> I wrote this with Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic’s AI model. If you don’t trust AI, just know that these are the same models that are currently wiping the floor with every other field, and I really didn’t try and force fable to write something I already agreed with. Actually, this whole experience has been me realising just how wrong I am about some things. Anyways, Claude did the measurements with me, drew the figures and drafted most of the text from my earlier essays.
Condescending attitude aside, if I wanted to hear what Fable says about this, I'd ask Fable myself. I want to hear what YOU have to say about this.
j2kun
Productivity gains have mostly gone to the investor class, they’re not only not working but making more for not working than they ever have. Elon could go sniff glue for a day and he’ll make more money than most of us would working 10 jobs for the rest of our lives.
an0malous
Not least people have gotten much more productive at some things and not at all more productive at other things. And those things become a larger fraction of what people wwnt, see
We had a run from 1980 to 2020 or so where the price of most things stayed stable except for housing, healthcare, education and childcare. It’s only the last year that people are complaining about the price of electronics.
PaulHoule
I'm no economist but it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase. Also, more generally, people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society, rather than their wealth in absolute terms [1]. So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
jpatten
Productivity and inflation are big subjects.
Just to touch on one important problem for which one must account:
Productivity over time is how much stuff you get out vs what you put in, from one time period to the next. Inflation is what the stuff costs over time.
But what do you do with stuff you used to make that you don't make now?
And the opposite: what do you do with stuff you make now that you didn't used to make?
If you look only at the the things that are almost exactly the same from one period to another, usually you find that the intuitions hold: food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
If you dig into the details of CPI and PPI, you'll quickly say, "waiiiiiit a second, can you really just do that?"
For example: they'll say that your tv or car now is "more stuff" because of "features." But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs.
djoldman
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard. The hardest working participants of the labor market will set the tone of the competition for high-paying jobs.
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
Dr_Birdbrain
This seems to point to that there should be no income tax for individuals, only consumption and wealth taxes.
And there is an argument for companies to pay both a wealth and a turnover tax, appropriately scaled. This might be able to stimulate more diversity of small/medium companies, and thus negating the monoculture like markets that currently seem to arise on a per sector basis, also allowing wider ranging ideas to flourish.
The tax system in western countries generally does not seem to have kept pace with the change in what work/productivity now is, and so gives incentives to the established rather than the emerging.
A number of eastern economies seem to have worked out better regimes encouraging overall diversity of enterprise - it is a tricky balance as you don't want to remove the incentive to try, but the concentration of wealth we see is not healthy in such individualistic societies as the west has.
airbreather
This reminded me of a strange quote I heard a while ago:
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
The author still writes with a savior complex. The basic observation, that productivity goes up but the rich get richer, is not novel to their work. Their explanations and conclusions about this issue are also not new either - they just rehash 250-year-old classical economics.
The actually (apparently) novel part - a macro wage model described in 'Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology' - is not discussed in detail. We don't know its relative merits or if its predictions are historically accurate.
skew-aberration
Tech (business in general) is a Red Queen's Race. If everyone else runs faster, you have to run faster just to stay in place.
We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.
comments (10)
Condescending attitude aside, if I wanted to hear what Fable says about this, I'd ask Fable myself. I want to hear what YOU have to say about this.
j2kun
an0malous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
We had a run from 1980 to 2020 or so where the price of most things stayed stable except for housing, healthcare, education and childcare. It’s only the last year that people are complaining about the price of electronics.
PaulHoule
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
jpatten
Just to touch on one important problem for which one must account:
Productivity over time is how much stuff you get out vs what you put in, from one time period to the next. Inflation is what the stuff costs over time.
But what do you do with stuff you used to make that you don't make now?
And the opposite: what do you do with stuff you make now that you didn't used to make?
If you look only at the the things that are almost exactly the same from one period to another, usually you find that the intuitions hold: food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
If you dig into the details of CPI and PPI, you'll quickly say, "waiiiiiit a second, can you really just do that?"
For example: they'll say that your tv or car now is "more stuff" because of "features." But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs.
djoldman
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
Dr_Birdbrain
And there is an argument for companies to pay both a wealth and a turnover tax, appropriately scaled. This might be able to stimulate more diversity of small/medium companies, and thus negating the monoculture like markets that currently seem to arise on a per sector basis, also allowing wider ranging ideas to flourish.
The tax system in western countries generally does not seem to have kept pace with the change in what work/productivity now is, and so gives incentives to the established rather than the emerging.
A number of eastern economies seem to have worked out better regimes encouraging overall diversity of enterprise - it is a tricky balance as you don't want to remove the incentive to try, but the concentration of wealth we see is not healthy in such individualistic societies as the west has.
airbreather
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
-Tim Gurney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHP0VfeOrU&t=12s
andai
The author still writes with a savior complex. The basic observation, that productivity goes up but the rich get richer, is not novel to their work. Their explanations and conclusions about this issue are also not new either - they just rehash 250-year-old classical economics.
The actually (apparently) novel part - a macro wage model described in 'Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology' - is not discussed in detail. We don't know its relative merits or if its predictions are historically accurate.
skew-aberration
We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.
Swizec