Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers. You keep working the same hours to make your bosses more money, when you could be working less instead. This income gap has been widening since the 1970s[1,2].
Imagine your job is producing chairs. You make 1 chair per day. Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase, instead the executives pocket all of it!
But what about the 3 extra chairs? Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day.
Wealth is about stuff, not money. If more stuff is produced (that is useful) then people become wealthier. So unless those executives are somehow taking all those extra chairs themselves there must be done other beneficiary from the extra productivity.
It's far more likely that regular people have a growing desire for more stuff than the executives using up all those extra products themselves.
> Now you get a machine that improves your productivity and you can make 4 chairs per day, but your pay doesn't increase
You are looking from a single worker's perspective. A more realistic example is 4 workers used to make 4 chairs per day, and now 3 workers can make the same number of chairs. Boss makes more money. No net gain for the remaining 3 workers (and the laid off worker has to find another job, potentially for a lower salary).
>Somebody somewhere gets chairs that wouldn't have got them if you had been producing 1 chair per day.
I hope you noticed that this somebody is someone else and not you. It could be another executive from another company.
The thing is, people don't care about stuff, because stuff is cheap. They need money to pay for housing and they need only the money, because if people stop consuming and spend more money on housing, the housing gets more expensive even for those who would have otherwise spent their money on consumption. Those people also need more money, not stuff, to spend on housing.
When things get more expensive for no reason, the economy must grow regardless of whether people want to consume more. Most wealth is about the allocation of already existing stuff and transforming it into something convenient. Humans didn't create the oil or iron ore in the soil. They just dug it out. Stuff is never produced, only transformed, so economics will always be about fighting for getting that initial endowment.
Those extra chairs aren't just given away for free for the benefit of humanity. The company sells them, and hence directly profits from the increased productivity. Meanwhile, the workers who actually make them likely never see their net worth increase because of it, and the executives do. This is a story that's been repeated for centuries.
I think you're underestimating how many chairs a single person can have. And cars and houses and services. And obviously some businesses will grow or shrink relative to others based on how elastic the demand is. Also it's a bigger range than just the executives.
Sure but do you know someone who doesn’t have chairs ? I mean, sure, there are people setting up in their first house, people who broke their existing chairs … but there is a lot of available options on the aftermarket.
I understand why you would want brand new chairs. My brain also does want them because they are pretty, because they goes well with your interior etc ...
But brand new chairs are far from a need we need to solve. And we are destroying our planet and our workers health for more chairs than there is asses on this planet.
My point is that, with the exception of food and possibly medicine, this reasoning applies to basically everything.
As an exercise of thought, if we magically stopped the economy now like, everyone stopped working and paying for housing and credit and given a magic influx of food, most humans in the world would not need anything else to be happy for a long time.
Of course it’s just an exercice of thought, we do need to replace some objects sometimes, we do need people to fix things. But apart from food, there is barely any object that we would need that isn’t already available somewhere in the world.
The thing is, mostly nobody is a farmer : most people in the world are producing or helping producing things we already have.
I play an MMO and people in Europe regularly tell me that they are playing at their desk or in meetings.
Given the number of people I've seen you spend more time on chat and social media instead of work task I would say that we have found more new ways to not work while getting paid.
What do you mean, "nope"? Which part of the previous claims are you refuting?
Your chart shows "real median personal income" increased by ~50% from 1975 to now (27k to 40k).
One of the links you're nope-ing says "From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%)."
Both of these can be true, and median personal income increasing by just 50% when the income of the wealthy increased by far, far more sure sounds a lot like "the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers."
That number makes absolutely no sense considering how much more basic stuff like housing is now.
Income going up does not actually mean anything without taking into consideration that people are less likely to be able to buy a house now than 50 years ago.
Exactly. If incomes increased at the same rate as housing did, then people would be much richer today than they were back then. It's why inflation uses a basket rather than just cherry picking a single component of the basket. If you want things to look bad you use housing. If you want things to look good you use potatoes. If you try and be fair you use a basket.
>> No amount of automation has ever seemed to result in a net reduction in work to do thus far
> Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers.
Or also people like working, for some value of "like":
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
[1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
[2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/