Whenever I get into discussions with strong supporters of capitalism, I find it very common for people pro-capitalism to defend the system by using examples which are simplistic reductions of the system itself. John is a baker, Jim is a butcher and Joe is candlestick maker and they all get to meet in the town square of their local village to set prices and negotiate the value of their own labor. Sounds great, right? What could be bad about a system like that right?
Nothing really. Under those conditions and those assumptions, capitalism and free markets are one of the greatest things to happen to mankind. The problem is those conditions and assumptions no longer match reality in the age of technology and automation.
John and Jim have had their bakeries and butcher shops put out of business by grocery stores and now work for them directly with the value of their individual tradecraft marginalized by machines that allow for mass production of quality goods by people needing a fraction of the training once required. Joe, unfortunately, is homeless now, because there hasn't been a need for a dedicated candlemaker as an essential tradecraft since they became mass produced by factories.
All of three of these people are examples of the philosophical change of companies which has been occurring over the last half a century. Instead of taking their profits and reinvesting them into the work force in an attempt to attract the most skilled workers to boost productivity and quality, companies are investing their profits into technology designed to increase productivity and quality while reducing the training and talent required by their workforce to perform said jobs. This has created a massive jolt in the productivity of the workforce while creating a stagnation in wages.
This divergence in productivity and compensation began in the 1970s and is often attributed to the dissolution of the gold standard and the beginning of unhindered printing of the U.S. dollar. While I don't doubt this plays into it, this is also the time period when computer technology truly began to take off with 1968 being the year of the invention of the first modern computer, 1969 containing the birth of UNIX, 1970 birthing the first DRAM chip, 1971 creating the floppy disk drive and 1972 presenting the first home game console.
Technological advancement and it's effect on the value of labor is now starting to reach it's crescendo with automation now beginning to replace the need for workers entirely instead of simply reducing the value of their labor.
Is this a bad thing? No, it's not. A human being spending their life working on the floor of a Tyson chicken factory as a cog in a machine is an awful existence and it's better replaced by a new machine which can be the missing cog in the machine.
It is, however, a bad thing in a system which ties the distribution of resources to the common man as a function of his or her labor. Many will argue that the old jobs will be replaced by new jobs servicing the machines and working with the technology, but yet this is not a very realistic stance. If the new system was able to provide enough jobs working with machines in order to ensure our entire population had enough labor to acquire the resources they needed, it would defeat the purpose of building machines to do work for us in the first place.
Yet, despite this growing issue, we have only had one presidential candidate who made this a serious part of his campaign. That was Andrew Yang. His idea that was dubbed Universal Basic Income by the media was actually an attempt to redistribute the benefits of this increased productivity from globalism and technology back down to the common man who was finding his labor increasingly devalued in a system that required labor to acquire resources.
Despite this, he was considered a joke candidate by many and was ignored by many people who are participating in this subreddit today with their votes going to candidates who still don't even recognize this as an issue and maintain a view in which the value of labor was the same as it was in 1920.
The point of my post here to day is to shed light on this issue and to help people understand that mass striking and resignation of jobs to force wages up will only get so far in a system that increasingly does not need our labor anymore.
The old adage of “Work hard and you will be rewarded” doesn't work when all profits are going towards the creation of technology designed to reduce the need for hard work, the very thing tied to the distribution of rewards in the system itself.
In the next election, please consider voting for a candidate who is making this issue a central part of his campaign.
Thank you.