That’s a lot of words for “greed”.
Different system, same problem.
It’s not a paradox, just good old fashioned robbery.
stem/“skilled” labor isnt benefiting from improved tech, it all goes to ceos, and billionaire/millionaires. in order o prevent the works from uprising, they use various methods of propaganda to dissaude any confrontation.
It makes the class pyramid narrower and taller at the top.
Unless capitalists are forced to share their gains, they won’t.
The real reason is that monopolies or other forms of market power prevent competitive pricing, wages and rents.
Computers cost 92% less than they did in 2000.
Until the current RAM, storage and GPU crisis.
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Short review directly from this source for those, who don’t want to read the whole article:
The Core Problem, Simply Stated
Technology is making distribution dramatically more efficient.
But efficiency gains are being captured by whoever controls the bottleneck — the platform, the marketplace, the search engine — rather than distributed to the workers who enable production or the consumers who fund it.
Without wages, workers can’t consume. Without consumption, capital has nowhere productive to go. So it piles up in buybacks and data centers. GDP growth slows. And we wonder why a world of genuine technological marvels feels economically stagnant for most people.
That’s the paradox.
As AI accelerates the substitution of capital for labor, the dynamics described here are likely to intensify rather than resolve. The question isn’t whether the technology works — it clearly does. The question is whether the institutions and incentive structures around it will evolve fast enough to distribute what it creates.
That’s the harder problem. And it’s not a technology problem at all.
The reason is rich people.
Productivity means doing more relative to input. It is only a paradox to the those who know what it exactly means.
This isn’t just a “technology redistributes value” story; it’s a market design and incentive problem. Platforms didn’t accidentally capture the gains; they were structurally positioned to own demand, data, and distribution.
Also, the “consumption ceiling” feels directionally right for physical goods, but less convincing for digital and AI-native categories, which can expand usage in ways that traditional economics underestimates.
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That’s definitely true, but the cost of some things have greatly out paced that like housing or travel.
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Let me guess:
It’s because all the money goes to billionaires.
Edit: Pretty much what it says. It’s more detailed than that but yeah. Labourers get less, more value is attributed to capital (buildings, land) and collected by the rich.
amazing good maths
next they’ll be writing articles about “if i vote for jill stein becaue palestine. why do fascists stay in power” level maths
Yep without even reading the article I was going to guess wage theft and billionaires.
Wage theft is not merely being underpaid relative to the work you do. It’s actually not paying someone who worked
It’s both and more.
Wage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.
Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism
“I think I deserve more, but I accept less anyway”
Maybe you don’t deserve more
I think I deserve more, but I accept less anyway, due to the ever present threat of unrecoverable retribution against myself and my family if I negotiate too hard
Everyone has excuses for why they are not successful…
Who owns the means of production that make industris more efficient? Bingo.
I swear it‘s like people don‘t even know who or what Karl Marx is.
They don’t. Schools teach that “Karl Marx didn’t want anyone to have any money, and to be owned by the state. They quickly ran out of food because no one was motivated to work.”
Why do you think guys who purchased “Truck Nuts” all screech on Twitter about “socialism is when you do all the work and they take all the profits” when that’s exactly what capitalism is and they are too dumb to notice? Why do you think the Tetris movie wasn’t really about Tetris but instead about “Soviets bad”?
Your comment only works for those who don’t live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it’s western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.
USSR wasn’t really communist though, was it? They tried and failed to make a communist state, no?
Marx’s view was that socialism would develop as an emergent phenomenon (a modern term, not one he used) to correct the contradictions of capitalism. But in both Russia and China, they tried to impose socialism on what were essentially feudal societies. The result was state capitalism, the industrial revolution imposed at gunpoint with no control of the means of production by the workers. And, as capitalist societies, both countries continued the imperialism and nationalism of their predecessor regimes.
And this isn’t an after-the-fact critique: contemporary socialists such as Rosa Luxembourg made these observations at the time.
Skipping a developmental stage doesn’t work.
No country has managed a transition to communism, all of them got turned into various types of authroritarian dictatorships. There is no known method for transitioning to communism and maintaining it.
To be fair, when they tried outside influences actively sabotaged the attempt.
Would you know whether or not democratic socialism is a good prospect in that regard? A flavor of which that remains capitalistic, but using worker coops instead of the top down monarchistic approach to institutional governance?
Communism in its true form is unsustainable economically and defies basic human sociology and psychology.
Humans lived for 10s of thousands of years under communism. Capitalism was invented and within a couple of centuries the human race is commiting collective suicide with falling birth rates.
For family units but it quickly breaks down in larger groups and as complexity increases.
There were a few years of war communism during, well, the Civil War, but due to all the hunger deaths it might not be what your usual USSR fan wants to think about.
All of this is fairly obvious to someone not wearing a MAGA hat.
Productivity per person has increased since the 80’s, but wages have not followed - rather they have remained largely stagnant.
As such, the increased profits are instead going into an increasingly small amount of very rich people’s pockets
Wages have increased a huge amount from the 1980s
I’m not OP, but to play devil’s advocate:
Wages have not raised as quickly as rent has raised, unfortunately. As per the U.S. Department of the Treasury (posted during the Biden administration):
This is inflation-adjusted, so it is comparable to your data. My point here is that while average wages have increased, average available spending money after paying for basic necessities has likely significantly decreased.
Yes, because the US doesn’t build housing
The problem isn’t available housing, it’s artificial price inflation. There is no regulation on how much landlords can charge, so they just keep raising the price. Plus, they turn their vacant properties into AirBNBs, or worse, their only intention with the property was to turn it into an expensive AirBNB to begin with.
Then how come in places like Austin, where they built housing the rents dropped?
Your graph is deceiving because it starts at 20 and not 0 on the y axis. It shows a very modest increase in wage, there are much better charts out there that plot wage growth Vs productivity growth. This makes the theft all the more obvious.
This chart uses mean productivity and MEDIAN wages. You posted a chart meant to deceive.
Now compare wages vs inflation, and wages vs GDP. GDP of developed countries has climbed dramatically since the 80’s, while wage growth has slowed to a crawl relatively.
One must ask themself: where did all the money go?
One must ask themself: where did all the money go?
It sure looked like it chartered a private jet to Venice Italy to rent out entire city blocks and get married in utter opulence, to me.
Forgot to say: when you take GDP and divide it by the population you get mean. When we talk about wages, we’re talking about median wages. That’s where the difference lies
I already compared wages vs. inflation
There’s literally four inflation measures in this graph. Did the image load for you?
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