JensSpahnpastaThe Productivity Paradox: Why Technology Makes the Economy More Efficient But Most People No Richer
Armand1
∟⊔⊤∦∣≶Wage theft is not merely being underpaid relative to the work you do. It’s actually not paying someone who worked
Vandals_handleIt’s both and more.
Wage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.
Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism
I think I deserve more, but I accept less anyway, due to the ever present threat of unrecoverable retribution against myself and my family if I negotiate too hard
I’m glad to hear that you don’t have a family, a pet, or other unit that you need to support other than yourself, and do not have an illness that requires medical insurance in a country that requirrs it for care, that a capitalist cannot exploit.
Think about this. Are there infinite companies to switch to? When you switch, someone still has to work the job you did. If everyone is trying to switch to companies that pay them adequately, how long until those positions run out? Be realistic. You can’t just say ‘go somewhere better’ because there simply isn’t the opportunity for everyone to do that. Better positions run out. Most people are stuck working jobs that pay them less than is required to live a half decent life, not because of their own fault, but because there isn’t opportunities for everyone. Why is that? Take a dip into reality and abandon the meme quotes for a second.
They have to pay the guy who did my job more, basically. This is because companies don’t really give raises adequately, so the guy doing my job actually will ask for more or he simply won’t accept the offer
I’m actually quite successful, but it was pure luck. My professional rivals keep disappearing under mysterious circumstances. (This is obvious satire.)
This reads like a lazily written article to me. The em dashes don’t increase my enthusiasm. Just in the opening I noticed:
Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% today. technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consume
Of course, real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled (more since it increased by 7pp). Is most of this billionaire yachts? I have no clue, but if you want to convince me you should try to not claim total amounts when you mean relative amounts.
A physical bookstore in 2000 took in $100 from a book sale and distributed it roughly like this: about 60% went to labor (store staff, publisher employees, authors), 30% went to capital (owner profit, rent), and 10% covered other costs. The money circulated locally through wages.
Amazon today takes in that same $100. The distribution looks fundamentally different: warehouse and tech labor receives roughly 25%, Amazon’s infrastructure and profit captures around 55%, and the remainder flows to publishers and authors. Labor’s share of that transaction dropped by more than half.
… unless you count the publisher and authors like you did for the 2000s data, in which case it decreased from 60% to 45%. And that’s persumably not counting the manufacturing of server farms, refinement of minerals, purchase of the actual reading tablet. Amazon has high margins but not 55% margins.
The labor share of US GDP fell from approximately 64% in 1980 to around 58% today — a 6-percentage-point shift. Applied to a $28 trillion economy, that gap represents roughly $1.7 trillion per year that once flowed to workers but now flows to capital.
Once again, since the GDP per capita has doubled the labor dollars per person has actually increased. The label for the $1.7 trillion is similarly misleading, those dollars never “once flowed to workers”, they just would have if the economy had grown without any changes to its composition.
If I were the author of the article, perhaps I would say that since 1980, real median wages have only grown by about 20% which seems very slight given the technological improvements made in that time. But how much of that 20% increase would have been possible without technological improvement, and how much has the quality of the things people spend their money on grown in that time? No clue, that’s beyond the thinking budget I have for this article.
Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over
Graph and download economic data for Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LES1252881600Q) from Q1 1979 to Q3 2025 about full-time, salaries, workers, 16 years +, earnings, wages, median, real, employment, and USA.
Rimu“real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled”
GDP measures a lot of things that are not consumer spending.
That’s true. My point was that the article is claiming that since the share of GDP which is consumer spending decreased, total consumer spending also decreased. But since GDP per capita increased at the same time, the actual total consumer spending per person increased (the 7 percentage point decrease does not outweigh the doubling of real GDP per capita). This could be misleading in its own right, with the richest spending more and the median spending less even in total numbers, but the article doesn’t claim that. It claims that total spending has gone down, which is just not true.
ah, duh, yeah - the share shrunk but the pie grew so it’s still a bit more cake
Giving you an upvote for using three metaphors in a sentence that small. Impressive!
thank you, I am giving you a smiley face back: :)
People have always been greedy. The difference is systems to encourage people to be useful to others so that greedy people have to provide something good to make more money
Good: legal systems that uphold contracts
Bad: regulatory capture where corps make money without doing anything useful
AmnesigenicThe problem is capitalism
Lol nope, it’s the direct result of an economic system that funnels wealth to the top
LexamWho owns the means of production that make industris more efficient? Bingo.
I swear it‘s like people don‘t even know who or what Karl Marx is.
They don’t. Schools teach that “Karl Marx didn’t want anyone to have any money, and to be owned by the state. They quickly ran out of food because no one was motivated to work.”
Why do you think guys who purchased “Truck Nuts” all screech on Twitter about “socialism is when you do all the work and they take all the profits” when that’s exactly what capitalism is and they are too dumb to notice? Why do you think the Tetris movie wasn’t really about Tetris but instead about “Soviets bad”?
Your comment only works for those who don’t live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it’s western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.
USSR wasn’t really communist though, was it? They tried and failed to make a communist state, no?
No country has managed a transition to communism, all of them got turned into various types of authroritarian dictatorships. There is no known method for transitioning to communism and maintaining it.
Would you know whether or not democratic socialism is a good prospect in that regard? A flavor of which that remains capitalistic, but using worker coops instead of the top down monarchistic approach?
Communism in its true form is unsustainable economically and defies basic human sociology and psychology.
Humans lived for 10s of thousands of years under communism. Capitalism was invented and within a couple of centuries the human race is commiting collective suicide with falling birth rates.
For family units but it quickly breaks down in larger groups and as complexity increases.
There were a few years of war communism during, well, the Civil War, but due to all the hunger deaths it might not be what your usual USSR fan wants to think about.
Marx’s view was that socialism would develop as an emergent phenomenon (a modern term, not one he used) to correct the contradictions of capitalism. But in both Russia and China, they tried to impose socialism on what were essentially feudal societies. The result was state capitalism, the industrial revolution imposed at gunpoint with no control of the means of production by the workers. And, as capitalist societies, both countries continued the imperialism and nationalism of their predecessor regimes.
And this isn’t an after-the-fact critique: contemporary socialists such as Rosa Luxembourg made these observations at the time.
Skipping a developmental stage doesn’t work.
Didn’t read the article yet.
I have a good friend who is homeless and begs for money. He says his life is much better than the life of the richest people of just a few centuries ago.
That’s not even true, even when accounting for the advance in technology, because your friend is likely dirt poor.
There are still lots of people much better off financially than your friend who work to keep wages low, work benefits low, and prices high. A daydream about the past doesn’t matter, because his and 90% of people’s material conditions are shit, and this financial and class oppression is what matters, not what fancy technology we have that makes us think we’re “kings”.
shortwavesurferInflation. You are putting your labor in and getting a money that your government can almost literally print for free in their basement. When you do it, it’s called counterfeit and you can be sent to jail for many years or killed. If they do it, it’s called inflation and is perfectly acceptable. STOP USING THEIR CURRENCY and your life WILL get better. Use Monero, Gold, or Silver. Since the government can’t print those things, they will retain their value.
stem/“skilled” labor isnt benefiting from improved tech, it all goes to ceos, and billionaire/millionaires.
Different system, same problem.
It makes the class pyramid narrower and taller at the top.
Computers cost 92% less than they did in 2000.
Until the current RAM, storage and GPU crisis.
Yes, RAM crisis will make computers cost 12,5 times more.
This is not adjusted for computing power.
AlmaccaThe reason is rich people.
Most people ARE richer.
Median wage growth since 1990 is over 40% and the quality of products significantly increased.
That’s definitely true, but the cost of some things have greatly out paced that like housing or travel.
Hours of work/sqf ratio is pretty much unchanged since 1990, BUT the quality of housing now is much better than it was 36 years ago.
Travel cost almost exactly followed inflation in the last 36 years, but again, travel now is significantly better than it was back then.
Most of the percieved price increase comes from the lifestyle inflation and just idolizing childhood.
Short review directly from this source for those, who don’t want to read the whole article:
The Core Problem, Simply Stated
Technology is making distribution dramatically more efficient.
But efficiency gains are being captured by whoever controls the bottleneck — the platform, the marketplace, the search engine — rather than distributed to the workers who enable production or the consumers who fund it.
Without wages, workers can’t consume. Without consumption, capital has nowhere productive to go. So it piles up in buybacks and data centers. GDP growth slows. And we wonder why a world of genuine technological marvels feels economically stagnant for most people.
That’s the paradox.
As AI accelerates the substitution of capital for labor, the dynamics described here are likely to intensify rather than resolve. The question isn’t whether the technology works — it clearly does. The question is whether the institutions and incentive structures around it will evolve fast enough to distribute what it creates.
That’s the harder problem. And it’s not a technology problem at all.
The real reason is that monopolies or other forms of market power prevent competitive pricing, wages and rents.