Comment 41999

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 15, 2010 at 17:54:14

The real question is why has productivity gone up so heavily in past decades while average real wages for most Canadians have stagnated since at least the early 1970s?

A Smith is right - we're not giving incentives to the people who create value. He is, however, wrong, about who that is. Owners and investors don't create value, they facilitate creation of value by workers. A factory, a bunch of ore, and a billion dollars of investment are absolutely worthless without somebody to work them into useful goods. If workers can double the amount of work they do and not see any real gains in pay, why should they?

And as for technology - yes, it can increase efficiency, but if the technology costs more than it provides in efficiency, then it won't. Over the long run it's hard to draw anything other than a direct connection between technology and MORE work, not less. Hunter-gatherers worked the least (2-4 hours per week), medieval peasants often had a holiday/festival every other day, and now after a century of unbelievable gains in productivity we're starting to see our workweek creep up again (thank you Mike Harris). It's pretty common knowledge amongst anthropologists that "labour-saving technologies" simply don't (ya just spend more time at work to pay for them). Jevons' paradox applies to people too.

"Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased." Adam Smith

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