Economic Productivity, Technology and Wage Growth
Economics is a strange field purpoting to be quantitative and scientific but beset by quasi ideologies.
My higher education background is in Economics.
Traditionally it is held that increasing technology and productivity increases economic output resulting in growing real wages over time as workers take their slice of a growing pie.
But what happens in a consumption driven economy when technology and automation enable capital holders to take an ever larger slice of the pie because to satisfy consumer demand they need ever fewer people in production per unit product?
The traditional answer is the service economy expands.
But what happens when the same thing happens in services and even things like dog walking are increasingly provided by app hawking mega corps such as Wag?
Does there come a point when an economy can logistically satisfy demand but due to the surplus of workers and concentration of ownership of production factors into ever fewer hands can not distribute its production effectively through wage income to consume?
What about when wage earners in other countries make the majority of our consumption goods and our purchasing power is merely buoyed by the waning strength of our currency?
Personally I think we have several possible futures.
One is democratic socialism with UBI based on local soviets.
Another is implosion and civil strife.
Another is unknown.
The first one is unlikely because people have bought into a transitional liberal economic capitalist system that only was efficient due to the 19th century industrial revolution.
ChatGPT, ads for toenail fungus on Youtube natue documentaries nobody wants, and Facebook likes can't power an economy.
I think the most likely outcome is civil strife and war as the old ststem collapses under its own weight.
Maybe then we can finally revert to rural agrarian Communism or hunting and garthering as is more appropriate for humanity and as we lived in contentment and peace for thousands of years.
What do you think?