EDIT: Replace ‘every human in the workforce’ with ‘most people’. I agree efficiency has not been gained equally across all professions.
In: Economics
As with most things, there are multiple reasons.
One of the reasons is that there’s a phenomenon called Jevon’s Paradox where an increase in efficiency leads to an increase in demand greater than the increase in productivity. If for example productivity for some widget is increased by 5x and that leads to the cost being reduced to 1/5th, demand might increase by 10x meaning you’d still need twice the workers despite the increase in productivity.
This can be seen even going back to the steam engine and the cotton gin. Slavery was actually slowly fading out even in the Southern US due to lack of demand… until the cotton gin came along and made cotton production much more efficient. This lowered the price of cotton to the point where demand exploded, leading in turn to a renewed growth in slavery.
Another reason is that corporations generally don’t look at increased productivity and say “since workers are more productive, they should be paid more for the same work and/or work less for the same pay”.
And there are plenty more factors.
Because capitalism demands profit, and the only way to win at capitalism is to make more profit than you did the year before :^)
People will say it’s because of greed or politics, but really what people don’t understand is that technology *isn’t creating less work, it’s creating more*. Throughout history whenever there are major technological advancements, it creates the need for more markets and industries that didn’t exist before. This in turn creates new jobs that people will need to work. A good book that covers this a little bit is Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. He describes how sock makers in 1700’s England went on strike over machinery that “replaced” the jobs of some of the workers. But within 50 years, there were exponentially more sock makers, and thousands of other jobs that had to exist to enable the new machinery and methods of sock making. Interesting stuff
David Graeber wrote an article and book about this, titled “bullshit jobs”. It’s not the definitive narrative on the subject, but a very worthwhile and humorous read. Essentially, he estimates that 30-40% of jobs shouldn’t exist, reported by the workers themselves.
1. The more profitable and sophisticated companies become the more risk there is. As a result more regulation and scrutiny requiring more effort.
2. Always trying to the best. You can’t innovate and beat your competitors without extra effort.
3. Lots of technology can still be more expensive than ppl. The cost of acquiring or building, maintaining it, adjusting to nuances, and extra controls required may not be worth it compared to hiring someone to do it.
4. General rat race. Everyone wants to get to the top and make all the money. How you do it doesn’t matter if you get there. This results in inefficiencies and probably causes more problems for everyone else to clean up
Look at all the studies regarding how much time employees spend surfing the net or being on their smartphone. Are we really that much more productive in 2021 once you factor this in as well
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).
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.
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
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.
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