Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting but interlocutory piece. Nobody is wrong but nobody is right either, and it all turns out for the best... except it really doesn't. The author seriously downplays the huge political effort that was required to change living standard and grow wages; among other things, modern representative democracy was "invented" and violently forced upon the ruling classes, but it doesn't really get a mention (whereas slavery and socialism do -- probably because they feel like they've been dealt with for good).

It feels like the author is trying to sweep hard truths under the carpet of the last few paragraphs: "the problems [...] will naturally involve the issue of wealth distribution" and "such a world is likely to demand more than [...] incremental reform". Coupled with "Best to be prepared", it sounds like a call to batter up for an upcoming political storm, but it doesn't really suggest which "not-incremental reform" should be attempted, nor does it say anything about who should ask for such reforms and how.

It's yet another in a LONG long line of articles that tries to shift the blame for stagnating wages on to:

* technological progress

instead of:

* steady de-unionization and

* obfuscated trade policies designed to fuck normal people (NAFTA, CAFTA and now TTIP AND TPP).

tl;dr - "dem robots took 'er jerbs" and "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain writing trade policy".

Correct. Just sweeping under the rug the labour history that made the mid 20th century so egalitarian with respect to wealth.

If we want a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, we have to demand it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March

While I'm fully supportive of unionization and organized labour, that doesn't seem like a particularly good example. What exactly did they gain from the march, besides getting shot at?

The 1941 Rouge River strike it mentions in passing seems like a much better example.

Fair enough. There are hundreds of episodes to pick from in labour history.

Technological progress sits hand in hand with globalization, which fits into the conflicts of the 20th century. All this stuff started as walking away from nationalism and imperialism after WW2 and shifting to America's form of economic imperialism.

Free trade equalizes the players... if you don't have capital, you get the shaft. NAFTA was bad for factory workers in the US, and it devastated the agricultural economy of Mexico.

* corruption (what's the main cause of your second bullet, is a direct cause of stagnating wages, and is a big cause of market power concentration - a bullet you missed)

I wouldn't say socialism has been 'dealt with', modern representative democracy in the European mould is heavily informed by socialist principles. I think you mean communism, evidenced by the article's mentions of Engels and Marx, which has pretty clearly failed in spectacular fashion everywhere it's been tried. I found the point that building out the infrastructure for industrialisation was incredibly capital intensive and so labour wage rises weren't really an option interesting, because of course that's exactly how it played out in industrialising communist countries as well. It's just that the state held on to the capital instead of industrialists (or rather the industrialists holding the capital were part of the state).

Interestingly, China now seems to be going through the equivalent of the late 19th century phase where labour wages begin to rise roughly in line with productivity. They've largely built out their core infrastructure and mopped up most of the spare labour pool. China's development has been a huge factor in the economic conditions in the west. I'm wondering how the balancing out of the Chinese economy with ours will affect us.

If you look at average wages in China, I think they have a long way to go to mop up labour slack. The problem is it's reaching a point where it's becoming more complex to mop up the rest by growing their more productive and experienced workforce, which is the new, growing, more powerful middle class. This can work out well, or not, and will impact us greatly either way.

>If you look at average wages in China, I think they have a long way to go to mop up labour slack.

Average wages in the Pearl River Delta don't seem to reflect this. Skilled wages are skyrocketing and even unskilled wages have upward pressure on them. The seemingly endless flow of cheap migrant labor is drying up.

Isn't this because China has had internal migration controls for over 70 years, which are unheard of outside communist countries? Actually I think it's unheard of outside China.

Not really. The controlls are there to protect municipalities from having obligations to provide welfare and services to migrants. It doesn't actually prevent the migrants from travelling for work.

"They've largely built out their core infrastructure and mopped up most of the spare labour pool."

What? There are 750 million (that is twice the population of the US, or 1.5 times the population of the EU) subsistence farmers in China. And that's only counting subsistence farmers as spare labor.

The standards of living were growing before democratization. For example, the colonies that would become the US had richer inhabitants even before the split[1]. In Europe, this growth could have well been delayed by revolutions, not hastened.

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w19861

I'm sure the widespread death and destruction and disruption of trade caused by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars were a significant brake on the improvement of standards of living.

The colonies that would become the US had more land-per-person in a late-agrarian, almost-early-industrial economy, versus Europe having far less land-per-(white)-person.

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