this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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A century ago was post Industrial Revolution and after the advent of mass production as a common means to produce goods. This was also past the time where many European countries had moved to a parliamentary system.
I’m not sure if you are just ignorant of history or what.
It’s inflammatory when the statistics are being presented in a misleading way, which you and many others are guilty of. We can discuss how to improve the system without that sort of thing and it’s not productive to actually seeing change get made.
It certainly is. Our living conditions have consistently improved in many ways as a result of industrialization.
You can argue that we could see more benefit and I’d agree with you, but to act like the average person hasn’t benefitted from industrialization is disingenuous.
The main thrust of my argument is simply, and throughout, has been this:
In the last 50 years, "worker productivity" has increased dramatically. compensation has not. The increased wealth that we are all generating is not making our lives better - it's going into the pockets of billionaires.
As you put it "the real median wage has not changed since 1980". As you showed with the graph you posted, the increased wealth that is being generated is increasingly going to the wealthiest people. This is all the data we need to support my argument, and they're both claims you have made.
The "improved living conditions" from better technology and industrial processes do not REQUIRE us to be giving all the extra wealth we're generating to the wealthiest people. These would still exist if we were taxing billionaires and large companies more, enforcing better wages for regular people, and investing that wealth into social programs.
Yes I agree with most of this. If the original post I responded to had said this instead of misleading statistics and “now we have billionaires” like that class of people is a recent development I wouldn’t have said anything. We can make our arguments without those sort of rhetorical devices and people will take us more seriously if we do.
People like to look back with rose tinted glasses and act like things were so much better in the gold ole days. They weren’t and we are arguably better off now than in almost any other time in history. I see value in appreciating that fact.
That said, just because we have benefitted from automation and technology development doesn’t change that we could do better. I’d love to see more social safety nets, more affordable housing, reduced working hours, and so forth.