Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedanieru | Hacker News Reader

So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).

View on HN

> Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up.

Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted out of poverty.

Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

edi: linked wrong chart

GNI is just a grand total divided by population; people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S.

> GNI is just a grand total divided by population;

Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.

> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S

Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.

First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

Actually, the wealth has accrued quite nicely to the top 1%, even more so to the top 0.01%. Whereas the rest of the population has seen real pay flatline as you say. That is the real problem.

>>>Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

What is the proper proportion?

Why not 1:1?

Would you care to share your measuring system for how do decide if it is 1:1 or not? It seems complex to measure health, "wealth", happiness, and security. I sure haven't found any actionable or reasonably complete metrics in my readings, maybe I am bad at searching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life

I think this is an excellent point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com