Comment on Gold
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 1 week agoDepends of your definition of solve. There is no mechanism directly within capitalism to solve negative externalities that appear in capitalism once they appear. You need government regulations via democracy to step in and resolve them. That is why the increasing influence of corporations on politics is so harmful.
But capitalism allows fewer negative externalities to appear. Let me give you an example for the worker owned factory. The elected leaders incentive is not to lead a productive factory. It is to be popular and win elections. So what happens when a role becomes obsolete. Perhaps you no longer need a person to stand in an elevator and operate it for people, since it can be automated. But firing people is unpopular, so the boss is incentivised to keep the person. This means these people are not allowed to find jobs that are actually productive in improving the standards of living for everyone. People don’t like being fired when their position obsolete but it is necessary to advance civilization.
Another example is investment. When the factory has surplus profit, should he increase the wages of the employees immediately or invest the money into improving the productivity by buying better equipment or building another factory site. What about maintenance? Should he increase wages and delay the maintenance until it is someone else’s problem? By the way, this delayed maintenance issue is why public infrastructure is crumbling everywhere, since that is overseen by democratically elected leaders.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
You’re describing the doorman fallacy and it’s part of why cooperatives outlast traditional businesses. That elevator operator understood the whole company and was willing to gradually shift to new responsibilities.
In the past generation we’ve seen productivity skyrocket while compensation hasn’t.
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So there’s little to no incentive to increase productivity. You’ll get paid more by switching jobs every few years than you will by putting in hard work for the company. We’re “alienated” from the results of our labor - someone else gets the gains while our slice keeps getting thinner. The whole point of socialism is to address that.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You are mixing cause and effect. Productivity is rarely affected by bottom level employees to a significant extent these days. That is why there is no pressure for wages to keep up.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I’m addressing this claim here. If increased productivity doesn’t increase compensation, then there’s no incentive to help the owner increase productivity. This year in particular we saw a lot of layoffs by profitable businesses! The productivity increases we have seen can be more easily attributed to technological advancement than increasingly motivated employees.
Imagine how much more productive we’d be if everyone actually had any reason to give a shit about their company. Because most of us certainly do not.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 1 week ago
First of all, this is very questionable, since data from companies that overpaid/indulged their employees like Google and other tech companies in the past did not really see much increase in productivity as far as I can tell.
Second of all, pressure on wages is different. Hence my referral to minimal wages etc. In a sense, a boss is indeed not incentivised to increase productivity if all the gains go to employees anyway, but this is one special edge case. As you say, a majority of productivity gains come from automation improvements and other kinds of innovation, where the incentives do apply.