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Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

Why does that matter? According to you, productivity is not what leads to increases in wages. You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising. I showed that worker wages went up starting in 1995. According to you, there must have been a worker uprising to explain that.

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> You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising.

I'm not sure you really understood my original post. I never said or meant to imply that wages never grow ever

I was talking about how increases in productivity do not lead to proportionally increased wages

Look, here's an example. Let's say I'm a worker producing Widgets for $20/hour by hand, and I can produce 10 widgets an hour. The company sells widgets for $10 each

In one hour I have produced $100 worth of widgets. The company pays me $20, the company keeps $80

Now the company buys a WidgetMachine. Using the WidgetMachine I can now produce 20 widgets an hour

I now produce $200 worth of Widgets per hour. The company still pays me $20, the company has now earned $180

My productivity has doubled, but my wage hasn't

So next year inflation is $5. The company increases my income to $25, starts charging a couple of cents more per Widget so they can absorb my wage increase without any change to their bottom line

My wage matches inflation, it still "grows" but it is completely divorced from my productivity

More importantly, my wage growing to match inflation doesn't help my buying power even remotely. If my wage only goes up to match exactly inflation then all I'm ever doing is treading water. At best all I can do is keep the exact same standard of living and lifestyle

Increases in "real wages" should have "real" impact on your life, it should let you have a better life than before

I never claimed that workers get 100% of the increase in productivity. I said that increased productivity leads to increased wages. Increased productivity is in fact a _requirement_ for wages to go up (note that I am _not_ claiming that in increase in productivity _must_ result in increase wages. It is necessary, but not always sufficient), or else there is no where for those increases to come from. So when you claim that productivity increases _only_ result in worker wages increasing in the co-occurence of a worker uprising, that is the same thing as claiming that worker uprisings are a requirement.

So I showed you an increase in worker wages. If there is not corresponding worker uprising, your original claim is false.

And,again, you keep ignoring that the plot I showed is already inflation adjusted. It is a real increase, not a nominal increase.

> Increased productivity is in fact a _requirement_ for wages to go up

No it isn't. This is an extremely naive understanding of how any of this works

You even say it yourself, with the silly graph you keep posting

That graph doesn't show productivity it just shows "real inflation adjusted wages", like you keep harping on about.

But in general a person is not increasing their productivity year over year. So why would their wage go up to match inflation if, as you say, wages only go up when productivity increases? That doesn't make sense

The reality is that people already provide their employers with vastly more productivity than they are paid for. Their employers are capturing the majority of the value from that productivity. If someone's wage goes up to match inflation, their productivity hasn't increased, inflation has increase the value of their current productivity

You seriously don't seem to understand how any of this works

Given that economists almost universally agree with me, I'm going to have to suggest that it is in fact you who don't know know how any of this works.

You keep shifting the goal posts, you keep talking about unrelated things, and you keep not addressing the core claims, and you keep not responding to the main refutation of your own original claim. I'm done beating my head against this wall. I hope you have a nice day.

> Given that economists almost universally agree with me

I'm amazed you've found that all economists that can universally agree on anything. Economists don't know how any of this works either. Economics is not a science, and you can find data to support basically an unlimited number of arguments.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic, but bluefirebrand did not claim that wages only go up because of worker uprisings.

In the long term, the only thing that _can_ increase wages on average and in general is productivity. Productivity increases mean the pie is bigger, and without that, there is no where for increased wages to come _from_. So by saying that producity only results in increased wages in the case of the worker uprising, that is equivalent to saying that wages can only rise from a worker uprising. The only way this isn't true is for some other proposed mechanism for worker wages to go up, and the only other methods would be short time, single increases where all you are doing is taking from someone else (presumably capital I guess?)

Sustained rates of increase _require_ increasing productivity. So no, they didn't explicitly state it, what they explicitly said was that productivity only results in increased wages if a worker uprising forces it. But that's the logical requirement of that statement.

> there is no where for increased wages to come _from

The pie doesn't have to grow when the pie is already massive, but only 1% of people are taking 90% of the pie

20-22% of the pie in the US.

Sure, whatever.

The point was not in the exact number

The point is that there is an answer to "Where could increased wages come from if we don't increase productivity"

We don't have to increase productivity to pay some of the population less and other parts of the population more

You can get short term or one time increases by taking from somewhere else, but without productivity gains, it's an inherently limited, zero sum game.

It's not short-term or one-time if you're taking away and redistributing the economic rent that those people collect from the rest of us.

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