No. Average worker productivity has skyrocketed since 1980 with the introduction of computers and automation technology. Salaries have remained flat. A 20 hour work week with the same salary would be far more reasonable (though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce).
Simply because a tool makes you more productive does not make the job more valuable. What it does is make it so whom you work for is more competitive. This is usually reflected in price drops. This in turn means more people have access to the products and services.
So, people are benefiting from their increased productivity, whether by their own hands or automation and computers. Look back thirty years ago, how many people have big screen televisions and powerful computers at home? See, its not a one sided equation as your view implies.
The rewards of this increase in productivity can be as simple as once were outlandish luxury items now being found in every household. Look back a generation and see what they had. Would you live like that and give up what you have now? I remember not having air conditioning until my parents built a new home in the late seventies. Having one TV because they were damn expensive. I remember our first PC. The fact these are everywhere are as a result of the increases in productivity which pushes down prices and increases choice.
Don't measure only one side.
Employees aren't really compensated for increases in output that are achieved through standard business practices, technology, automation, etc.
That's because their relative input remains the same.
Same input, same salaries.
If I'm starting a business mass-producing widgets and I fund the machinery, process development, and software to produce that -- why should I pay extra for the employee who really only has to push the big red button to start the machines going every morning?
Just because a lot of value is produced when he pushes that red button doesn't mean that he should be highly compensated.
You should push that button yourself in the morning, and save the salary entirely.
Consequences are left as an exercise for the student.
I'm not sure there's any value to this kind of armchair economics.
If we're going to have any value in a forum at all, we need to at least make an effort to read and understand the arguments of posters before posting straw men.
Spreading it around rewards an orthogonal group that did nothing to create the productive output and will siphon off it like a parasite.
Spreading it around is inherently a worse way to decide where value should flow through a society; especially one as culturally diverse (ie, filled with many self-interested constituencies) as here in the US.
[edit: So sad that on a site dedicated to the entrepreneur, arguments that promote entrepreneurship and rewarding good choices and hard work are moderated into the dirt..]
And I don't think you have to give up business or innovation to get it. If your Scandinavian startup becomes the next Mojang, you're still going to be fabulously wealthy, so I don't feel at all disincentivized by the distant possibility that I'll have to fork over a percentage of my hypothetical future millions (I'm certainly not going to move back to Texas just for that). There are more successful companies per capita than you'd expect (certainly more than most American states), and the economy generally still runs on a market basis, there's just a little more sharing of the wealth.
Notice that I mentioned cultural diversity. There is a reason that Scandanavia can manage with a more socialistic government. The gene/meme pool is far less diverse and evolutionarily created reinforcement of good communal practices are already present. A thousand years ago and beyond, if you didn't grok cooperation and thoughtful planning, you starved and died come winter.
Scandanavia is like a petri dish with a thriving germ culture that has had very little exposure to many other competing germ cultures. It's easy to point to that little petri dish and say, "See how well this culture thrives?"
We don't have that luxury in the USA. Here, we deal with many self-interested gene/meme contributors who are more self-interested than community-interested. If we implemented the government and laws of Norway here in the US tomorrow, we would collapse. Too many here would take the free government support as a right and live off of it until the whole system failed.
And you Sir are a prime example. In fact, you do everything you can to spread such memes in the society. The irony of that sentence amuses me.
In the end, though, those little petri dish cultures are not where the action is in the world. One merely needs to look at the last 200 years of innovation and invention to have the overwhelming impression that the USA method for technological and economic progress is to be admired and pursued. It's a damned shame that so many people here are hell bent on taking us backward to a one-size-fits-all European style socialistic government.
Its rare for there to be some kind of CEO mastermind that builds everything from scratch on day one. More than likely you started small and your staff built these systems. They came up with the ideas, managed the projects, etc. Their input and ideas created that efficiency.
> he pushes that red button
I think you're taking your manufacturing analogy too far. We're talking skilled labor here, even then you could just have wrote "when my nerd programmers type on their keyboards" and been just as wrong.
As I understand it, your scenario is how unions justify their continued existence.
(If you're not already an American Republican, you really should look into it. trollolol...)
You just hire another shlep who can wake up on time to hit the red button. If you can't find a reliable person to hit the button for you, you do the R&D to automate it.
As I understand it, your scenario is how unions justify their continued existence.
You're reading an argument that I didn't make.
If you're not already an American Republican
I'm a libertarian. I believe that if all you can do is hit a button then you shouldn't be surprised that no one wants to pay you very much. You also shouldn't be offended when your job is truthfully characterized as "just hitting a big red button in the morning".
My basis was that the button pusher was critical to your business and automation was not feasible, since you would have done that from the beginning. I don't know which economic concept this describes, but the idea is that you are compensating the button pusher based on their absolute, objective value (no pushing, no profit) rather than subjectively (skill-less "schlep").
(though still very far off the mark of paying
employees according to the value that they produce).