Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening productivity vs pay gap?
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.
But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base, this system is litterally designed to have a class of poor people forced to do shitty jobs to survive.
If you take away the hope of a wealthy future, there are no reasons left to slave away your life on a corporate ladder.
At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR and Exec realms.
The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity and stagnating employee compensation.
Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1]. The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful comparison would use the same inflation index for both data sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure. When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of the point that the original report was trying to make.
Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced, which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is that productivity and compensation increases have been increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad subset of workers have not seen large productivity and compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but it's also a different story with different policy implications than the original story which implied diverging productivity and pay within the same set of workers.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compe...
The trend is towards less immigration and thus lower demand for goods/services and lower supply of labor.
What has actually transpired in the meantime has been record breaking bailouts, corporate handouts, and profits, while workers pay remains in stagnation and housing market inflation goes through the roof (because of slow development, IMO, attributed to NIMBYism, mixed with a nationwide inability to build densely or build public transportation infrastructure).
edit/ And let's not forget, there have also been 2 disastrous, major wars, one of which inarguably never should have occurred.
Yeah. And now it's happening.
Back in 2000 the average baby boomer was 35-55, far from retirement age.
The average baby boomer is now 55-75, and after COVID forced a ton of them out of the labour force, they're choosing not to come back.
See, you can report about a thing that's likely to happen in the future before it actually happens, and in the intervening period, while it may not be happening, that doesn't mean the reporting is wrong.
Or are you also one of those types that thinks the media was overblowing the whole global warming thing because they deigned to report about it before we saw some of the more dramatic and visible effects?
Frankly, I don't know what you're going on about in the rest of your comment. I made no claim that baby boomers aging out of the workforce explains All The Things. I certainly didn't make the claim that it explains trends in the economy up to this point. My point is that it's now a major factor in the economy going forward and we can expect major changes as a consequence.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pa...
The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the government does comes for free, and then there's all the additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all the paperwork.
Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year.
You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed.
Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone.
That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?
https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...
They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago.
On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15 minutes.
This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real money.
The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?
That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe; insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
I gave real examples, not hypotheticals.
I never said government spending was zero-sum.
> That hydrant was probably too expensive
The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job.
> The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.
China's GDP growth consistently out-paces the US. Canada continues to do well. Germany has consistently positive GDP growth with a few exceptions related to international downturns. And, of course, if you're talking about countries that use economic stimulus, you'll have to include the United States, which has the largest GDP in the world. I think your claim requires a tighter definition of "economy" and "do poorly" to hold merit.
Everybody is doing more poorly than growth estimates, but (a) COVID just happened and (b) everyone always does worse than growth estimates; growth estimates are the rewarded metric and therefore incentives are high to over-estimate it in extrapolation as another form of incentive (i.e. aim higher than you want to hit).
The second issue is your overall thesis seems to be "the government is inefficient," which is fine to say and to criticize, it certainly is inefficient by many measures, but I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at. Usually these discussions take two routes: the capitalist one, wherein you argue that private industry is more efficient, which even if we accept that efficiency is the only valid measure of how we should choose to do things (amazon builds road faster and cheaper than government: then puts a toll on it so only the rich are allowed to use it. this is bad), is probably not true[0] or possibly the opposite of the truth. Maybe you're more anarchist in your leanings, in which case you're arguing for more distributed and local management of these kinds of services? That could be a really interesting conversation, is that what you're suggesting?
[0] https://gsdrc.org/document-library/is-the-private-sector-mor...
1. the amount of money it spends
2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses
> I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at.
A much more limited government.
yes, government spending increases, always. I'd need to be convinced this is inherently bad lol
2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses
What about subsidies, when businesses only exist because of government intervention at all? What about Harley Davidson? The banking sector?
> A much more limited government.
How limited? Is it allowed to prevent monopoly? You seem to know enough about the subject to know that making the state too limited will merely lead to the establishment of state power by monopolistic corporations instead, from plenty of historical examples.
It's no different than me 20 years ago installing a server for a client. I would go out slap it in and turn it on. I did not architect the applications on it, nor configure the firewall rules on the router for it to work.
News articles are written about exceptional things, not the mundane.
Besides, everyone knew the flow was sufficient because it would be the only hydrant upstream of a flow reducer in the main line. I.e. there was plenty of pressure in the line.
The drawings were completely superfluous to a bog-standard install.
> News articles are written about exceptional things
That's true. The hydrant wasn't in the news. Want another one that wasn't exceptional enough to make the news? A nearby one mile stretch of road has been undergoing repaving for THREE YEARS now.
BTW, did you read the article about SF? It blames the permitting process which takes forever and $$$$. That affects everything in SF.