“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich””””
You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average.
Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital.
It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades.
If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers.
It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.
You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average.
Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital.
It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades.
If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers.
It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.