lots of independent dealers is a job creation feature, not a bug. Dozens of industries in America have the same regulation.
Not everything should be maximally efficient, especially if it reduces competition.
This is only a problem because the increase in productivity is captured by corporations. If people were paid accordingly, they could autonomously decide to work fewer hours and everyone would be able to put in the 10-20h/week. Keynes foresaw it nearly 100 years ago.
A wave of new automation.
Dial the standard workweek back to 2x hours. Adjust the minimum wage accordingly.
A wave of new automation.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Expect it to converge towards a value, but a value that monotonically decreases over time.
China doesn't have a domestic or international consumer base large enough to buy everything it produces. For some years now Chinese growth has been fueled by a real estate bubble of truly historic proportions that has burst. Even in a healthy economy with a healthy demographic structure it takes time to recover from the depths of the business cycle, China is healthy in neither sense and this is an economic crash its unlikely to meaningfully recover from.
We've seen the complete domination of labor by capital once before: in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was fixed by a giant war that wiped out the asset holders in Europe and a less cataclysmic series of events that reduced their power in America (Great Depression got FDR into office, business leaders got caught red-handed trying to coup him and forced into concessions, WWII veterans made labor delegitimization difficult).
Here's hoping we can find another Roosevelt without finding out what WWIII means.
This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery.
Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands.
Peasant and working class women have always had jobs.
I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.
For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis.
Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
> Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you.
...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions?
If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
No I’m saying the 1-income household utopia was built on someone doing that work. Usually unseen, unsung, and poorly rewarded.
And for lots of people that utopia never existed. They simply weren’t allowed or able to partake.
For the record: I’m not saying whether this is good or bad. I’m trying to provide an alternative view of default expectations from a different cultural and socioeconomic background. In my neck of the woods, for example, we didn’t have America’s post-ww2 boom. We were too busy industrializing from a mostly agrarian pre-war economy while also building a new country on the ashes of the old country (we had a civil war on top of the ww2 occupation thingy).
The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house. So the notion of work was just starkly different than what it is today in most urban Western areas.
So here’s my question: Would a woman helping out in her husband’s shop/restaurant/farm/etc even count as a job in terms of labor force participation?
Personally I’d consider that a job but I have a feeling it doesn’t show up in stats because it’s an unpaid position and just considered the default expectation in a family business. Especially back then.
That's not taking into account all the handcrafted goods: half the stuff we buy, would've been made instead, and that proportion would probably increase the further back in time you go. But the labour to buy stuff is counted as worked hours, while made stuff isn't. That makes some sense in the perspective of economic exchanges, but not for many comparisons.
Central planning, collective ownership (meaning nobody felt the need to actually manage those assets since they were owned just by state) was a disaster in every single effin' country it implemented. Literally everybody was stealing stuff somehow.
When I look at my ancestors, women worked darn hard. Giving birth directly on the field in the middle of work and resuming said work right after was considered normal. Those were not some rosy times some folks desperately wanting to own properties right here right now like to paint as.
Come on, many jobs back then weren't what you would consider a job these days. And after work, you were free to do whatever you wanted. No on-call duties, no late-night catch-up after hours, etc.
At least there was a sense of community—everyone knew and helped each other. There were a lot of bad things, especially in the economy. But there were also a lot of good things in society that were killed by capitalism and a Darwinian society.
People lived in literal reality bubble compared to rest of the world and were brutally naive in many aspects (just like you would expect North Koreans to be naive about many aspects of the rest of the world). That naivity hit hard when iron curtain fell, the concept of defending democracy and 'fighting' for whats good in life and society is simply too alien, even now. As long as you kept pretending all is good and you don't mind lack of basic freedom, system largely left you alone, you just couldn't travel or say what you wanted. But that pesky freedom is something you can't keep ignoring for your whole life.
But if any of your ancestors or even more distant family said or did anything even mildly perceived as non-alignment even decades ago, then your kids who could be brilliant students, were forced to do to worst trade high school (since they were mandatory just like employment) and banned from universities or many other aspects of society. This is story of my mother, 1st in economic university entrance exams, banned because my grandfather stepped away from communist party when soviet union invaded us in 1968, more than a decade before. Stories like this are everywhere if you care to ask, brilliance was punished as a threat to regime and mediocrity and bowed head was celebrated.
It is happening again slow moving, just due to lack of mating success.
Most of our food is produced by a few percent of the population, yet people go hungry.
I don't know what the right answer is, but we live in strange economic times
Hunger is generally a distribution and pricing problem more than a supply problem.
So, what individuals want has little to do with it.
But AI is probably going to hit the labor market like a wrecking ball anyway, at which point it will be exactly like that.