my suggestion is that productivity growth is in the hands of the people who must be productive. As they lost incentives they became less productive, but because the companies provided productivity boosters they were able to stay at the same level of productivity. In order for capital to increase productivity if this were correct they would have to give the shares of the rewards to the labor.
on edit: it seems weird to say we gave them all these tools to increase productivity, and they didn't increase productivity, but not note at the same time we removed rewards for increased productivity.
The reward for increased productivity is more work!
The problem for the capitalist is having to pay all those pesky people to do the work. Eats into profits. Now we can burn out 2 people and do the work that used to take 10!
An increase in aggregate worker productivity isn't necessarily an increase in the ability of workers; most productivity gains are attributable to capital investment. If you took a productive modern worker back 500 years, they wouldn't be much more productive than the locals of that time, as they'd lack the tooling, machinery, resources, equipment and factories that magnify human productivity today. It hence makes sense that the gains from rises in productivity wouldn't all accrue to workers, as the gains result from the actions of business owners investing in better means of production, not from action on the workers' part.
This destroys incentive to invest in productivity improvements, because the gains are eaten by wages. Most productivity gains in the economic sense don't come from people working smarter/harder, they come from investment in better machines and technology (capital). If you took the most productive worker today back two thousand years, their productivity would be massively reduced without access to any modern tools or equipment.
It seems to me that worker productivity gains come primarily from better technology and processes - from business investments - rather than from workers themselves. The rewards flow accordingly. Workers who enhance their own productivity actually do provide more value and hence gain a competitive advantage. Plenty of individuals could improve their productivity and value.
I've never understood the claim that higher productivity somehow entitles workers to the surplus. The key component of actually being substantially responsible for productivity gains is missing.
A significant part of productivity gains went to workers up until 1999. There is no universal law that says productivity gains are inherently captured by shareholders. Of course if this is a possible option capitalists will choose it. I think this is a consequence of government policy where monopsony power prevents labour from getting a fair price due to only a handful of monopolists having the things that improve productivity.
Sure, but how do we used to share the increase in productivity ? How do we share it now ? How should we share it ?
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My feeling is workers had been the "loser" those last 30 years in how are shared the productivity gain.
Ethically I find it wrong.
Economically this did not seemed to offer more growth or positive outcome...
All productivity gain is the result of capital investment. That doesn't mean the benefits should not accrue to workers. Who do you think is provisioning, configuring and using the machines that result in that gain? Shareholders?
I see all these posts and comments talking about productivity and the problem being the growth of productivity. Productivity wasn't ever a problem. Productivity has definitely increased. The problem is who or what benefits from it. My layman hypothesis is that a lot of created value has been thesaurized.
Do you have some numbers on individual worker income vs. individual worker productivity? Most numbers I've seen have been aggregated.
And do you really believe that all productivity improvements would be captured by workers with sufficient negotiating power? What's the incentive for the capital owner to invest in new technology that would improve productivity if there's no profit motive because all the added revenue ends up in the workers' pockets?
on edit: it seems weird to say we gave them all these tools to increase productivity, and they didn't increase productivity, but not note at the same time we removed rewards for increased productivity.
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