Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers. You keep working the same hours to make your bosses more money, when you could be working less instead. This income gap has been widening since the 1970s[1,2].
Imagine your job is producing chairs. You make 1 chair per day. Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase, instead the executives pocket all of it!
But what about the 3 extra chairs? Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day.
Wealth is about stuff, not money. If more stuff is produced (that is useful) then people become wealthier. So unless those executives are somehow taking all those extra chairs themselves there must be done other beneficiary from the extra productivity.
It's far more likely that regular people have a growing desire for more stuff than the executives using up all those extra products themselves.
> Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase
You are looking from a single worker's perspective. A more realistic example is 4 workers used to make 4 chairs per day, and now 3 workers can make the same number of chairs. Boss makes more money. No net gain for the remaining 3 workers (and the laid off worker has to find another job, potentially for a lower salary).
>Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day.
I hope you noticed that this somebody is someone else and not you. It could be another executive from another company.
The thing is, people don't care about stuff, because stuff is cheap. They need money to pay for housing and they need only the money, because if people stop consuming and spend more money on housing, the housing gets more expensive even for those who would have otherwise spent their money on consumption. Those people also need more money, not stuff, to spend on housing.
When things get more expensive for no reason, the economy must grow regardless of whether people want to consume more. Most wealth is about the allocation of already existing stuff and transforming it into something convenient. Humans didn't create the oil or iron ore in the soil. They just dug it out. Stuff is never produced, only transformed, so economics will always be about fighting for getting that initial endowment.
Those extra chairs aren't just given away for free for the benefit of humanity. The company sells them, and hence directly profits from the increased productivity. Meanwhile, the workers who actually make them likely never see their net worth increase because of it, and the executives do. This is a story that's been repeated for centuries.
I think you're underestimating how many chairs a single person can have. And cars and houses and services. And obviously some businesses will grow or shrink relative to others based on how elastic the demand is. Also it's a bigger range than just the executives.
Sure but do you know someone who doesn’t have chairs ? I mean, sure, there are people setting up in their first house, people who broke their existing chairs … but there is a lot of available options on the aftermarket.
I understand why you would want brand new chairs. My brain also does want them because they are pretty, because they goes well with your interior etc ...
But brand new chairs are far from a need we need to solve. And we are destroying our planet and our workers health for more chairs than there is asses on this planet.
My point is that, with the exception of food and possibly medicine, this reasoning applies to basically everything.
As an exercise of thought, if we magically stopped the economy now like, everyone stopped working and paying for housing and credit and given a magic influx of food, most humans in the world would not need anything else to be happy for a long time.
Of course it’s just an exercice of thought, we do need to replace some objects sometimes, we do need people to fix things. But apart from food, there is barely any object that we would need that isn’t already available somewhere in the world.
The thing is, mostly nobody is a farmer : most people in the world are producing or helping producing things we already have.
I play an MMO and people in Europe regularly tell me that they are playing at their desk or in meetings.
Given the number of people I've seen you spend more time on chat and social media instead of work task I would say that we have found more new ways to not work while getting paid.
What do you mean, "nope"? Which part of the previous claims are you refuting?
Your chart shows "real median personal income" increased by ~50% from 1975 to now (27k to 40k).
One of the links you're nope-ing says "From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%)."
Both of these can be true, and median personal income increasing by just 50% when the income of the wealthy increased by far, far more sure sounds a lot like "the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers."
That number makes absolutely no sense considering how much more basic stuff like housing is now.
Income going up does not actually mean anything without taking into consideration that people are less likely to be able to buy a house now than 50 years ago.
Exactly. If incomes increased at the same rate as housing did, then people would be much richer today than they were back then. It's why inflation uses a basket rather than just cherry picking a single component of the basket. If you want things to look bad you use housing. If you want things to look good you use potatoes. If you try and be fair you use a basket.
>> No amount of automation has ever seemed to result in a net reduction in work to do thus far
> Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers.
Or also people like working, for some value of "like":
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
That kind of misrepresents the situation because our social and economic systems screw over the employees whose jobs are automated away.
Initially there's the same amount of work, but if they don't find something else to do, they won't be able to pay their bills or buy food, and they'll be out on the street.
So we end up with crappy, low pay service jobs that only exist so people have some way to scrape out a living.
The business owners benefit from automation, the employees lose.
That’s because we use automation to solve problems and create needs we never had.
I mean, nowadays we solved pretty any need the average human had 100 years ago.
Our leaders are convinced that we must grow and grow, but we basically have everything we need to be a happy species in the long term.
What we are doing now is working (here 6 days a week) to solve inexistant problems marketers are creating while going full throttle both in burn-out and in the environmental wall.
In the meantime, while we are working hard releasing SaaS softwares, there have never been fewer farmers which, historically, have been the job of pretty any human in the last millennia.
If we don’t change this paradigm, we are at risk of dying stupidly from climate induced famine or wars just because we needed the latest smartphone.
Don’t get me wrong : I understand how at the end of the day, in the current system, all of this supports our basic needs. But we need to think about another system because we are going to destroy environment and human psyche.
Why would it? It’s not like the amount of work to do is fixed and once it’s done, everyone can relax for the rest of the year. There’s always work to do and progress just speeds up as work becomes more efficient.
Is there nothing to improve in your life? Was there nothing to improve in the 50s? Would you like supersonic commercial flights for everyone and photorealistic computer games? Electric cars and larger houses? You can also do better and improve the life of everyone. That’s not even considering the improvements impoverished countries around the world have experienced in the recent decades, have a look at Africa.
My desire to work less eclipses any desire for any of those things. I do not believe that lives are being improved. It only benefits the rich that don't have to work because there is no downside for them and they only gain more power through the system
Shiny new phones every year, bigger better faster shinier cars, Fancier meals, must have gadgets, keeping a keen eye on the Jones's, better fuller lawn without weeds, that paved driveway you've always wanted, a faster computer, better heating systems, brand name clothing...
When needs and wants get all mixed up, there is always more to be done.
It's a whole bunch of toxic factors working synergistically.
The Greek economy is dominated by low-wage tourist-oriented businesses, a whopping 20-30% of employed people are directly involved in them.
And they have to compete against Turkey, Egypt, and other low-income countries. These businesses simply cannot pay high salaries, there's no profit margin for it. So people don't want to work in these miserable conditions, and business owners have problems attracting labor.
Those low-wage tourist-oriented businesses are making crazy high margins and paying workers peanuts. Beaches keep getting gobbled up by multimillion-euro hotel complexes (unconstitutionally) so they can make money hand over fist by taking advantage of public property (with the appropriate kickbacks to the local politicians), while the local economy benefits minimally from whatever minimum-wage jobs are created in the process.
> Those low-wage tourist-oriented businesses are making crazy high margins and paying workers peanuts.
They are really not.
I looked into this in 2019, when I was making a backup plan to get an investor visa in the EU. You can buy a hotel business in Greece for basically peanuts, but it is almost impossible to make _any_ profit without resorting to shady tactics.
That's also why large chains can move in so easily. They can spread a lot of expenses and risks across multiple properties.
I'll trust your analysis, but how do you explain the extremely high prices nowadays? I went to a beach yesterday, and they wanted 75 EUR to rent an umbrella and two beds for a few hours. That's three days' wages for a Greek, how is this a low-margin business? Opex is minimal (basically bar staff), Capex is minimal (a bunch of beds and umbrellas), where's all the money going?
Maybe it's only hotels that are low-margin, with Airbnb being a competitor, but otherwise everything is too expensive for any Greek to afford to go on vacation in our own country any more. The money must be going somewhere.
I don't know who you are but chances are they saw you as a guillible sucker. That price is completely unrepresentative for Greece. Two beds and an umbrella for a day range in the 5-10 euro a day and I'm vacationing in Greece since 15 years now so I know. If you know where to look you can find "free" beds and umbrella provided you consume something from the beach bar, starting with 2 euro for a coffee. I'd get like a 5 euro frappe and give 2 euro off record to the lady who hands the tickets and that's it. For a few hours it's enough given that I don't lay the whole day in one place.
It's down to supply and demand. You get a license from local govenrment, buy some nice furniture, hire some young people, and set up shop offering a nice looking product of beach access with food, drinks, service at your umbrella, for 75 euro. More if you want front row beach access. You do leave the required free space for the public to put down their own umbrella (or not!). If you're the only shop on that particular beach, and it's a nice beach, people will come, and to enough of them your product will look "sexier" than the public beach area. By paying for it, they solve a need of theirs (beach fun) and can also brag about paying for it on social media.
Shows profitability for tourism around 20% in New Zealand - although that's on the back of some pretty crappy service jobs.
Elsewhere in the report it implies that the government makes more than 20% (15% sales tax GST, plus other taxes).
I'm not a huge fan of tourism as a sector because it's so cyclical and paid service to tourists is often unpleasant. Although tourism is likely better than some other export earners... But tourism is a more significant earner for Greece: ouch.
Is it still common to expect workers to pay government-mandated bonuses back to their bosses in cash? I know this was a common practice some years ago.
Greece has a lot of businesses with seven-day working weeks. Hotels, that kind of thing. This rule change says, AIUI, that you can't work in that kind of job and insist on a five day working week.
One wonders if increasing the compensation offered for these jobs might result in less vacancies. I mean, I've heard theories (only theories, mind you) that this could have some effect. Seems unlikely, but maybe worth a try?
I don't know a lot about Greek economy. It seems like it could be a scenario where consumers can't afford higher prices. If prices goes up then consumers bail, companies go out of business, unemployment goes down but total available jobs goes down, too. Instead, everyone's grinding their way to the bottom which isn't great, either.
There are no vacancies. On the contrary, there's a whole slew of 20-somethings willing to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for six months for 1k/mo so they have some money during the winter.
> However, at least the pay is good on Mykonos, which cannot be said for some of the less well-known Greek holiday destinations.
> All of this is why hotel-owners in regions like the popular Chalkidiki peninsula in northern Greece are having trouble finding enough workers. As a result, some restaurants and hotels in Greece will open late this summer.
Well, at least TFA is right about the horrid conditions. I don't know how right it is about the shortage, I'll tell you tomorrow when I'm there. The prices are already exorbitant, though, so I'd be surprised if the business owners couldn't afford to pay workers a bit more to entice them to come.
If there's a worker shortage, why will hotels open later? Sounds to me like an excuse to cover up a less-busy-than-expected opening season.
Exactly the same story over here in Croatia. It's a narrative from political elites blaming "lazy and demanding" workers.
The real truth is that working conditions, salaries and culture suck, and yes, workers are emigrating to other EU countries like never before in history of the country/region.
Politicians are crying their eyes out how people don't want to work so they're "forced" to let immigration being rampant. All the while being corrupted like there is no tomorrow (and probably there isn't).
This is happening everywhere and there are slight differences depending if those are jobs in tourism or not.
In tourism terrible cafe owners are complaining that waiters cost too much (they don't), hotel owners are paying minimum level wages to immigrants (why paying full salary to a local?), local public transit company is complaining that that cannot find drivers (so: immigration). All of this is complete BS. The standard of living is going down the drain, the difference between a tourist and local's buying power is larger and larger, politicians are doing everything in their powers to enrich themselves fuck all, same with judiciary, and public health services works only on paper. We're completely screwed.
And related, this reminds me about 20 years ago I was constantly hearing and reading from the media how domestic IT is sorely missing workers of any kind. Which was bs, they then wanted almost minimum wage experienced workers, just like they still want now.
> From the construction industry to the tourism sector...
those are the jobs which robots cannot currently take. And even for jobs which robots can do (manufacturing), they won't be used if the salaries are so low that humans are cheaper.
People not working at all, or working significantly less, is not acceptable by any political system of the western countries. The proof here, is the exponential rate in which debt goes up. That debt is directly funding the anti-automation each political system imposes. In other words, automation has to be stopped, and it's gonna take as much money as it needs.
This anti-automation process, created the biggest bubbles in history, equity bubble, real estate bubble, government bond bubble, pharma bubble, cryptocurrency bubble, currency bubble in short TEB(The Everything Bubble).
That's gonna end of course, and soon. It has just started yesterday actually with some triple A derivatives blowing up again like in 2007. By the end of the summer, the first bubbles will start popping off. It's gonna be fun.
[EDIT] There are more bubbles, I just put some in there.
[EDIT] The triple A blowing up is not correct.
Well, i know a lot about history, political systems when they are at the end of the road, no one really competent can even come close to be a leader. When an incompetent person thinks of a solution to a problem, they choose the worst solution.
In addition to that, there is also the possibility, that political systems themselves will be automated, not 100%, but close to 95% or 99%.
George Gammon made a video yesterday about it. I don't personally know what derivatives even mean, but i do know in 2007 something like that happened, triple A derivatives of mortgages or something.
Even if that's not it, the bubbles will start pop off soon, end of summer or end of the year, and it will take years for the process to complete, 5 years probably. For 5 years, each bubble will pop one by one.
My point is, at the end of the process, and only then, serious automation will start to happen, because they will not have the ammo to stop it.
Ok, it's not right? I will add an edit. I don't know about particular financial instruments, but i do know about the economy.
Automation is constant in everything we do. For example: Protectionism of an economy is a way to fight automation, imposing tariffs on importing cars is exactly that [1]. Trump also plans to do it.
Uber is banned in Greece, or at least not totally legal, and Airbnb the same. Interfacing with any government not totally electronically (like Esthonia) is stopping automation. House zoning laws, and permissions for buildings is also stopping automation.
Sounds in the video like some AAA CMBS had losses (not sure I'd call that a derivative, though). What I meant is why digress into it when it is not your area expertise.
I am not sure I understand how zoning laws are stopping automation or how banning Uber is stopping automation.
George Gammon made another video 21h ago, in which he explains it in depth[1]. Then again, i don't understand that situation with the financial instruments, and indeed it may not have been wise of me to mention it.
In the broad economy however, any protectionist regulation, any anti-monopolist regulation, any protection from myself like narcotic laws, and a myriad of other things, creates bubbles.
In the economy, following Adam Smith's invisible hand, any decision not taken by the individual, but is imposed upon him, and this decision carries along with him a financial cost, creates bubbles. It is that simple.
When an individual wants to hire an Uber instead of a cab driver, there are certain factors influencing his decision, like cost, convenience, quality of service and more. When an individual wants to hire an Uber but he can't, then the inferior product or service will continue to be profitable, until the individual finds a way to get around the laws and regulations.
When that happens, then the people who offer the inferior product or service, lose their source of income in a moment's notice. That's when the bubble pops.
The bad situation here, is that a lot of people will lose their source of income all at once, instead of it being gradual. That's why creating bubbles is not advisable, and it creates explosive and dangerous situations.
In Uber's case in Greece, they are banned somewhat, because as a company they have revenue from Greece, but they don't pay taxes here.
Automation's in its infancy. What makes you assume you can draw any conclusions about its effects in its maturity from the current economic situation in Greece?
Right. So they can optionally work weekends and get compensated with penalty rates. Can't really see an issue here? We have the same system in Australia for lower paid workers.
I'm confused because economically it doesn't add up.
Shortages of labor should lead to higher wages. Supply and demand.
So it would make sense to relax laws prohibiting working more than 40hrs in order to unleash additional economic output i.e. increase the amount of money made.
The article claims that for some reason that defies logic, it will just make employers demand more work for same amount of money.
I see two possibilities for that.
A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B? The wages should raise because workers would migrate to the highest paying jobs.
Or there just isn't profit to pay more in which case there's noting the government can do either way.
Greek workers have the option to work in any of the 27 EU countries, and a few non-EU countries like Switzerland and Norway.
Given that there is a shortage of skilled workers prompting this policy, it makes little sense to allow employers to demand more unpaid overtime of workers. That just means more Greeks working outside of Greece.
Greek workers already work more hours than any other EU country while making basically no money, so making Greeks work even more hours should probably not be a government priority.
Removing needless regulation and speeding up government permits would be a better idea.
> A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible.
Why? I would rather guess that this is very common. Obviously, they cannot fix wages directly, but they might outsource the job of estimating wages to some agencies providing the market wages for relevant positions. If every employer asks the same agencies, they all arrive at the same wages, with minor variations.
You must have never worked a fast food job. Companies will do anything but raise wages, even if it allows them to have way more revenue and higher reliability.
In Belgium, the "loonnormwet" or "wage norm law" controls how much workers are paid to ensure the country stays competitive. Jobs are also classified into pay scales based on their type and the qualifications needed.
This means that even if technical jobs are in high demand, if you have a lower educational degree — which is often the case — you might not earn much more because of it. As a result, these jobs may not attract many job seekers.
This situation creates a cycle where lower wages make these jobs less desirable, which can lead to difficulties in finding enough qualified workers. Now, business lobby groups like VOKA are considering bringing in immigrants from Mexico and India to fill these lower-paying positions.
The country is basically a huge cartel. The business owners have colluded to fix prices, wages, supply. In every industry or business sector. It's just effed up. Whoever has normal goals, like having a family that they can support and give them a quality of live and not just make meets end, is trying to find job in another country.
or maybe economics is the study of spherical cows trading fungible goods and services in an efficient market with perfect information, and the real world is none of those things.
> If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B?
The government service that does work inspections was soft-abolished. There is tons of immigrants that work in slavery conditions. Undocumented workers are everywhere because the taxes are too high for both workers and businesses. There was write-off of old debts for millionairs. The link below shows how government documents get stored in my home town. There are also images of people from a tax office "moving documents for storage" by throwing them out of the window to the back of a truck. We are a third world country.
That's only true because expectations rise. It's the old economics problem definition of finite supply and infinite demand, which may be true for a lot of people but not all.
It is easier to provide for "basic", however that is defined, needs such as food and clothing than ever before, and there are a lot of NEETs who live minimal lives without working because of this.
There are two sectors which have an inelasticity problem, healthcare and housing. Healthcare demand is inelastic, and housing supply is inelastic. (Housing demand is inelastic to a point where everyone is housed, and healthcare supply is inelastic because of the lag of training newer professionals, but these have less of an effect than the converse.) These are two of the sectors seeing the most price increases even as consumer staples fall in price. Housing is already correcting itself through reduced birthrates. Healthcare is the tougher problem to solve.
Theoretically the amount of work to be done is infinite, but practically people can trade work for free time, and accept the lower earnings, and still survive. Many people already do this to varying degrees.
"to be done" is doing a great deal of work in "The amount of work to be done..."
There's no fixed definition of how much work needs to be done. Different people may have different interests and standards that lead them to prefer that more, less and/or different work is carried out. The amount of work to be done can certainly be bounded for some people in some situations.
They faked their books, literally, and underrepresented their governmental debt and deficit[1] . I assume the parent post includes state borrowing and spending in assessing "wealthiest"
Greece should have left the EU when the price of membership was revealed to be a generation of ruthless recession and exploitation. Somehow the german bankers convinced them it was worth it even though grexit would've been much more expensive to them then loan forgiveness. I don't see what Greece got out of EU membership other than a brain drain as their ambitious youth is forced to leave their country.
How about others in the EU bailing them out when they found out you actually can't just increase spend forever? Grexit would have been certain bankruptcy
Isn't Greece's unemployment rate the highest in the E.U.? Yes, they may be "low-quality" workers applying for jobs, but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do.
> but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do.
At some point it isn't economical to "make do", because paying for in-training employees eats into margins. Especially if "training" means you have to teach to read and write properly and teach how to do more arithmetic than counting on your fingers. No Greek business is going to squirm at investing a few months of training, but the reality is that many people are lacking years.
Greece has been ranking near last in the EU on some important education metrics (specifically those that affect composition of their workforce, like early leavers and those who never went to school at all) until they recently got their stuff together and did a complete 180, but for now they're still stuck with a workforce whose education isn't a strong match for the kind of work that is available now.
There's very little work for people with tertiary education in Greece, and at the same time there's a large number of people who simply hadn't had any formal education at all or dropped out early. The middle ground is extremely under served.
Companies have no pension to tie people to those jobs, people make more money by job hopping, companies don’t give large enough raises to keep people, companies lay off people at the slight change in fortune. Correspondingly it doesn’t make sense to spend the time training someone if they leave as soon as they are productive.
The problem with training new hires is that they can leave with the the skillset you invested in them. I realize of course that employer loyalty erosion may be in large part to blame for that being a big risk, but the issue should be acknowledged in an era of increased job switching.
Funny how not that long ago everyone used to predict that with the increases of productivity worldwide we'll keep reducing our workload to a point where we'll work just few hours a week and remain just as productive. And it seems that this has happened for a select few but everyone else is working more and more just to afford rent and basic necessities.
> And it seems that this has happened for a select few
It's happened for anyone that owns housing without a mortgage in a wealthy country.
Everyone else has to work full-time to pay their landlord or bank. Given the housing stock is kept artificially low, all remaining money in the average paycheck will necessarily be eaten up by housing. It doesn't really matter how productive the economy is. If shelter is kept scarce, the cost of housing will keep rising to eat up the rest of the average paycheck.
"Given the housing stock is kept artificially low,"
I'm not sure I'd call it artificial. There are rational market forces at play. The real issue is that everyone wants to live in the same places, and the people there already want to preserve their lifestyle and investment.
I got into AI specifically, because the automation and productivity yields would result in a 4hr work week for most if not all upon full fruition.
That dream-like bubble got popped when I was reminded by a savvy individual at a hackathon basically what you alluded to in your post. He was concerned that the elites would hoard the productivity of AI as they would get a controlling stake and it wouldn't benefit the common people as much. At first I was slightly incredulous and thought better of my fellow humans but then after seeing countless confirming examples in different settings, you and this hackathon guy have a worrisome point.
Capitalist forces, at least its current iteration and various other political-economic systems seem incapable or willfully defiant on providing rent and basic necessities. We have the wealth to shelter all and feed all for a fraction of human effort yet gaining access to reliable shelter and food is a continual struggle for those not in the top rungs of wealth earners. Capitalism is reaaaaally good at producing wealth, it's atrocious at spreading it around or serving the needs of the lower classes.
So many things point at increasing wealth and automation doesn't trickle down in meaningful ways to the lower classes.
Tesla's obviously going through some recent struggles, it's cutting 10-ish % of its workforce, yet the board repeatedly push through a multi-billion dollar package for technoking... Barf.
Besides that jarring example, I wish I could remember a lot of people making elicit abstract takes, on the failings of democracy and capitalism at serving the people.
But one is: David Graeber. He talked about bullshit jobs and the promise of the 15 hour work week according the John Keynes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs. I recommend youtube videos of him or reading his book.
I'm sure Noam Chomsky has some good points.
There's also Norm Finklesteins comment about what he calls a mausoleum in New York, a multi-million dollar building owned by internationals that's empty, all the while there's homeless outside. The contrast is striking. I've heard Greek has had similar problems in recent past of foreigners owning lots of the touristry spots pushing out the locals.
Then there are plenty of situations where there's some corporation thats the main wealth creator in an area. The majority stakeholders of course somehow finesse their way into more than their fair share of the wealth with some rationalizations that most people buy into without a second thought. But the math discrepency over the long term doesn't quite paint a copasetic picture.
Neighboring that, I like doing this thought experiment: It's clear there aren't any super humans on this planet. No "true" self-made billionaires IE billionaires that can make a billion without any other human involvement. Sure it's easy to become a billionaire when you financially hoodwink a group collaboration taking a lionshare of the stake by some financial contraption that most have no idea what's going on or have no negotiation power to be like NAH. Even so, there will always be the next useful idiot to agree to get taken advantage of to make Jeff Bezos rich. Maybe not an idiot, but starving and desperate to get food.
But back to the majority stakeholders. So the majority stakeholders get extremely lopsidedly compensated. Here is where trickle-down does work. Others have to find a way to "service" these majority stakeholders so that they can depart those wealth hoarders from the pennies pinched between their fingers and exchange that for food and shelter from price-gouging landlords in cities where building enough shelter at good pricing is such an insurmountable obstacle (My apologies I'm laying it on too thick). The trickle down effect in the economy takes the shape of how the wealth hoarders want to be served. If Jeff Bezos wants a stadium-sized yacht and a personal lower orbit shuttle service. Well the economy contorts, IE industrial capacity and labor effort, that contorts with its discretionary capacity to serve those needs and those who are willing to provide that can get their housing and sustanence needs taken care of. The stadium-sized yacht and spaceship side hustle wouldn't upset me so much if Amazon's work conditions weren't so notorious and also if everyone's shelter was already prioritized before reaching out for more absurd business schemes.
Regardless, our political-economic systems (Greece or elsewhere) definitely are failing some key evaluation metrics regardless of the spin proponents like to place on them.
In Chile in the 1950s they had a 48-hour work (and school) week: Monday through Saturday. However, it was common for people to just not show up for work on Mondays, jocularly referred to as "celebrating Saint Monday's Day", even though they forfeited one day's pay. In 1959 the government implemented a new program: if you worked the full 6 days you were paid for 7 days. If you worked less than 6 days, you were only paid for the days you actually worked; that meant that taking Monday off now cost you two days pay. The "Saint Monday's Day" practice quickly died away.
Productivity has increased substantially over the past few generations. Longer working time just captures more of that productivity for the benefit of the employer. This is a continuation of another trend over the past generations, to have increased productivity over a much larger segment of the population (more women joined the workforce) and yet the benefits of this were mostly captured by the employers, at least in the countries where this was more thoroughly documented and didn’t suffer any upheaval or regime changes to influence the numbers (e.g. the US).
Maybe it's just a Greece thing. I notice that other EU countries are doing a lot better than them economically; not sure why Greece in particular seems to be struggling.
AGI and General Purpose robots are both so far off in the future they should be considered science fiction at this point. The "Woz Standard" - a robot is dropped in front of a random house and proceeds without any assistance to brew a cup of coffee - is hard to imagine being met before 2040, if not even later.
I don't see a future where we have AGI but don't have affordable full fledged household robots costing like a car or less. Where are already at the point where you pay more for the programming than the robot itself.
Totally agree, with all this attention to "smart devices" in recent years I wonder where my consumer-sized flying de-duster mini-drone or something like that is? Sure the floor's sorted even with a 100%-non-smart robo-vac (and thusly, a flyer could just wipe or blow the dust down to the ground instead of any complicated gathering acrobatics), but the ground's just approx. half of dust-prone surface area..
I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately. Humans are good at arbitrary judgements like “this is dusty”.
It suffers the same kinds of problems as robotic pooper-scoopers, and even self-driving cars.
Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?
> I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately.
Not needed. Like a robo-vac running frequently: they don't pick up _every_ single grain of dust perfectly during one given run. You just run them often enough they keep the floor "undusty enough". Or trimming beard / head at x mm every y days, not every hair is a perfect x mm at all times but the repetition / constancy makes it close enough.
> Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?
Intuitively, probably the latter?.. But engineers working on such a thing would probably be best off prototyping and validating in both directions and with endless parameterizations =)
> Cleaning my bathroom seems like a better benchmark.
Unclogging pipes full of toilet paper, pee and shit (I have to do that once in a, thankfully, rare while) is mine. The robots must be able to go in the garden, find the manholes, verify where the pee and shit are clogged, and fix it.
When do we have that?
P.S: every time I couldn't fix it myself, I called a company specialized in that sort of thing. Interestingly I never ever saw a woman show up. It was always men. Just as the new automatic registering of 18/26 y/o people for military only concerns men. It's interesting how the sex equality ain't respected in these cases.
> Just as the new automatic registering of 18/26 y/o people for military only concerns men.
I think the people who want to protect the draft have a vested interest in not introducing equality here. Namely, their constituents have a particular mental model of how the world should be. They want to maintain that illusion.
Try 2400. Our current breed of capitalism is always only aiming to pick the lowest-hanging fruit and milk it to death and then beyond. Our current economics do not reward long-running projects with a huge payout in some 10-50 years in the future so I am pretty sure we'll never see general AI in this current phase of the civilization.
The situation in Europe is worsening rapidly, and it's not just in Greece—it's a trend across several countries. The rise of nationalist parties has increased the influence of corporate lobbies as well.
Migrants frequently bear the brunt of blame in this environment. Additionally, there's a troubling misuse of subsidies and tax breaks, with funds often channelled to companies who exploit them solely to boost their profits, rather than fulfilling their intended benefits.
Certainly, in Belgium, this issue is significant. We allocate billions in tax breaks for research and innovation, yet politicians sometimes appear at technology fairs showcasing outdated VR technology as if it were still groundbreaking in 2014. Now, they are using lag in the development of AI as a way to justify new tax breaks, all the while proposing cuts to social benefits.
Fascinating thing about america 50 years ago was it seemed to work 24/7. In Finlandia it was illegal to work after 16:00. Then we got a nazi government who decided that small shops and kiosks can extend their hours upto 18:00.
Worst thing was that there was no bank services outside 8:00-16:00. This was a blessing sort of, because Finland was the only country you could get bank services with a modem in 1970's. In 1983 you could do exactly all banking with your own Teletype. This included realtime stock exchange and that modern scheiße.
At least HN's downvoting team works 24/7.
Excellent.
"Seemed" meaning through the media you watched while living in Finland? And you think that gives a good representative view of what the US was like in the 1970s? The news and shows you watched from the US were mostly made in large cities in California and New York.
Parts of the US in the 1970s certainly had blue laws similar to what you mention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States mentions that "Maine was the last New England state to repeal laws that prohibited department stores from opening on Sundays. The laws against the department stores opening on Sundays were ended by referendum in 1990." and that in North Dakota it wasn't until 1991 that most business were allowed to be open on Sunday, and 1988 for Virginia.
For that matter, TV stations would stop broadcasting during the late night, with about 6 hours of dead air, not the 24/7 of modern stations. Fall asleep watching Carson and you might be woken up by the national anthem played just before shutdown.
No doubt your exaggerations cause the downvotes. It was not illegal to work after 16:00, even in Finland. Who ran the restaurants? The buses? The power company? The phones? The hospitals? The hotels?
This 1979 travel guide for US tourists, at https://archive.org/details/fieldingseurope10000fiel/page/28... , says shopping hours in Finland (or at least Helsinki) at that time were "Weekdays, 8:30 A.M. to 5 P.M., plus 8 P.M. on Monday and Friday; Saturday 8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. in winter, with 3 P.M. closings in summer."
A long time ago my retort when someone would claim California's government was oppressive was; I can walk into the grocery store Sunday morning and buy hard liquor.
Erh. What? I bicycled across America in 1984. Never seen in any other country that a food store can be open at midnight.
As regards 1979 Finland, this was far after beforementioned reforms. I remember I almost died
on a 100km sunday trip in 1966. Not even kiosks were open in Porvoo. I drank water from a ditch and got instant diarré. Fainted couple of times, but some trucker eventually saved me.
A few pages earlier, it says hairdressers are generally open 8AM to 5PM.
It seems like a pretty good nightlife scene. On page 412, "Always go late to savor Helsinki nightlight (except to Espilä which wraps up the evening at 1 A.M.) The gear shifts of merriment seldom mesh into overdrive before 11 P.M. - and from then onward, they're off and racing."
Earlier on the same page it also mentions "Prayer Sundays" - four Sundays of the year where there is no public entertainment between 6pm Saturday and 6pm Sunday.
"While the 40-hour work week is still officially in place, employers are permitted to require staff to work up to two unpaid hours per day for a limited period in return for more free time."
This is kind of a wild quote from the article. WTF? two hours unpaid work per day?
"A supplement of 40% of the daily wage will be paid for the sixth day of labor."
It's unclear to me if this means they're receiving 100% + 40% for their sixth day, or if the sixth day is 4/10th the normal wage?
What the article probably means is "they get those two hours back in lieu" and "140% pay on the sixth day".
What already has been happening in reality is that workers work ten/twelve-hour days for no overtime, and the sixth day is unpaid. We've been working six-day workweeks ever since I can remember (so at least forty years), and probably much longer than that.
The first paragraph ends with “in return for more free time” which makes zero sense if they are working 2 more hours for each day. I was expecting something later like it’s banked and you work a 4 day week or something. But nothing on that.
And then yeah one place it says unpaid and another place (to me) said 140% pay rate for that time.
This is a classic sign of a ruling class derailed. They have pushed a series of education reform to create "better useful idiots" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... and then they collect as a result a large slice of people unable to do anything, rulers included, so as long as those who know retire there is no way to go ahead.
I think it's too late to recover, there will be a social collapse, a war as usual to cover and control the people and a slow recover. I only hope that respect of the past this time those who have caused the collapse for their personal interest will not make it again.
1. people say that robots are taking all the jobs
2. countries raise retirement age & adopt 6 day work week, because there's too much work to be done
I am not entirely sure, but maybe robots are not that bad, assuming appropriate taxation to fund pensions & 5-day work weeks?