EDIT: Replace ‘every human in the workforce’ with ‘most people’. I agree efficiency has not been gained equally across all professions.
In: Economics
Management/ownership still has more leverage than workers. They’d rather make workers keep working same amount of time and reap higher profits than reduce work and keep profits the same. They also have used their leverage to not even increase pay in line with workers’ productivity.
Most of the extra productivity and efficiency has gone straight to the top. Instead of CEOs making hundreds of millions, now they make billions.
Because that would mean that you would be able to produce the same amount of products, you’d just need less time. But why would a company wanna do that? Why would they just be happy with the same amount of products produced when they can increase it?
It just wouldn’t make sense to not use that time to producing more.
Because countries run into debt to fund their militaries and their welfare states to support for the poor and the extremely rich classes. So people need to work more comparatively to pay for that debt.
Because the average worker still has to pay the bills and feed his family.
Imagine being a boss, you own something simple like a banana stand. You hire a person to work 40 hours a week, along side you. You are running the register and dealing with customers, while your employee is making the banana orders. All fine and dandy.
So one year you decide to invest $500,000 in a banana robot to do most of that person’s job. In fact you only need that person for an hour a day, to get the robot prepped.
So now you only need your employee for 5 hours a week instead of 40. So are you going to keep paying him for 40 hours of work per week? No. The entire point of your automation investment was to eliminate man labor hours.
So that investment helps YOU, the business owner. It doesn’t help the employee.
One problem with your question is that not every occupation has been increasing in efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
So the rest of the workforce is gaining efficiency and the economy is reacting to people able to make more money in less time (example: high wage software engineers in California driving housing prices up because they have tons of cash to spend). While a teacher can technically teach thousands of more students thanks to video calls it’s not something you want so teachers still only teach something like 30-40 students an hour like they have for years and years.
So to keep up with this you have to pay them exponentially more for their labor so they can still have enough money to survive.
Meanwhile everyone with greater efficiency has to pay more and more for every service that hasn’t increased through efficiency. Doctors, construction, child care, (soon to be food preparation and transportation).
Why do people want bigger cars? Bigger houses? Cell phones? Access to information, more clothes, etc.
If everyone had all the same things they had in the 1920s we would have more free time. But people decided they wanted more.
Technology made things more efficient. This allowed a choice to either produce the same amount with less effort, or produce more with same effort.
By and large the latter was chosen leading to lower cost of goods and greater availability of products.
There is a reason grass fed, grass finished organic beef is more expensive. Automation cannot be used like it is at a feed lot.
It’s also way easier to access a variety of goods than back in the 1930s because we produce more options
The most obvious reason is that productivity gains accrue to owners, not workers. Additionally, not all sectors of the economy benefit equally from productivity. Agriculture and manufacturing do, medicine and education don’t. Medical alone is a huge chunk of the economy that barely existed 100 years ago when there just wasn’t much medicine could do for you. We have to pay for it though.
What has led to a shorter work week was never efficiency gains, but union demands for their workers. Efficiency gains net beneficiaries were always the capital owners. Without union efforts for a 9-5, 40 hour work week we’d still have capital owners like Jack ma:
>Jack Ma told an internal meeting that Alibaba doesn’t need people who look forward to a typical 8-hour lifestyle, according to a post on Alibaba’s Weibo account. He lauded the industry’s notorious 996 work culture: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week.
There will be a tipping point in the future when enough automation exists that has displaced enough wages(and therefore taxable income) that taxation could enable a UBI, but currently that level of automation tipping point isn’t here and a tax would act like a disincentive *to* automate(taxes are low level disincentives).
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