this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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People working 40 hours to make 10 things. Technology improves so that one person can make 20 things in 40 hours. People now get paid twice as much? People now only work 20 hours? Nope! Half as many people now work at the same pay. The rest have to go find something else to do.
What's your counterargument when I mention that technology creates jobs and specialty positions? Especially for autistic people.
I'm pretty sure @[email protected] was trying to create a simplified example. To include a generic autistic tech we can modify the example to "40 people making 10 things an hour. A clever autistic person comes along and writes a computer script that improves efficiency. Now 19 people make 20 things an hour, the autistic tech makes 5 times as much as one of the original people and has the specialty job of maintaining the script, the business owner lays off 20 people (4x of their pay compensates the tech) and the business owner pockets the other 16x as extra profit"
The 19 people still employed don't get any more pay for their extra efficiency, nor do they get any more time off.
The 20 people who were let go at no fault of their own now apparently don't get to eat or live or have any kind of security until they reeducate themselves to a new line of work.
The autistic tech doesn't understand where their additional pay comes from, but is happy to get rewarded well for their good work.
If questioned about why the 20 people needed to be let go, the business owner will blame the scripts efficiency instead of their own decision to pocket the money.
However, to answer your question directly: it does not matter how many new jobs or specialty positions are created - if the net pay available to workers is reduced and the net jobs workers can fill are reduced, some workers are destined to get the short straw.
People have been complaining about technology forever. The south complained about machinery that would make slavery obsolete. There's no pleasing these people.
This guy wants all of the benefits of technology at a low price, but doesn't want any of the change that occurs from that benefit. What happens if you make everyone work 20 hrs in his example? Everyone makes half what they did before and can't afford anything. What happens if you fire half the workers in his example? Half the workers can afford the tech but no one else. Which one allows the company to keep selling the tech? The scenario where half are fired.... BUT How about we keep all the people like he claims is possible? Then the price of the tech must double. But this guy doesn't want that because that must be a greedy company. So how will they pay all those employees? What happens when someone else makes the tech with fewer employees and thus lower cost?
So yeah... Tech always requires some to retrain. But society always benefits as a whole.
The only certainty in life is that life is uncertain. To complain about change is just being lazy and refusing to accept change.
|What happens if you make everyone work 20 hrs in his example?
If they are paid for what they make and not the time they spend, everyone earns the same and the workers have more free time. It is this insistence that pay = time which divorces productivity gains from benefiting the worker.
Competition. Someone is highly likely to figure out how to shave costs. Then the company can't even sell the thing and the people lose their jobs.
The point of an hourly wage is that it's a contract to be paid some hourly amount regardless of how many things are sold. The company bears most of the risk. Sales are always dynamic. So how can the company pay the employees for every widget made if the things they make aren't selling for a price that covers the cost of paying the employees?
Any thing created will never sell consistently and never sell forever. So again, skill must change. Marketable skills are always changing. During tech change, the price and demand of the old product drops.
From 1900 to 1920 millions of people lost their jobs to cars. They spent their entire lives around horses. Leather work, carriages, blacksmiths, farm equipment, etc. In just 20 years the horse and carriage was toast. Everyone had to reskill for cars and other jobs because cars took fewer people to make than trending to all the horse stuff.
A modern example is computers. Until the 80s and 90s there were huge work forces processing everything with paper. It wasn't just those workers that had to reskill. The paper mills had to reduce output. Fewer printing houses. Fewer printing press repairmen. Fewer parts manufacturers for the presses. Less ink. Less forestry management for paper. And so on.
Then how do we incentivize the non-shareholders into more efficient practices? Remember, Occam's Tweezers