[scorpion]

(10-28-2013 08:11 PM)Kingsley Davis Wrote:  

"It'd been estimated that if wages had continued to rise as they had during the '50s the average salary would inbetween $90,000 and $100,000. I've seen other estimates that if they had continued as they had during the '40s it be close to $300,000 a year. And it's not because of interference by the government.
If we had a true free market, I think everyone would own at least two plots of land (which used to happen not so long ago when people had fishing cabins in the mountains along with their homes), we'd be making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and everything would be peachy-keen.

This is definitely true. When you look at the productivity gains of the past fifty years, especially the gains enabled by computers and the internet since the 1980s, it's absolutely astounding. And almost none of those productivity gains were shared with workers in the form of higher wages or fewer working hours. Instead, we get the reverse: people are working more hours for lower pay. What the hell happened? Essentially, a conspiracy between big business/banking and the government to siphon off the lion's share of this new wealth while ensuring that the population continues to slave away. They don't want the average man to be making $100k, nor do they want the average man to have the free time that would accompany his only having to work 20 hours a week to support himself and his family. That would give the average man the time and the means to educate himself, to question the status quo. That represents an existential threat to the powers that be, so they want to keep as many people on the wage slave treadmill as possible.

And so it is that we have had decades of stagnant wages and the creation of the "service economy", where the vast majority of jobs are completely unnecessary, bullshit, makework jobs. It's completely insane. Everyone working a service job, slaving away for 40+ hours a week to serve other people in order to earn enough money to purchase services for themselves. Nevermind that human beings lived for millennia without 99.99% of the "services" that flood our economy today. It's all just a bunch of bullshit makework, the only purpose of which is to keep money flowing through the economy and to keep the population occupied with the need to make money for themselves.

To get an idea of just how much modern work is bullshit, consider the humble accountant. Accountants have been around for well over a hundred years. In the old days, they used to keep track of everything without the use of computers or calculators. Everything was done by hand. Records were kept meticulously in ledgers, calculations done with an abacus.

Now fast forward a few decades to the invention of the computer, the internet and spreadsheet software. A single accountant with Microsoft Excel can literally do the work of a dozen accountants fifty years ago, and do it in a fraction of the time. Spreadsheet and database software is so powerful in general, not just for accounting, but also for logistics and operations, that the productivity gains are incredible. In fact, I remember reading once (I think in a book or article about Robert McNamara, who worked in logistics during WW2) that if the Allies had had access to modern day spreadsheet software in the 1940s the effect would have been more decisive than the creation of the atomic bomb. That's how powerful the efficiency gains are from a logistical and operational perspective. Simply by being able to manipulate data hundreds of times more quickly and accurately than their enemies, the Allies would have won the war faster and more decisively than they did thanks to the Manhattan Project. The millions of tiny efficiency gains from real-time information reporting and tracking are in sum much more powerful than a nuclear weapon.

So basically, we're living in an era where all this incredible efficiency is being completely squandered, as far as actual quality of life goes for the majority of the population. Do you think anyone really gives a fuck that they can have a 60 inch television with 500 channels, or a cell phone that talks and plays videos? Is that supposed to make up for the fact that he's forced to spend the vast majority of his waking hours slaving away in some soul-sucking job? Wouldn't he be much happier with a 19 inch television working 20 hours a week? Everyone is on this treadmill, and most people don't even realize it, much less understand that it's completely unnecessary.

The amount of bullshit work going on in the year 2013, with our existing technology at its current level, is absolutely absurd. It's the equivalent of making 90% of our population go out and dig holes and fill them back up for 8 hours a day.