You don’t worker harder than the ones before you to increase the rate of profit, therefore you deserve significantly less is certainly a take.
Nesrie
3356
I mean modern day working schedules have days off and limits on how many hours worked. Most the people repeating this spiel already work less hard then the ones who frequently collapsed before them on the job because of labor laws. I mean there was a time when you basically stopped working because there wasn’t any light left to work under. I don’t think that made them more productive than someone who maybe stopped before the sunset and now has better tools.
Economic systems, like supply and demand models in capitalism, only tell you what is most efficient. It doesn’t actually tell you that efficiency should be valued over some other value. That’s what politicians say, not economists, and the two get intermingled enough where it sounds like it’s coming from one when it’s really coming from the other.
Compared to 1890? Yes. Compared to 1970? No. What we have compared to 1970 is much better tools and longer working days and the same pay.
Indeed, if capitalism doesn’t make us better off, why should we tolerate it? I thought that was the entire argument for capitalism.
Nesrie
3358
My point is, the people who are often trying to claim how hard they are working in comparison to the younger generations never REALLY want to compare how hard they are working to the generations long behind them. And that’s because it’s not really about how hard anyone is working at any particular moment to begin with. It’s really about value judgments masquerading as math problems to try and shutdown the fact that people rightfully have different opinions on what to value more.
I really don’t understand what point you’re trying to make, @Nesrie. We are all obviously thankful to not be subsistence farmers or railroad workers, but the point I’m at least on is that the massive productivity gains over the last fifty years should, in a just society, mean that even small farmers or unskilled laborers should have a safe and healthy life given the unbelievable amounts of material largesse at our disposal.
Instead, we have megayachts, luxury spaceflight, and Fyre Festivals while millions of Americans (and of course it’s much worse in less affluent regions) either die homeless or work for sub-subsistence wages in no-hope jobs to try and avoid that fate.
It’s worth noting that not even John Maynard Keynes, who predicted a 15-hr workweek, was able to imagine what the greed of the capital class would demand from future workers.
Nesrie
3361
What I am trying to point out is models used in capitalism only tell you what is most efficient. The visuals of supply meeting demand, for example, are pretty familiar to everyone… but that only tells you what has the most efficiency. Efficiency is not always the goal… in fact it often isn’t. Society choses a lot of different goals over efficiency all the time and capitalism absolutely allows you to do that, to make value judgments beyond pure efficiency.
Productivity is often interlinked with efficiency models, but again that only tells you what the inputs say are most efficient. They do not tell you what you should do or that efficiency should even be in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd position of any set goals. Capitalism allows you to know what is more efficient but have society choose goals that more important than that.
Aka, you don’t have to abandon capitalism concepts, models or ideals to live with in a society that prioritizes other things. It’s not economic based ideals that says that, it’s political.
We don’t have megayachts birthing baby yachts out in the ocean due to economic models. We have that due to political and societal one. No functioning country would ever be based on pure economic models… nor is it meant to be. The rich, politicians and decision makers are using capitalism and a faux shield for making terrible decisions and by doing so trying to say arguing against them is somehow an argument against math to shut everyone up. That’s not how economic systems work.
I don’t really see any way to separate economics from politics.
Nesrie
3363
I literally just told you how.
You acknowledge that yes, this model is most efficient, but there are more important things than efficiency. You don’t have to argue against capitalism in order to make that statement or make judgments that enforce that statement.
For example, taxes are not efficient, not when you look at the most basic models around them. They simply aren’t. You loose money, read spend money, trying to collect money. That doesn’t mean countries that are largely based on capitalism shouldn’t have taxes. Of course they should.
The question in society isn’t about whether to have taxes or not have taxes, it’s about how to have taxes, and which taxes to have. And those choices are far more influenced by politics than by any economic model. We don’t have negligible inheritance taxes because the economic models say they’re inefficient; we have negligible inheritance taxes because rich people don’t want to pay them, and they drive the political decision-making. Similarly, economic models suggest that optimum rates of income taxation are as high as 70%, but that doesn’t produce real-world tax rates of 70 percent, because rich people won’t allow them.
I’m saying that the way we practice economics is…politics.
Politics is the air you breathe, separating it from economy…that’s akin to having a lobotomy.
Timex
3366
Again, when we are talking about mean wages in the US economy, you aren’t capturing the whole equation.
There are billions of people who saw their standard of living increase dramatically over that period of time, within that capitalist system.
But it’s a global system, and you are measuring a single country (which happens to be the country with an extremely high standards of living when you started the graph), and ignoring all of the global labor force that had their wages and standard of living increase.
Nesrie
3367
If you spend money to get money and then take x- the money you spent and you spend more money to redistribute it, you are not getting x amount of money to spend on the things you want to spend it on, you are getting x - (money you spent to get money) - (money you spent to res-distribute). It literally is less than x. This is not the most efficient way to spend x amount of dollars. However, society has decided that x - these sums is okay because spending slightly less than x for the greater good is better than hoping x gets to where it needs to go without that inefficiency; it’s a societal good.
There is no requirement in capitalism that says you cannot prioritize societal goods, aka what is best for society, over market efficiency. It’s simply not there. It’s up to society, often through elected officials and basic voting, to decide what is best for society.
The problem is, you have a bunch of politicians, business individuals, rich individuals and anyone else with obvious self-interest heavily involved in these decisions trying to use capitalism not as a tool but as a weapon to shutdown dissent, and they do that by trying to say: anyone who argues against me argues against capitalism. Then those individuals, for reasons that make no sense at all, say okay well then we’ll argue against capitalism… and we wind up here.
I don’t think people are arguing against capitalism as much as they’re arguing against the kind of capitalism we’re being subjected to. And they’re not wrong.
I dunno, I think you’re arguing that American worker wages didn’t rise with productivity gains because they had to be shared with global workers, but I don’t really understand why, over the same period, capital’s share of productivity gains…went up? Why weren’t they shared with global workers, too?
Nesrie
3370
No. They are. They get a bunch of people to sit outside banks and say down with capitalism. Then they get some people to sit at city hall and say, down with capitalism. And then someone asks them what is it you want, and there is no cohesive response. They haven’t actually got to the societal good part, too busy picking up and marching with the argument that the people they are mad told them to argue about. Meanwhile, each year the rich are getting richer because the wrong arguments are being had, and it’s losing arguments too, over and over again. They just keep convincing people to get mad at the wrong thing, and it works!
But you know, we can wait for the next Occupy Wall Street to lead to… nothing, or, maybe just hear me out here, approach the problem differently. There is no need, none whatsoever, to take on battles against capitalism or what people think capitalism means when you can just say, this is more important. It really doesn’t matter if something else is more efficient. Entry level homes are not being built, dense properties are not being built, wages are not keeping up and somehow we are pumping out even more ultra rich people. We can fix all that by prioritizing it… and there is no need to try and convince anyone capitalism is wrong while doing it. That’s just an efficiency tool.
…this, to me, demonstrates that they aren’t really arguing against capitalism. If they were, they’d have an argument!
Nesrie
3372
No they were arguing against capitalism, against Wall Street. It’s in the name. They had a target but not a goal, not something to prioritize over efficiency. There was no… plan to make what they wanted a priority.
Nesrie
3374
There is no need to apologize.
I simply think that going against capitalism is not only a losing battle, it’s an unnecessary one for the reasons already provided. And when you start measuring productivity from say the 70s to 2021… it’s already a trench too far in a war that doesn’t need to be had. The gap is bigger, but that doesn’t mean everything is stagnant. All they have to show is any improvement at all to win that argument… and then we’re still left with an obvious gap.
It’s being set-up so even a win is a lose.
