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That's clearly the "why" no one pushing for innovative products is answering. A couple decades ago one salary could sustain a family in most developed countries, now it seems to be a struggle with two for many, we have mass unemployment, productivity soared but somehow society also can't afford enough cleaners to keep places decent.

Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?

efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value. Political institutions are not very good at preparing for unfamiliar problems, dont count on them doing that. Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes. Thats the best that we can do.

"efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value"

And yet countries that value more than efficiency and productivity are repeatedly ranked as the happiest in the world [0].

"Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes"

How much damage has unfettered tech done to society at large? Maybe we'll never know the full answer, but we can definitely agree it hasn't all been positive (advertising, social media etc..). We're now retrospectively regulating, but a lot of it feels too little, too late, for some elements of society (privacy being a notable example).

0: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptional...

Perhaps being happy is not the goal? What if the happiness isn't sustainable?

Happiness is the only goal, because all other goals no longer matter if you're unhappy. Infinite money is worthless if you do not have the motivation and drive to enjoy it. Have 1 trillion dollars and spending none on something you care about is equivalent to having zero dollars.

> Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?

I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.

I'm afraid that "a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to" is necessary to solve AGI (as opposed to getting extincted by one), and world peace will kind of follow naturally.

In other words: we're screwed.

It doesn't have to be more objective, it just has to not run away.

The problem with the wealth-weighted-value that gets optimized by capitalism is that the gini coefficient tips the optimization process from being about doing what other people want to being about doing what rich people want. Rich people mostly want to get paid for being rich, of course, so they pump assets to increase their wealth. Their weight goes up, the objective function pumps assets harder, their weight goes up, the objective function pump assets harder... and gini heads to 1 and you return to a palace economy.

A note of optimism: we've been here before, shortly after the industrial revolution. We've fixed this before, even though Marx predicted that we couldn't. We should all be trying to figure out how to make sure that next time the USA gets neo-Roosevelt, not neo-Hitler or neo-Lenin.

> We've fixed this before, even though Marx predicted that we couldn't.

Is it fixed if it falls apart in a couple generations? Maybe flex tape over the problem isn't going to cut it.

Any readings to recommend? :)

I don’t really understand what you’re proposing. How would we fix things to “not run away”. If we’re not trying to value fix to be more objective, what guiding principle should we follow?

On the wealth weighting, I’m a fan of a 100% inheritance tax tbh. I’m in the “top 1%” and I don’t plan on giving my kids more than a great upbringing and education. I’m not giving them any additional cash injection. I think that solves a lot of the wealth weighting problem by shortening the lifecycle of capital holds, but I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see it (or some form of it like inheritance caps).

> we have mass unemployment

We do?

No, not in the US at least, but society runs on vibes these days

Vibes being misinformation and populist propaganda campaigns. Emotionally manipulating people is highly effective and, by far, the easiest it's ever been with technology.

Fair enough, I'll withdraw the "mass": EU 6.5%, USA 4.5%. That's still enough to have all sorts of policies to reduce that amount, apparently...

Arguably in the recent election the Democrats learned that increasing inflation to reduce unemployment was a bad political tradeoff.

you should also try to avoid cars and electric lights, grooms and gas light maintainers need jobs too

I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it.

But if you also buy clothes only made from hand-spun yarn, I mean, it was a problem for the yarn-spinsters back then, and by all means help them. But paying someone to do something that no longer needs doing is how you create bullshit jobs. No problem with spinning yarn for recreation, but if they have to do some complete nonsense to earn a roof and a meal... there are kinder ways to help.

> I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it.

Alternative take wrt. self-service checkouts: the store is making you do unpaid labor for it. And with how it's implemented in practice, it's not only offloading work of a specialist to you, it's also costing you time and frustration, since a cashier doing checkout 8h/day on a checkout desk optimized for throughput is doing a much faster job at it than you doing it ad-hoc, in constrained space, on a machine that throws an error if you look at it funny.

I'm very much for automating bullshit jobs away, but store checkout ain't it yet, and the results are universally worse.

More importantly, it's a common pattern that's been inflicted on people (and ourselves) by our industry particularly often: "automating away" specialist jobs with software. The workload doesn't actually go away - it gets redistributed to everyone. It only looks like a win, because specialist salaries are legible to the business, while generalized productivity loss isn't.

Think of it next time when a two day coding problem takes you a week, because you also need to attend several useless meetings, make some powerpoint slides, update your calendar, timesheet, and fill in expense reports from a business trip.

Groceries are a highly competitive market so a large fraction of cost savings end up being returned to the customer in lower prices.

From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving.

Sure I’ll take a full cart to an actual cashier, but by removing people with only a few items from those lines they become more predictable.

> Groceries are a highly competitive market so a large fraction of cost savings end up being returned to the customer in lower prices.

It doesn't look this way from customer perspective, so I propose alternative interpretation: it contributes to hiding inflation, because instead of seeing the prices rapidly rise, we see them rise slower (further slowed down by "shrinkflation" and related shenanigans), but the quality of service goes down too. So what we get is ever worse shopping experience and lower inflation rates reported by economists.

(Not to mention, shopping taking more time because of this "optimization" is effectively even more hidden inflation.)

> From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving.

It's a good reason to have both. Because in practice, 2 out of 4 machines are, at any given moment, locked and waiting for a supervisor - and many stores "optimize" further, by eschewing a dedicated role and just tacking responsibilities on to existing work roster. Meaning, the supervisor you're waiting for is likely staffing a checkout point or unloading boxes in the back of the store at the same time, so you better get ready to wait.

Ideally, the store would have both automated and staffed checkout, and direct those with few discrete items to the former, where a dedicated supervisor would ensure problems get resolved quickly. That would indeed optimize latency/maximize throughput.

> It's a good reason to have both.

I’ve never been to a store that only had self checkout, I think the equilibrium is one bank of self checkout + a bunch of normal registers.

> 2 out of 4 machines are, at any given moment, locked and waiting for a supervisor > where a dedicated supervisor would ensure problems get resolved quickly

Sounds like an implementation issue.

The grocery store I typically use has one bank of 6 self checkout machines with a dedicated attendant who seems to be able to resolve any issues. It’s common for 1 or 2 of the machines be down though. They also have 4 to 14 normal checkout lines open depending on how busy the store is.

I rarely use self check but it seems like a good tradeoff vs a 5th line being open when things aren’t that busy.

> Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family

Yes! I have been thinking this. So as an economic consequence of both parents being able to work, now the choice to stay home and care for the kids is an even harder one. The birth rate falls. Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents.

But capital got their assets pumped and that's what matters!

We need to stop asking 10+ workdays a week from each couple. Once we only demand 7 workdays a week, people are allowed to raise their own kids again!

That's the irony. Before, there was no choice but for women to stay at home. Now, most have no choice but to work.

Turns out, for the market, having a choice is a form of wealth. It will make you pay to acquire it, it will treat you as that much more wealthy if you have it, and it will encourage you to sell it.

Yeah, as far as labor market goes "women's liberation" never really happened. The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear, and yet there's way more pressure to build a career to appease our corporate overlords. Is that really an improvement?

Ultimately capitalism is built so that improved productivity, more working hours, higher salaries never benefit the worker long-term. If people start earning more, the owning class will simply raise prices to match this new level of income. The US is the wealthiest and strongest country in the world, and yet young people there struggle to buy houses just as much (or even more) than their peers in much poorer countries.

> The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear

All sexually reproducing organisms on the Earth have families without any social pressure and we evolved from primates who work like this.

By far the stronger pressure is biological. I doubt social pressure even comes close to moving the needle.

Unlike most organisms, we’re smart enough to satisfy those urges without having children.

The peak reproductive years are the late teens to late twenties (give or take). However and in modern society, having children in the first two-thirds of the peak years is a recipe for failure or lifelong hardships.

I would argue wealth is only the execution of more choice, and choice as a concept is equivalent with power. Powerful people can make bigger choices, and that's what makes them powerful.

That’s really quite impactful and insightful. Presidents have choices no one else has … how interesting

Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents

Is this bad?

only in the same sense that most coffee shops are now starbucks where the coffee is made by temp baristas, not shop owners who care about the legacy of their coffee

Were you drinking coffee before Starbucks came on the scene? I was, and if you could find a cafe that served better than a brown crayon steeped in water, it was a rare treasure.

You're making the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Posh coffee didn't become a "thing" because of starbucks. Starbucks became a "thing" because of emerging posh coffee trends, which created a market for starbucks in the first place.

The thing you're missing is that, you go to a starbucks, which promises to sell you posh coffee, but it may be good, or it may be crap, and it's all down to luck whether the barista gives a crap about your "posh" coffee. Whereas if you go to a small business owner whose business is posh coffee, you can probably expect a great coffee (or if they don't, then you expect the place to soon go out of business)

Great example. I don’t know anything about coffee, have no idea how to make it, and no desire to learn it. If I’m ever forced to make my own coffee it would probably suck. When I want to drink coffee I go to Starbucks. Their coffee tastes great to me.

it's a skill that takes 15 minutes to learn. maybe 30 if you include roasting your own beans. it could be taught in highschool to everyone.

hardly requires a bustling industry to solve this 'problem' or provide this 'value'.

starbucks is a monument to the lazyness and exploitation of this lazyness in homo sapiens.

Making coffee takes like 3 steps.

The only 'skills' you need is the ability to transfer powders and liquids from one container to another.

I have no idea why people idealize coffee making so much. I have been doing pour over coffee my whole life and it feels as basic a skill as washing a dish.

If you can boil water, you can make coffee at least as good as Starbucks. If boiling water is too difficult, there are automated push button machines (Nescafe, etc).

I’ve seen those baristas pouring hot espresso directly into the plastic cup.

> Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them.

I have a "hobbyist conjecture" that I'd love feedback on from people familiar with economics. Simply put, the idea is this: if you were to give every human around the world a million dollars (imagine this is easy and feasible), prices would inevitably rise. The poorest might experience some improvement in their standard of living, but not as much as one might expect. This effect seems to go beyond inflation alone. My intuition is that prices ultimately adjust based on social structures and expectations.

Similarly, we see a unique economic advantage in many dual-income gay couples who, statistically, achieve higher standards of living. Often, this is partly because fewer have children, which shifts financial priorities and spending capacities.

Yes this is common knowledge in econ supply/demand and money supply.

Other currencies 1M base notes is not a lot (e.g. 1M dinar). You can just add/remove zeros but prices have adjusted, those people can't live like "millionaires" with 1M dinar.

There was a time goods like meat cost pennies, now it's $10 per pound. In those times $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money, today most people have $10,000 in assets. The price of goods is related to money supply, they get more expensive if people have more money.

Money has no intrinsic value, it is balanced by whatever goods and services can be bought by it. If you add money but no goods and services, money is worth less (see COVID policy, increase money and decrease goods and services).

Thank you! The COVID policy example feels especially relevant because it illustrates the kind of sudden economic shift I'm curious about, rather than just changes in nominal currency values. To clarify my thought experiment: imagine a stable economy where suddenly every person worldwide is gifted $1 million USD. I'm interested in exploring how this kind of immediate influx would impact prices and standards of living, beyond just inflation.

If every person is giftet USD1M, prices of all things will go up by a lot. Furthermore, prices of necessities will rise by larger fractions because most people in the world are significantly poorer than the median of this forum.

More generally, gifting every person worldwide the same amount of money seems roughly equivalent to taxing every above-average wealth person a fixed percentage of their surplus and giving every below-average-wealth person a fixed percentage of their deficit...

I think that's not quite true, because rich people mostly keep their wealth in assets, not cash. Stock will just rise.

Which of my two claims is not true? Why should stock rise more than basic necessities? Of course, all prices would rise a lot. But I think stocks would rise by a smaller factor.

Ah sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was talking about your second claim - that giving people lots of money would redistribute a fixed proportion of wealth from the rich to the poor. My point was that the rich have most of their wealth in stocks and the like, so the redistribution would only affect the cash portion of their wealth, which is quite small.

I see. The "taxation" scheme I had in mind was intended to apply to "any and all wealth", which I didn't make clear. Do you think it works out then?

On a more realistic note, gifting every human 1M would probably completely break the financial system and cause a global recession...

IANAEconomist, but I've long arrived at the same conjecture; I usually phrase it as "the market always adjusts to keep average discretionary income at 0".

So, if you give everyone in a given population (I'd go for the country instead of the world to see the effect much faster) a million dollars a month, the average discretionary income would, obviously, rise by one million dollars. That would cause prices to raise, but also all kinds of new products and services to become available. Some of those would evolve from luxuries to necessities over time - like e.g. having a car, or a mobile phone. Housing would likely eat a chunk of the surplus.

In the end, it would all stabilize, at exactly the "life is more expensive by a million dollars, on average" point. We'd still have socioeconomic classes - poor with < 0 surplus, rich with > 0 surplus, and the middle with ~0 surplus. Some people would've moved to different places on the ladder, but the ladder would still be there, simply because of variability in individual incomes.

I guess put another way, you could say, the market is a DC filter - as wealth distribution in a population changes, the market always adjusts to cancel out the constant component ("DC offset").

Except via policy you can adjust how much each percentile has. If you set a tax at 70% over a million dollars of income/capital gains/etc, and bolster lower brackets to have more income kept (eg fewer sales taxes), you can increase the amount of discretionary incomes for people where a little bit more goes a long way. It’s not like there aren’t controls available for wealth distribution.

It's not that easy since changing policies could give you the exact opposite result that politicians think. For example, increasing wealth taxes could make people to go elsewhere and moving fortunes abroad.

Changing policies frequently increase the risk for future arbitrary decisions.

You're right of course, except I wouldn't say it's "beyond inflation alone" - it IS inflation by definition. It's beyond the usual level of inflation, but that doesn't make it a separate phenomenon, you've just caused a shit ton of inflation to happen by giving everyone a million dollars.

Users of self check out are training cashier replacements.

Doesn’t matter whether a person chooses self check out or cashier check out.

What matters is the training.

When self checkout becomes nearly as accurate as cashiers the cashiers lose their jobs.

Which lane we choose has little to do with the replacement. Thousands of holdouts won’t affect the millions of shoppers training the replacements.

Post-war Germany relied on cheap, foreign-worker labor instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter

Note: The European guest worker model of the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t work for the United States, due to the birthright citizenship status.

> At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.

I’m not sure this is Owning the Bots the way you think it is.

For this to be true, real wages would have had to collapse (at the very least ~50-70%) for a household of two workers to be less rich than the household of one worker x years ago.

This is just not true. If people feel worse it's because they want more things from life, not because they are able to afford less things.

(I'm talking about the last ~50 years. The last 20 years may be a different point, but it doesn't have to do with female participation in the marketplace)

I’m not saying the continues got a boost - but companies were able to absorb extra workers and maintain the total outgoings per household for decades

Not sure how that shows up in the stats