Here’s the thing. We could have that right now, today, we’re there, they’re right. Computers and just useful software (fuck AI) alone have increased productivity so much that one guy with fancy Excel can do the work of what used to take 98 people (7 banks x 14 person abacus teams). And that’s just one regional bank. Before email, corporations had internal mailing departments, now there’s dirt cheap and super convenient email. There are untold numbers of shell scripts out there quietly replacing whole ass departments of people. Soft automation alone, no robots needed, has increased human productivity to an absolutely bonkers degree since these statements were written. Thanks to the Friedman doctrine and Reagan and Thatcher and their ilk, all the benefits of that productivity got turned into a benefits for the asset holding class, while the middle and lower classes got lectures on the morality of hard work.
Flawless .
People talk about the age of abundance - we’ve been living it for decades. Money is created out thin air, automation and industrial have done the rest.
Marx called it 100 years ago. Thomas Piketty nailed it down a few years ago : Surplus goes to assets owners - the more assets you own, the more surplus you accumulate and it’s effective are compound over the time. Until you have a handful of people people who own all the asset, which is where we are now.
People used to physically carry boxes of paper checks out to planes to be shipped between banks.
As a kid, my dad used to tell me stuff like that. He believed it too. He worked 2 jobs 6 days a week all his life to die in relative poverty.
People make wealth issues generational. It’s not. It’s a narrative to divide and conquer.
It’s the rich vs the poor. It’s always been.
My dad still works in his 70s and fights vehemently against any talk of making life easier for the younger generation. People are weird man.
But instead, we decided to make a very small number of people extremely rich.
Bernie is pushing for 32/week.
If he was president we might have gotten it, but Biden sure as shit isn’t even going to mention it.
American workers are more productive than at any point in history, it’s just all the wealth goes into a very small number of pockets, and instead of having to pay taxes, they pay a small percent to politicians in both parties to ensure workers don’t get any
I wouldn’t say we’d have gotten it. Being president doesn’t mean you control Congress.
Well he probably wouldnt have broken the railroad strike at least
They got everything they wanted from the strike without having to fuck up the US economy. Stop thinking you’re dunking on Biden with this one, it’s stupid.
Huh?
They structured a deal with the unions instead of striking. They got a 24% raise (biggest in 4 decades), platinum healthcare, and the things that were on the strike demands for each involved union.
No i meant huh? why would you start a conversation so rudely?
We nothing. Hold the people who voted for Reagan responsible.
How do I argue that this is a bad thing to my boss.
I will preface by saying that my boss is a great guy. I don’t have targets and I get freedom and feel empowered in that sense.
But we often debate about the world and he seems to argue that on the whole society is doing a lot better than we did in the past. Living longer, more luxuries etc.
On the whole… how would you define that? The mean? The median? If it’s mean, he may have a point because the richest people don’t have to work for many thousands of years each. But the median person is likely under poverty level.
And better… also what is the definition of that? More money? More free time? Less crime/risk of injury? Etc.
And then there’s the case that it doesn’t matter if it’s “better” than it was however arbitrary time ago, it matters that it could be better for a massively greater percentage of people. But in the current state it is only insanely better for only a select few, and nearly the same for the vast majority of people.
Thank you for this. You’ve definitely given me some points to touch on.
For what it’s worth, I agree we should do better.
More like depressing, given how the current era turned out to be.
If only this picture had the next paragraph…
“There are some who gloomily expect a society run by a small elected elite, presiding over a mindless multitude kept happy by drugs and circuses, much as in Huxley’s Brave New World. But most futurists believe that work will still be the only way to gain responsibility and power.”
They’re right.
We could do this.
We just don’t.
And it would even be better for the planet
The timeline where Reagan didn’t fucking gut the unions.
This is so uniquely depressing. They were accurate on my annual wage in 2024 yet they assumed I’d be working less than 40 hours 😭
I got that wage, but not accounting for inflation…
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With the 1966 labour share of income you probably would be working way less (or making way more)
Is it really accurate? They wrote this is '66 about the year '00, which is 34 years. It’s been another 24 years since their prediction date.
I think you misread that, because $40,000 in 1966 is roughly $385,000 in today’s dollars.
Pretty sure that’s the joke
That was the joke. I make $40k today.
I’d say in a given week I do maybe fifteen minutes of real, actual work - Peter Gibbons
The naivete is hilarious.
Not incorrect, Jeff Bezos is working fewer than 4 days a week and fewer than 8 hours on a workday.
Hey they were close! We make 30-40k in (2024 Dollars)
The sheer amount of jobs that post that range as the expected salary is insanely depressing and disgusting…
I don’t think people truly understand just how much of our economy operates with those pay scales. I’m uneducated so I don’t have a specific industry to get tunnel vision with, I see a broad range of jobs and holy shit it is gross what is being “offered.”
On a side note, my friend in computer science just mentioned a coworker who makes over 150k is quitting because he has too much down time at work. Just kill me already, I’ve had enough torture…
You may find David Grieber’s book Bullshit Jobs interesting. TL;DR: human beings have a natural drive and need to spend their lives doing useful work. If that need isn’t met, they get depressed. Getting to do something actually useful at work is considered a privilege, a job perk. Companies offer more pay as compensation for the lack of job perks at jobs that don’t do anything useful.
That was for nonworking families.
“HAHAHA…no”
– Capitalists
This is what it was like when the people of the country worked together to make the future better for everyone. Not self improvement, not local; it was understood across the country that people should plant trees without expecting to sit in its shade. Plan for the future and give the next generation the best chance.
Those articles were written in the 60s. At the very least each author was born 18 years prior, part of the silent generation. The future they hoped, expected, and built was for boomers.
A generation of greed has killed almost all hope for future generations. It only took one to fuck it up for everyone else.
A generation of greed has killed almost all hope for future generations. It only took one to fuck it up for everyone else.
TO be fair, that generation is also kind of a bunch of cunts.
Well, on the bright side, the housing market will collapse in the next few decades as boomers die off/move to retirement homes, leaving a massive glut of housing (unless it all gets bought up by corporations). That’ll cause its own set of issues, but ample housing would certainly go a long way.
Yeah so aside from housing being bought up by corporations, privatized health care will bleed that generation of the rest. There will be nothing left.
(unless it all gets bought up by corporations)
This will happen though. Unless we get to “adventure time” somehow before the boomers die which seems unlikely. We’re gonna have to get waay hungrier
:(
