EDIT: Replace ‘every human in the workforce’ with ‘most people’. I agree efficiency has not been gained equally across all professions.
In: Economics
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
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
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.
Because capitalism demands profit, and the only way to win at capitalism is to make more profit than you did the year before :^)
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.
Look at the CEO pay vs average workers from 50 years ago. Now look at it today. That’s where the difference lies.
contrary to popular belief, automation isnt automated.
theres a team of engineers and programmers behind automation, the work has just shifted from brute force to intellectuals.
we also have a lot more than we used to.
100 years ago, no one was making cell phones. we didnt have the time.
How about the specialization of work ? I mean, this created more jobs as well right ?
Previously we did not have positions for product managers, social media workers, several thousand content producers , photographers , etc , etc?
Hasn’t the specialization of labour created more jobs than was removed from automation?
Corporate greed. It is in their best interest to have a consumer population that relies on convenience. People that are overworked (40 hours a week, plus travel, meals, home maintenance, etc) pay for fast food and easy make meals. They buy cars so they don’t have to use their precious limited leisure time waiting for public transportation. They pay for cable and streaming services and video games. They need specialists to do their taxes and home projects because they don’t have time to learn how to do it themselves. _And_ if everybody is overworked, pressed for time _AND_ short on cash, they won’t notice/care/have time for the _big_ problems, freeing up big business to buy governments, destroy the planet and abuse their workers.
_Every_ time in the history of capitalist labor that someone has suggested that laborers should be safer/better compensated/have more rights, businesses have pushed back, whining about menial cuts to their profits like Dudley whining about getting 36 presents when last year he got 37.
8 hour workday?? We’ll go out of business!
OSHA regulations? We’ll go out of business!
No more child labor?? We’ll go out of business!
Maternity/paternity leave? Health insurance? Minimum wage? Environmental protections? Weekends?
It never ends.
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