Edit: Pretty much what it says. It's more detailed than that but yeah. Labourers get less, more value is attributed to capital (buildings, land) and collected by the rich.
I think I deserve more, but I accept less anyway, due to the ever present threat of unrecoverable retribution against myself and my family if I negotiate too hard
They don’t. Schools teach that “Karl Marx didn’t want anyone to have any money, and to be owned by the state. They quickly ran out of food because no one was motivated to work.”
Why do you think guys who purchased “Truck Nuts” all screech on Twitter about “socialism is when you do all the work and they take all the profits” when that’s exactly what capitalism is and they are too dumb to notice? Why do you think the Tetris movie wasn’t really about Tetris but instead about “Soviets bad”?
Your comment only works for those who don't live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it's western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.
No country has managed a transition to communism, all of them got turned into various types of authroritarian dictatorships. There is no known method for transitioning to communism and maintaining it.
Would you know whether or not democratic socialism is a good prospect in that regard? A flavor of which that remains capitalistic, but using worker coops instead of the top down monarchistic approach to institutional governance?
Humans lived for 10s of thousands of years under communism. Capitalism was invented and within a couple of centuries the human race is commiting collective suicide with falling birth rates.
There were a few years of war communism during, well, the Civil War, but due to all the hunger deaths it might not be what your usual USSR fan wants to think about.
Marx's view was that socialism would develop as an emergent phenomenon (a modern term, not one he used) to correct the contradictions of capitalism. But in both Russia and China, they tried to impose socialism on what were essentially feudal societies. The result was state capitalism, the industrial revolution imposed at gunpoint with no control of the means of production by the workers. And, as capitalist societies, both countries continued the imperialism and nationalism of their predecessor regimes.
And this isn't an after-the-fact critique: contemporary socialists such as Rosa Luxembourg made these observations at the time.
Wages have not raised as quickly as rent has raised, unfortunately.
As per the U.S. Department of the Treasury (posted during the Biden administration):
This is inflation-adjusted, so it is comparable to your data. My point here is that while average wages have increased, average available spending money after paying for basic necessities has likely significantly decreased.
The problem isn't available housing, it's artificial price inflation. There is no regulation on how much landlords can charge, so they just keep raising the price. Plus, they turn their vacant properties into AirBNBs, or worse, their only intention with the property was to turn it into an expensive AirBNB to begin with.
Now compare wages vs inflation, and wages vs GDP. GDP of developed countries has climbed dramatically since the 80's, while wage growth has slowed to a crawl relatively.
One must ask themself: where did all the money go?
Forgot to say: when you take GDP and divide it by the population you get mean. When we talk about wages, we're talking about median wages. That's where the difference lies
Your graph is deceiving because it starts at 20 and not 0 on the y axis. It shows a very modest increase in wage, there are much better charts out there that plot wage growth Vs productivity growth. This makes the theft all the more obvious.
This reads like a lazily written article to me. The em dashes don't increase my enthusiasm. Just in the opening I noticed:
Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% today.
technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consume
Of course, real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled (more since it increased by 7pp). Is most of this billionaire yachts? I have no clue, but if you want to convince me you should try to not claim total amounts when you mean relative amounts.
A physical bookstore in 2000 took in $100 from a book sale and distributed it roughly like this: about 60% went to labor (store staff, publisher employees, authors), 30% went to capital (owner profit, rent), and 10% covered other costs. The money circulated locally through wages.
Amazon today takes in that same $100. The distribution looks fundamentally different: warehouse and tech labor receives roughly 25%, Amazon’s infrastructure and profit captures around 55%, and the remainder flows to publishers and authors. Labor’s share of that transaction dropped by more than half.
... unless you count the publisher and authors like you did for the 2000s data, in which case it decreased from 60% to 45%. And that's persumably not counting the manufacturing of server farms, refinement of minerals, purchase of the actual reading tablet. Amazon has high margins but not 55% margins.
The labor share of US GDP fell from approximately 64% in 1980 to around 58% today — a 6-percentage-point shift. Applied to a $28 trillion economy, that gap represents roughly $1.7 trillion per year that once flowed to workers but now flows to capital.
Once again, since the GDP per capita has doubled the labor dollars per person has actually increased. The label for the $1.7 trillion is similarly misleading, those dollars never "once flowed to workers", they just would have if the economy had grown without any changes to its composition.
If I were the author of the article, perhaps I would say that since 1980, real median wages have only grown by about 20% which seems very slight given the technological improvements made in that time. But how much of that 20% increase would have been possible without technological improvement, and how much has the quality of the things people spend their money on grown in that time? No clue, that's beyond the thinking budget I have for this article.
EDIT:
I've decided I'm not going to be overly charitable towards the article since it got an overall positive response from here. I'm very certain the article was written partially or fully by an LLM, and that it was written to advertise the portfolio of whoever wrote it. The article doesn't make a good effort to make an argument capable of convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with the thesis. The counter arguments are bunched up at the end and barely countered at all:
Absolute living standards have genuinely improved. Longer lifespans, better medicines, access to information that would have cost thousands of dollars in library fees
Free services — Google Search, Wikipedia, WhatsApp — create enormous value that doesn’t show up in GDP at all. The consumption ceiling argument partially breaks down for digital goods with near-zero marginal cost.
So does the article's author actually think technological improvements have failed to benefit regular people? They don't seem interested in arguing these benefits are fake, or outweighed by negative aspects. If they want to argue that the 1% have captured most of the growth that technology has given, their article doesn't support that. It gives a lot of explanations why this might happen but the first part meant to cement that it does happen is based on unfounded conclusions which the "What This Isn’t Saying" part then lists reasons not to trust.
That's true. My point was that the article is claiming that since the share of GDP which is consumer spending decreased, total consumer spending also decreased. But since GDP per capita increased at the same time, the actual total consumer spending per person increased (the 7 percentage point decrease does not outweigh the doubling of real GDP per capita). This could be misleading in its own right, with the richest spending more and the median spending less even in total numbers, but the article doesn't claim that. It claims that total spending has gone down, which is just not true.
stem/"skilled" labor isnt benefiting from improved tech, it all goes to ceos, and billionaire/millionaires. in order o prevent the works from uprising, they use various methods of propaganda to dissaude any confrontation.
Short review directly from this source for those, who don't want to read the whole article:
The Core Problem, Simply Stated
Technology is making distribution dramatically more efficient.
But efficiency gains are being captured by whoever controls the bottleneck — the platform, the marketplace, the search engine — rather than distributed to the workers who enable production or the consumers who fund it.
Without wages, workers can’t consume. Without consumption, capital has nowhere productive to go. So it piles up in buybacks and data centers. GDP growth slows. And we wonder why a world of genuine technological marvels feels economically stagnant for most people.
That’s the paradox.
As AI accelerates the substitution of capital for labor, the dynamics described here are likely to intensify rather than resolve. The question isn’t whether the technology works — it clearly does. The question is whether the institutions and incentive structures around it will evolve fast enough to distribute what it creates.
That’s the harder problem. And it’s not a technology problem at all.
People have always been greedy. The difference is systems to encourage people to be useful to others so that greedy people have to provide something good to make more money
Good: legal systems that uphold contracts
Bad: regulatory capture where corps make money without doing anything useful
I have a good friend who is homeless and begs for money. He says his life is much better than the life of the richest people of just a few centuries ago.
That's not even true, even when accounting for the advance in technology, because your friend is likely dirt poor.
There are still lots of people much better off financially than your friend who work to keep wages low, work benefits low, and prices high. A daydream about the past doesn't matter, because his and 90% of people's material conditions are shit, and this financial and class oppression is what matters, not what fancy technology we have that makes us think we're "kings".
This isn’t just a “technology redistributes value” story; it’s a market design and incentive problem. Platforms didn’t accidentally capture the gains; they were structurally positioned to own demand, data, and distribution.
Also, the “consumption ceiling” feels directionally right for physical goods, but less convincing for digital and AI-native categories, which can expand usage in ways that traditional economics underestimates.
Inflation. You are putting your labor in and getting a money that your government can almost literally print for free in their basement. When you do it, it's called counterfeit and you can be sent to jail for many years or killed. If they do it, it's called inflation and is perfectly acceptable. STOP USING THEIR CURRENCY and your life WILL get better. Use Monero, Gold, or Silver. Since the government can't print those things, they will retain their value.
71 Comments
Armand1@lemmy.world · 105 pts · 178d
Let me guess:
It's because all the money goes to billionaires.
Edit: Pretty much what it says. It's more detailed than that but yeah. Labourers get less, more value is attributed to capital (buildings, land) and collected by the rich.
luthis@lemmy.nz · 49 pts · 178d
Yep without even reading the article I was going to guess wage theft and billionaires.
iopq@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 177d
Wage theft is not merely being underpaid relative to the work you do. It's actually not paying someone who worked
Vandals_handle@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 177d
It's both and more.
DomeGuy@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 177d
Wage theft as only "not paid what was owed according to current law" is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.
Please don't help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the "value theft" inherent to capitalism
iopq@lemmy.world · -7 pts · 177d
"I think I deserve more, but I accept less anyway"
Maybe you don't deserve more
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 177d
iopq@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 177d
Everyone has excuses for why they are not successful...
jimmy90@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 176d
amazing good maths
next they'll be writing articles about "if i vote for jill stein becaue palestine. why do fascists stay in power" level maths
CosmoNova@lemmy.world · 83 pts · 178d
Who owns the means of production that make industris more efficient? Bingo.
I swear it‘s like people don‘t even know who or what Karl Marx is.
4am@lemmy.zip · 49 pts · 178d
They don’t. Schools teach that “Karl Marx didn’t want anyone to have any money, and to be owned by the state. They quickly ran out of food because no one was motivated to work.”
Why do you think guys who purchased “Truck Nuts” all screech on Twitter about “socialism is when you do all the work and they take all the profits” when that’s exactly what capitalism is and they are too dumb to notice? Why do you think the Tetris movie wasn’t really about Tetris but instead about “Soviets bad”?
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org · 7 pts · 177d
Your comment only works for those who don't live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it's western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 177d
USSR wasn’t really communist though, was it? They tried and failed to make a communist state, no?
BrightCandle@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 177d
No country has managed a transition to communism, all of them got turned into various types of authroritarian dictatorships. There is no known method for transitioning to communism and maintaining it.
Doom@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 177d
To be fair, when they tried outside influences actively sabotaged the attempt.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 177d
Would you know whether or not democratic socialism is a good prospect in that regard? A flavor of which that remains capitalistic, but using worker coops instead of the top down monarchistic approach to institutional governance?
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 176d
Communism in its true form is unsustainable economically and defies basic human sociology and psychology.
Triasha@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 176d
Humans lived for 10s of thousands of years under communism. Capitalism was invented and within a couple of centuries the human race is commiting collective suicide with falling birth rates.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 175d
For family units but it quickly breaks down in larger groups and as complexity increases.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org · 4 pts · 177d
There were a few years of war communism during, well, the Civil War, but due to all the hunger deaths it might not be what your usual USSR fan wants to think about.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 175d
Marx's view was that socialism would develop as an emergent phenomenon (a modern term, not one he used) to correct the contradictions of capitalism. But in both Russia and China, they tried to impose socialism on what were essentially feudal societies. The result was state capitalism, the industrial revolution imposed at gunpoint with no control of the means of production by the workers. And, as capitalist societies, both countries continued the imperialism and nationalism of their predecessor regimes.
And this isn't an after-the-fact critique: contemporary socialists such as Rosa Luxembourg made these observations at the time.
Skipping a developmental stage doesn't work.
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io · 34 pts · 178d
All of this is fairly obvious to someone not wearing a MAGA hat.
Productivity per person has increased since the 80's, but wages have not followed - rather they have remained largely stagnant.
As such, the increased profits are instead going into an increasingly small amount of very rich people's pockets
iopq@lemmy.world · -9 pts · 177d
Wages have increased a huge amount from the 1980s
Filetternavn@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 13 pts · 177d
I'm not OP, but to play devil's advocate:
Wages have not raised as quickly as rent has raised, unfortunately. As per the U.S. Department of the Treasury (posted during the Biden administration):
This is inflation-adjusted, so it is comparable to your data. My point here is that while average wages have increased, average available spending money after paying for basic necessities has likely significantly decreased.
iopq@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 177d
Yes, because the US doesn't build housing
Filetternavn@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 176d
The problem isn't available housing, it's artificial price inflation. There is no regulation on how much landlords can charge, so they just keep raising the price. Plus, they turn their vacant properties into AirBNBs, or worse, their only intention with the property was to turn it into an expensive AirBNB to begin with.
iopq@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 176d
Then how come in places like Austin, where they built housing the rents dropped?
Eranziel@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 177d
Now compare wages vs inflation, and wages vs GDP. GDP of developed countries has climbed dramatically since the 80's, while wage growth has slowed to a crawl relatively.
One must ask themself: where did all the money go?
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 177d
It sure looked like it chartered a private jet to Venice Italy to rent out entire city blocks and get married in utter opulence, to me.
iopq@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 177d
I already compared wages vs. inflation
There's literally four inflation measures in this graph. Did the image load for you?
iopq@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 177d
Forgot to say: when you take GDP and divide it by the population you get mean. When we talk about wages, we're talking about median wages. That's where the difference lies
Lucius_Sweet@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 177d
Your graph is deceiving because it starts at 20 and not 0 on the y axis. It shows a very modest increase in wage, there are much better charts out there that plot wage growth Vs productivity growth. This makes the theft all the more obvious.
iopq@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 177d
This chart uses mean productivity and MEDIAN wages. You posted a chart meant to deceive.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 177d
captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works · 34 pts · 178d
This reads like a lazily written article to me. The em dashes don't increase my enthusiasm. Just in the opening I noticed:
Of course, real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled (more since it increased by 7pp). Is most of this billionaire yachts? I have no clue, but if you want to convince me you should try to not claim total amounts when you mean relative amounts.
... unless you count the publisher and authors like you did for the 2000s data, in which case it decreased from 60% to 45%. And that's persumably not counting the manufacturing of server farms, refinement of minerals, purchase of the actual reading tablet. Amazon has high margins but not 55% margins.
Once again, since the GDP per capita has doubled the labor dollars per person has actually increased. The label for the $1.7 trillion is similarly misleading, those dollars never "once flowed to workers", they just would have if the economy had grown without any changes to its composition.
If I were the author of the article, perhaps I would say that since 1980, real median wages have only grown by about 20% which seems very slight given the technological improvements made in that time. But how much of that 20% increase would have been possible without technological improvement, and how much has the quality of the things people spend their money on grown in that time? No clue, that's beyond the thinking budget I have for this article.
EDIT: I've decided I'm not going to be overly charitable towards the article since it got an overall positive response from here. I'm very certain the article was written partially or fully by an LLM, and that it was written to advertise the portfolio of whoever wrote it. The article doesn't make a good effort to make an argument capable of convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with the thesis. The counter arguments are bunched up at the end and barely countered at all:
So does the article's author actually think technological improvements have failed to benefit regular people? They don't seem interested in arguing these benefits are fake, or outweighed by negative aspects. If they want to argue that the 1% have captured most of the growth that technology has given, their article doesn't support that. It gives a lot of explanations why this might happen but the first part meant to cement that it does happen is based on unfounded conclusions which the "What This Isn’t Saying" part then lists reasons not to trust.
ChristerMLB@piefed.social · 2 pts · 178d
"real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled"
GDP measures a lot of things that are not consumer spending.
captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 178d
That's true. My point was that the article is claiming that since the share of GDP which is consumer spending decreased, total consumer spending also decreased. But since GDP per capita increased at the same time, the actual total consumer spending per person increased (the 7 percentage point decrease does not outweigh the doubling of real GDP per capita). This could be misleading in its own right, with the richest spending more and the median spending less even in total numbers, but the article doesn't claim that. It claims that total spending has gone down, which is just not true.
ChristerMLB@piefed.social · 4 pts · 178d
ah, duh, yeah - the share shrunk but the pie grew so it's still a bit more cake
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 3 pts · 178d
Giving you an upvote for using three metaphors in a sentence that small. Impressive!
ChristerMLB@piefed.social · 2 pts · 178d
thank you, I am giving you a smiley face back: :)
rimu@piefed.social · 1 pts · 178d
I can confirm - it is slop.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 23 pts · 177d
stem/"skilled" labor isnt benefiting from improved tech, it all goes to ceos, and billionaire/millionaires. in order o prevent the works from uprising, they use various methods of propaganda to dissaude any confrontation.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 177d
That's a lot of words for "greed".
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 176d
Different system, same problem.
Lexam@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 178d
A rigged system is not a paradox.
Almacca@aussie.zone · 16 pts · 176d
It's not a paradox, just good old fashioned robbery.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 176d
It makes the class pyramid narrower and taller at the top.
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club · 7 pts · 177d
Productivity means doing more relative to input. It is only a paradox to the those who know what it exactly means.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 176d
Until the current RAM, storage and GPU crisis.
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 176d
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 178d
The problem is capitalism
iopq@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 177d
A statement without any meaning
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 177d
Lol nope, it's the direct result of an economic system that funnels wealth to the top
phutatorius@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 176d
Unless capitalists are forced to share their gains, they won't.
atcorebcor@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 176d
The real reason is that monopolies or other forms of market power prevent competitive pricing, wages and rents.
Bazell@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 176d
Short review directly from this source for those, who don't want to read the whole article:
Don_alForno@feddit.org · 4 pts · 176d
The reason is rich people.
org@lemmy.org · 4 pts · 178d
Greed. Full stop
iopq@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 177d
People have always been greedy. The difference is systems to encourage people to be useful to others so that greedy people have to provide something good to make more money
Good: legal systems that uphold contracts
Bad: regulatory capture where corps make money without doing anything useful
ranzispa@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 178d
Didn't read the article yet.
I have a good friend who is homeless and begs for money. He says his life is much better than the life of the richest people of just a few centuries ago.
lemmyk@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 177d
That's not even true, even when accounting for the advance in technology, because your friend is likely dirt poor.
There are still lots of people much better off financially than your friend who work to keep wages low, work benefits low, and prices high. A daydream about the past doesn't matter, because his and 90% of people's material conditions are shit, and this financial and class oppression is what matters, not what fancy technology we have that makes us think we're "kings".
ranzispa@mander.xyz · 0 pts · 177d
Food is very cheap and available everywhere. Clothing is basically free, and clothes are now easily high quality.
Other people is richer than you does not mean your conditions are bad.
InsightSeeker@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 176d
This isn’t just a “technology redistributes value” story; it’s a market design and incentive problem. Platforms didn’t accidentally capture the gains; they were structurally positioned to own demand, data, and distribution.
Also, the “consumption ceiling” feels directionally right for physical goods, but less convincing for digital and AI-native categories, which can expand usage in ways that traditional economics underestimates.
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 176d
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 176d
That's definitely true, but the cost of some things have greatly out paced that like housing or travel.
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 176d
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip · -11 pts · 178d
Inflation. You are putting your labor in and getting a money that your government can almost literally print for free in their basement. When you do it, it's called counterfeit and you can be sent to jail for many years or killed. If they do it, it's called inflation and is perfectly acceptable. STOP USING THEIR CURRENCY and your life WILL get better. Use Monero, Gold, or Silver. Since the government can't print those things, they will retain their value.