Comment by sigmoid10
3 hours ago
Yikes. Good to know that labor shares used to rebound after crises, but since the 2000s and the dotcom bubble it has basically been downhill only. So don't expect any of this to get better unless we roll back technology to the last millenium.
It's not the tech but who sees the benefits. The issue at play is the monopolization and concentration of power.
Ie, why can one guy who is insanely wealthy due to stock valuations take loans against that to pull various levers of power. We didn't elect him, we need a way to control that outsized influence.
Not technology - that's only downstream of politics.
No political administration in my lifetime (!) has made policy decisions against the interests of tech monopolists. The closest we got was Lina Kahn's FTC.
Technology isn't the problem. The problem is the generation in governing power through the last 2 decades has no problem burning down the country's future to maintain lavish retirement funds for themselves.
I think it's more nuanced than that. There surely are plenty of cases where that is the case, but it's also a natural effect of hyperfinancialization, which many really do believe to be a "net positive" for the stability it brings. There's also the natural tendency of consolidation and centralization of power, and the natural counter-balance to that has been suppressed. Then you have legislative incompetence, the general failings of scientific governance aggregating over time, and many other structural flaws that are deeply seated and long-running.
We shouldn't just be pointing at the (very much real) stupid greed, there are many rotten components occurring simultaneously.