Item — HN Reader

Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.

Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.

What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?

3 comments

Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital

Ideally our political systems act as a sigmoid filter over the growth, benefits, and harms

The population grows exponentially. Why would you think the system would work against that?

Populations grow logistically as they hit carrying capacity, it just looks exponential when it’s far from K

I'm dumb. I look at a chart of "world population" and I see an exponential curve that starts in the 1950s. K?

Or are we going to work from the modern perspective that these peoples are somehow outside of our sphere of influence or concern?

Are we looking at different data? If I look at https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth - which lists data from 1950 - I see a basically linear growth?

Doesn’t that make the situation even more dire? (If true, hard to believe when global population has negative second derivative)

If you're practicing casual misanthropy I'm sure it looks very "dire" that no one is exercising the authority to artificially limit population growth.

To me it just looks like "we're screwing around and falling behind on the work of actually advancing the cause of humanity." I'm hoping that's what you meant but around here it would be unusual.

Blowing unaccounted billions on elite golden cows. For all this money would could have built a house for every homeless person in the USA.

Labor supply and demand do not reliably reflect the productive or social value of labor.

An explanation to your analysis:

"War begins to be presented as the heroic alternative, the last hope, the “way out” from the unending nightmare of economic crisis, misery and unemployment. Fascism, the most complete expression of modern capitalism, glorifies war. The filthy sophism “War means Work” begins to be circulated by the poison agencies of imperialism, and filters down to the masses. ... War is only the continuation and working out of the crisis of capitalism and of the present policies of capitalism. It is inseparable from these, and cannot be treated in isolation. All the policies of capitalist reorganisation, all the policies of Fascism, can only hasten the advance to war. This is equally true of the line of a Roosevelt, a MacDonald or a Hitler. War is no sudden eruption of a new factor from outside, a vaguely future menace to be exorcised by special machinery, but is already in essence implicit in the existing factors, in the existing driving forces and policies of capitalism."

- R.P. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935