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@BrianJopek To be fair, that increase in worker efficiency is due to restructuring organisations around automation and IT, which has been strategically driven through and organised by the upper management/owners.
That it's probably a bad idea taking ever more people out of the equation as population continues to increase, leaving a fetid pool of bullshit jobs behind, is an entirely different issue.

@brrbrr @BrianJopek

It's not really a different issue. If compensation had risen with worker productivity, those workers would be able to afford to consume in other areas, or even create new companies and new wealth. Filtering all of the value created by worker productivity into a smaller number of hands, is distorting our wealth distribution, our politics, and our our overall well-being.

@animalspirits @BrianJopek without disagreeing, who said it isn't raising all boats... just spread out across a global economy and a few billion more people.... i.e. by a very very small amount per person. This is a very important question. Should citizens of ex colonial powers still expect to be the beneficiaries of their elites power when those elites have long since left national boundaries and the same citizens demand more income for less work? There's no nice way to put it really.

@brrbrr @animalspirits @BrianJopek

Isn’t it funny how when capital uses labor arbitrage to lower it’s costs it never leads to lower prices for the consumer? The bottom line is that capital is using market leverage to extract huge amounts of value from everyone else and stuffing that value into virtual mattresses (asset speculation) so no one else can use it. How is that an efficient allocation of capital?

@animalspirits @BrianJopek really? Are you sure? Wealth gets annihilated by inflation if it does nothing. Speculation is a loss maker on average. The removal of labour intensive sectors generally has to do with commoditisation. I don't think that's the right explanation.

@brrbrr @animalspirits @BrianJopek

You’re confusing wealth with currency. Currency is a game we all play because it’s a convenient way to divide and measure value. Wealth is the sum of the value real assets that are bought and sold. The nominal price of assets floats with inflation while the actual value is only changed by supply and demand. This is why inflation is relatively meaningless to people who own assets and asset speculation takes resources from others

@animalspirits @BrianJopek ...except that just isn't true. You can own businesses, but they rapidly become worthless if they fall off the tightrope of profitability. You can own property, but that's barely break even in reality (maintenance!). You can own historical treasures, but those are basically only for money laundering... Land? Don't get me started. It's the wrong explanation. But if it makes you happier, civilisations collapse with their ecologies. We'll all be poor soon enough.

@animalspirits @BrianJopek incidentally, I find it very instructive to look at what happened when the Communists took over the east of Germany. They took the wealthiest industrialised part of the country, for nothing... and ran it utterly into the ground within a handful of decades. The industrialists that fled, went to the poorest region of the country, and in that same period turned it into the most wealthy. What was wealth again?

@brrbrr @BrianJopek

I'm not sure where you got the idea that I said all assets only make money. I only said that they are a store of value that is resistant to loss through inflation, and that's true.

Do you really disagree that capital holders are using market power to extract and hoard wealth in a way that damages everyone else?

@animalspirits @BrianJopek assets depreciate, rapidly, unless very carefully managed. That's not where wealth disparities are being generated, but it's where they're being reflected, and it's where they'll ultimately be lost.
Wealth disparity seems inevitable towards the end of civilizational periods. It has more to do with technological half-life and exponentially increasing rewards for incremental increases in performance. This has held for millennia. We're just along for the ride.

@brrbrr @animalspirits @BrianJopek the story of East Germany is slightly different. When the Soviets took over they got everything for free, but actually extracted big parts of the industry and also brains and moved them to Russia. Further: They had no interest to have excelling country's under their power for political reason. They actually starved big parts of Ukraine by extraction value from the people.

It was more colonialism than communism.

@brrbrr @animalspirits @BrianJopek At the same time in West Germany they did the opposite. They didn't extract the industry, but threw a lot of money in, to build up things and to actually feed people.

The distribution of companies in West Germany at the time was a huge amount of small companies. With some bigger ones that had managed to preserve their wealth through bad times and inflation. While most others lost big.

The wealth of West Germany is based on distribution not extraction to few.

@katzazi @animalspirits @BrianJopek ... the BRD "golden years" were certainly about decentralised market driven growth facilitated by historically low levels of bureaucratic regulation, but now, the classic three generations later, where is the German Mittelstand? What happened to those millions of tiny businesses? Why do we see classic wealth distributions, third/fourth generations selling out, spikes in wealth disparity and the early signs of collapse as owners become faceless accountants?

@katzazi @animalspirits @BrianJopek ... that's no more true than the degree to which the Americans extracted West German talent and took over the cream of the business crop (and continue to do so)... whereas (even following your assertion) the Soviets ran their own economy into the ground. Might it be that a) wealth distribution is an overly simplistic catch all for an overly simplified problem definition whilst b) ignoring laws of growth by asserting ideological dogma can only fail?

@BrianJopek it's almost the majority of people can't afford boats, or had to sell them to afford food

@BrianJopek We have known this for far too long. If we had a Congress that actually serves the people and not just the wealthy this would not exist.
Are we willing to accept the fact that we do not have a democracy that serves the people?
Our entire system is rotten. Time for an enema.

@BrianJopek A rising tide lifts all boats except the ones with holes in them.

@BrianJopek i wouldn't mind seeing a source for the increase in worker productivity growth, as one thing I have heard is that the rise of computers in the workplace has led to no discernable increase in productivity (though my source for that claim is as anecdotal as your text on a photograph shared on social media).

@IanMoore3000 Understood but actually I think most of the folks who are “liking” and “boosting” may be doing so because of the second part regarding how the rising tide should, essentially, benefit everyone and not just a few.

@BrianJopek yes but you should also account for inflation. I mean, how much did the cost of yachts increase? I'm guessing alot.

@BrianJopek IF you can...swim along side...my Yacht for a mile

Welcome Aboard (the New Economy)

@BrianJopek S&P500 rose about 5000%, so maybe workers should invest in this index 😁

@BrianJopek

“Ah, but, you see, thanks to the climate crisis and rising sea levels, we *are* now lifting all boats. You’re welcome.”

— oil and gas industry

@BrianJopek The law should require that employees (including contractors, freelancers) are paid pro rata in at least some shares according to a fair formula. Tax free if kept for e.g. 10 years. Over time, the owners of the company are then the employees, or their heirs. (If someone wants to work for a private company, they can just get cash plus a portfolio of choice e.g. mirroring the sector.) This treats the workers like CEOs (Shares then need to be divisible in law below their unit price.)

@BrianJopek

Minimum worker pay should be indexed to CEO average pay/bonuses, yearly. This is for when it's larger than currently existing floors btw, so you don't suddenly end up with $0 pay CEOs.