What one wants to do and what is economically valuable are different. Be glad we live(d) in an era where those coincided because for most of human history people had to do the work they got, not that which they wanted.
But more to the point, it seems that 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value from all knowledge work ever, despite doing it off the backs of artists, programmers, writers etc.
(Assuming they don't collapse the financial system , internet or power grids first).
Working more is a choice. The field is well paid because there the industry is supply constrained. Workers have a choice to work more because they're the supply.
> 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value
The AI companies running models will capture a portion of the value they're creating. Their vendors and their customers capture similar portions, and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
If so, hook a brother up with an interview…
This is a fallacy where you extrapolate the large change in a single dimension and imagine everything else staying mostly the same, ignoring the disruption of the system from non-linear effects of that single dimension being saturated. When a few companies capture a large proportion of the economic value of the system, the economy simply doesn't exist as it is currently conceived.
The current economy is driven by the need for broad participation to maintain the collective standard of living. We all get to skim a bit of that value for ourselves, and so distribution is inherent to the system. When broad labor participation is no longer needed to create collective wealth, the leverage of the average person to demand a share of the value produced evaporates. The economy in this scenario is something very different. There's no reason to imagine wealth being distributed in an egalitarian way; it certainly won't be automatic.
They never had laptops so the work finished at 5 and that was it. Ditto for weekends. I work longer hours and could never dream of doing what they did with two salaries.
Me who lived in a country where war hadn’t touched its shores for centuries was unable to achieve that.
It isn’t about building up. The wealth is already here, in far greater quantities than existed in a recently war torn communist country.
As wealth inequality increases, the purpose of the economy as seen through its objective function increasingly revolves around the desire of rich people to get paid for being rich. The exponential growth of asset values in excess of economic growth (including yours, but dominated by those of the wealthy) ensures that not only does the growing economic surplus fail to trickle down, but that the median person sees a grinding deprivation as their ability to command a wage is slowly eroded while their costs rise.
The "what someone will pay for it" definition is a trojan horse. It looks like a mathematical practicality, but it actually smuggles the self-interest of the wealthy into a value system that would not otherwise enshrine such as a guiding principle.
Moreover, there is a difference between economic and social value, which the field of economics already recognizes in the form of positive externalities.
Rich people who mostly want others to pay them for being rich? That's a weird and extreme answer and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. This is not an externality problem, it's a priority problem. These priorities are dogshit.
We don't need gini=0 to fix this. Gini=0.9 is nuts, famous billionaires having millions of times the weight as the median American is nuts, and we need to back off a bit. Maybe start by asking them to pay taxes. For once.
You don’t expect these companies or employers to just give you something or let you work less, right? Right?
Please, elaborate how do you see this? Give me a few examples…
But it has (almost) never happened before. It is very unlikely it will happen now. More likely outcome is companies pocketing profits. Unless the unemployment is so high that the government needs to step.
I honestly think it’s a bit naive to think this time it will be different
Ah, but it has! The New Deal era ~100 years ago is the one to look at. We've fixed this before, we can fix it again.
But we might not. The billionaires moved early; we have over two years until the next presidential election and a speeding AI train that seems on-track to deliver exactly the right amount of economic displacement by then: enough to convince people to act boldly, but not nearly so much as to achieve a worst case. That's no guarantee of success but the good path has substantial probability weight.
> every other major economy on earth was decimated
That would be a more convincing argument if the decimated economies didn't experience the upswing in middle class living standards as well. Gary Stevenson has been covering this from the UK angle and his story (and the UK's story) is the same: middle class flourishing in the wake of WWII and a steady erosion back to the mean. This suggests that the capital reset, increase in worker bargaining power, and the concessions won through it were causal while being on the fortunate side of the Atlantic was not.
For the vast majority of history people did whatever work their circumstances led them to do. Such as taking over their father's farm, their father's craft, or whatever apprentice job there was a vacancy for nearby and hopefully learned to like it though exposure.
It has also been argued that the first farmers were also miserable, but still won due to more calories. But they would have preferred the hunter gatherer lifestyle over working one field all the time and taking care of a bunch or domesticated animals.
Yes there is something sad about a master craftsman having to become a manager in a factory, and the apprentice a conveyor belt worker, but the industrial transition also allowed immense improve ts in efficiency and production. Many people who descend from those early factory workers and farmers, like myself, enjoy a casual level of abundance with a desk job, car, stocked supermarkets, online orders etc. and while poverty still exists it's nothing like it was 100-150 years ago.