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> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't. In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand. In a

by jlebar 4mo ago

> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't. In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand. In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease. This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under. You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for. Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".

ncallaway 4mo ago
Right, but a day off would reduce supply. And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2). So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that. There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.
- jlebar 4mo ago
  > There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. 200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%. The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.) But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
  - komali2 4mo ago
    > The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar. And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000. Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie. In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life? On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
    - jlebar 4mo ago
      > Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions. Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years. https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
      - komali2 4mo ago
        Capitalists invented metrics to show how awesome capitalism for the world, and then said "see, against these metrics, the world is better!" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2... Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into? People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement? https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-settlements https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-... People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement? These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.
skew-aberration 4mo ago
From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?

by jlebar 4mo ago

ncallaway 4mo ago

Right, but a day off would reduce supply. And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2). So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that. There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.

jlebar 4mo ago
> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. 200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%. The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.) But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
- komali2 4mo ago
  > The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar. And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000. Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie. In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life? On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
  - jlebar 4mo ago
    > Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions. Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years. https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
    - komali2 4mo ago
      Capitalists invented metrics to show how awesome capitalism for the world, and then said "see, against these metrics, the world is better!" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2... Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into? People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement? https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-settlements https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-... People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement? These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.

skew-aberration 4mo ago

From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?