Comment by bluefirebrand
10 months ago
> Nonsense. We make far, far more than people did in the past entirely because of the productivity gains from automation.
"We" were never subsistence farmers, our ancestors were
I'm talking about real changes that have happened in our actual lifetimes.
In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents. In order to afford even remotely close to the same standard of living as our parents had, we have to go into much larger amounts of debt
We have watched jobs move overseas as automation lowered the skill requirements so that anyone could perform them, so we sought the cheapest possible labour to do them
We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
The fact is that automation is disruptive, which is great for markets but bad for people who are relying on consistency. Which is most people
> In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents.
This graph is going up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
The reason you believe otherwise is that people on social media think they're only allowed to say untrue negative things about the economy, because if they ever say anything positive it'd be disrespectful to poor people.
> We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it.
> We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
> Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it
You think service workers at a fast food restaurant or working the till at Walmart are higher paid than Factory workers?
> They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
The reason it is positive for (almost) every group is because it isn't measuring anything meaningful
Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
> You think service workers at a fast food restaurant or working the till at Walmart are higher paid than Factory workers?
Fast food workers aren't service-economy workers, they're making burgers back there.
More importantly, factory work destroys your body and email jobs don't, so whether or not it's high earning at the start… it isn't forever.
> Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
That's not a salary chart. The income chart I did post is adjusted for cost of living (that's what "real" means).
Also see https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-growth-since-1979-has-not-been...
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