I can't get a single tech worker to understand how monetary policy is connected to this, but it is. As technology improved, workers had more and more leisure time, better work conditions, less stress, more disposable income, more savings, and development of personal capital.
Once we went off the gold standard, and especially when we attempted to print our way out of recessions more aggressively than we had before (70s stagflation); Since then worker outcomes have been decoupled from improvements in productivity.
I could go full schizo post on how printing money is a value extraction tool, but I'll only go half way. Now when workers produce more output than they need, the excess value is extracted and re-invested into control systems for securing this fortunate outcome the money printers have and accumulating reserve funds and contracts they can use in a pinch.
So when workers collectively work harder, we don't collectively get double the food, double the free time, and double the cars. We get double the police force, double the bank ownership of the economy, double the mortgage without double the equity.
It's why I'm anti-work until our economy has real money. Working for monopoly money is collectively the stupidest thing workers could do. They set up a situation where what is individually smart isn't the same as what is collectively smart. It is individually smart to have twice as much monopoly money rather than less. But collectively it's really stupid for everyone who isn't the money printer.
Being an anarchist I think the answer is individually driven and voluntary collective intelligence. But it's an uphill battle because you need to convince others what is collectively intelligent, and that it's in their personal interest to pursue it once their own needs are met. You need to somehow convince libertarians that there is more to game theory and optimal human action than marginal individual calculation. You need to convince leftists to actually care about economics and finance beyond "corporations bad." You need to convince the right that not all business is good just because money is moving around and someone got an excuse to dress in a tie. You need to convince people who like government programs that their favorite institution that makes it all possible, the Fed, is not a free lunch.
You can't get those people on board. Which means you can't get more free time just because there is more productivity in the office. Because no one is actually invested in understanding the problem. They are all invested in their own narratives about who the villains are, but it's not a deep enough root cause analysis to get to an action item that will actually work.
And with AI taking off and either coming into a golden age or the exact opposite, we really needed to be on the right side of this issue 10 years ago.
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I can't get a single tech worker to understand how monetary policy is connected to this, but it is. As technology improved, workers had more and more leisure time, better work conditions, less stress, more disposable income, more savings, and development of personal capital.
Once we went off the gold standard, and especially when we attempted to print our way out of recessions more aggressively than we had before (70s stagflation); Since then worker outcomes have been decoupled from improvements in productivity.
I could go full schizo post on how printing money is a value extraction tool, but I'll only go half way. Now when workers produce more output than they need, the excess value is extracted and re-invested into control systems for securing this fortunate outcome the money printers have and accumulating reserve funds and contracts they can use in a pinch.
So when workers collectively work harder, we don't collectively get double the food, double the free time, and double the cars. We get double the police force, double the bank ownership of the economy, double the mortgage without double the equity.
It's why I'm anti-work until our economy has real money. Working for monopoly money is collectively the stupidest thing workers could do. They set up a situation where what is individually smart isn't the same as what is collectively smart. It is individually smart to have twice as much monopoly money rather than less. But collectively it's really stupid for everyone who isn't the money printer.
Being an anarchist I think the answer is individually driven and voluntary collective intelligence. But it's an uphill battle because you need to convince others what is collectively intelligent, and that it's in their personal interest to pursue it once their own needs are met. You need to somehow convince libertarians that there is more to game theory and optimal human action than marginal individual calculation. You need to convince leftists to actually care about economics and finance beyond "corporations bad." You need to convince the right that not all business is good just because money is moving around and someone got an excuse to dress in a tie. You need to convince people who like government programs that their favorite institution that makes it all possible, the Fed, is not a free lunch.
You can't get those people on board. Which means you can't get more free time just because there is more productivity in the office. Because no one is actually invested in understanding the problem. They are all invested in their own narratives about who the villains are, but it's not a deep enough root cause analysis to get to an action item that will actually work.
And with AI taking off and either coming into a golden age or the exact opposite, we really needed to be on the right side of this issue 10 years ago.