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.
Who 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”?
All of this is fairly obvious to someone not wearing a MAGA hat.
Productivity per person has increased since the 80’s, but wages have not followed - rather they have remained largely stagnant.
As such, the increased profits are instead going into an increasingly small amount of very rich people’s pockets
A rigged system is not a paradox.
Let me guess:
It’s because all the money goes to billionaires.
Edit: Pretty much what it says. It’s more detailed than that but yeah. Labourers get less, more value is attributed to capital (buildings, land) and collected by the rich.
Yep without even reading the article I was going to guess wage theft and billionaires.
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.
EDIT: I’ve decided I’m not going to be overly charitable towards the article since it got an overall positive response from here. I’m very certain the article was written partially or fully by an LLM, and that it was written to advertise the portfolio of whoever wrote it. The article doesn’t make a good effort to make an argument capable of convincing anyone who doesn’t already agree with the thesis. The counter arguments are bunched up at the end and barely countered at all:
Absolute living standards have genuinely improved. Longer lifespans, better medicines, access to information that would have cost thousands of dollars in library fees
Free services — Google Search, Wikipedia, WhatsApp — create enormous value that doesn’t show up in GDP at all. The consumption ceiling argument partially breaks down for digital goods with near-zero marginal cost.
So does the article’s author actually think technological improvements have failed to benefit regular people? They don’t seem interested in arguing these benefits are fake, or outweighed by negative aspects. If they want to argue that the 1% have captured most of the growth that technology has given, their article doesn’t support that. It gives a lot of explanations why this might happen but the first part meant to cement that it does happen is based on unfounded conclusions which the “What This Isn’t Saying” part then lists reasons not to trust.
“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: :)
I can confirm - it is slop.
Inflation. 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.
Greed. Full stop
The problem is capitalism
