Working people don't choose. People in power and corporations choose. And the constant is that they want to expand the number of hours and reduce the pay.
The extra productivity that automation brings doesn't matter. It's not like they target X levels of productivity. They target "as much productivity as we can get, up to infinity".
Plus, what would they do with a population that had time in its hands to think and be involved instead of being a wage-slave bound by debt?
(That's not some dystopian tinfoil concept. It's a standard concern of those at the top of any given society from the age of the Romans ("panem et circenses"), to Machiavelli to modern era think tanks).
As long as countries don't have large economic areas based on corporativism, oligopolies and regulatory capture.
More work against that is needed from economic liberals in e.g. my native Sweden. (You won't see much criticism from media and politicians in such a situation.)
In fact, in Sweden there's a law that allows parents of children under 8 to work 75% of fulltime (30 hrs/week), but very few make use of it. I suspect that part of the reason is a fear of annoying the employer though.
That's because they also prefer to have a full salary. It's not like employers, considering the increase productivity technology affords, offer full old-time salaries for part time work.
If anything it's the inverse: buying power has dropped since the seventies (only partially offset in some areas with cheaper and more capable electronics, but not for things like housing, food, etc).
If I can get the same product at a lower price, it frees up some of my income to buy something else. That creates demand, it is is demand that creates jobs.
The problem is that workers aren't fungible. People spend years or even decades acquiring skills, and then technology can automate away what they do, leaving them stranded economically speaking. They need new skills to keep earning because demand has changed.
Also on an individual level we all resist change. If you like your life and lively-hood now, and technology threatens that, it's not surprising that people will go Luddite in order to avoid the effort and risk that comes with changing jobs.
The answer is to put in place the social institutions necessary for people to be more adaptive and fluid in how they earn a living. Give people a safety net to fall on: social insurance, and a ladder to climb to climb out on: education.
Plenty of nations are using parts of this strategy and the data seems clear it works. But it's a difficult sell politically in the US. People here aren't willing to see the taxes they pay as investment toward bettering society as a whole. And to be fair, they're justified in feeling that way since our government's spending priorities are often insane.
Personally I advocate a gradual decrease in allowed work hours - 10 minutes shorter work day every year, or so. Although France has tried this and it doesn't really seem to work.
A very different application of automation to the relative-wealth issue: http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/
You might be able to reduce all these administrative costs, but splitting work up among more people has its own cost. Remember Brooke's law, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - the same effect is in play.
[Editted to fix arithmetic. This makes the example less dramatic, but still significant given the profit level of many companies]
I don't understand this. If you are paying:
$1500 for a 30 hour week
+$2000 for administration costs
-------------------------------
$3500
2000 /wk labour
2000 /wk overhead
----
4000 /wk @40hrs/wk
100 / hr
1500 /wk labour
2000 /wk overhead
----
3500 /wk @30hr/wk
115 ish / hrWar serves another purpose, too - wealth transfer, and that helps keep the work week at 40 hours.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962...
> But this never happens. Why?
What good is it being rich without poor people for contrast?
Or, from another angle, I suspect (without any formal economic training) that hyper-rich with private jets is not possible in a society where most people are moderately rich, because there wouldn't be excess cash to monopolize.
To achieve the goal of working less, you need to own capital. Technology changes the capital vs. work equation towards capital at the same time when there is increasing global supply of educated workforce. It's just supply and demand. Workers are simply competing towards bottom.
To get to position where you need to work less you would need to have:
1. Change taxation from work to capital.
2. Basic income.
Why do you think it's as many as 1:2?
That sounds like a lot of new jobs to me; How many travel agents did hipmunk and expedia et all shut down vs. how many employees that they have? One robot maker and a couple of robot service-people can make and maintain enough robots to remove a hundred jobs. Or maybe a thousand. I don't know, and I don't pretend to.
Big money requires big investments for the big returns. Big funds cannot consider many worthwhile investments, due to transaction costs, the (relatively) lower expected ROI.
If the money keeps moving (the velocity of money) through progressive taxation (decreasing inequity), then more people will have access to more capital.
One reason I keep reading pg and HN (and watching crowd sourced funding) is because I'm fascinated by the effort to reduce transaction costs. I'd prefer progressive taxation. But this seems to be working too.