Basically, human labor is required to make the economy grow, but to sustain it doesn’t need so much labor.
That’s like when you’re building a house, a lot of working hours goes into building it (10 men for 1000 hours each), but sustaining it can be done by a housewife in her spare time after she took care of children all day. (I’m deeply sorry about the gendered language but i feel it gets the point across more clearly - maintenance requires significantly less work than building something in the first place.)
This leads to the following phenomenon:
As time goes forward, we have more resources available due to better automation (consider farming robots) but at the same time there’s less demand for human labor also due to automation.
This changes the way that society operates significantly. And it also makes it very displeasant for the people who only identify through the labor they produce to have children, because these children will have a difficult time finding meaningful employment.
Note that this phenomenon takes decades to roll out, but that’s also the time in which children would grow up, so it matches on the timescale and that’s why it’s relevant.
I just want to add to my description above that the cost of living is actually decreasing if you looked at it from an objective perspective. However, we are humans and don’t look at things from an objective perspective, but from a subjective one instead, i.e. how much can i buy with my money.
And that is becoming less. Because the wages decrease faster and more dramatically than the cost of various products. As a consequence, if you divide the cost of products by our wages, things still seem to get more expensive in relation to our own buying power.
the objective perspective is if you compare prices to food.
historically, food was one of the first type of products to be optimized as much as can be, because people in the 19th and 20th century understood very well how central and important food is for a society. like, for example, under hitler, in nazi germany a whole lot of focus was put on how to produce as much food as possible on the area available. as a consequence, everything about the food production process got optimized as much as possible. the same happened everywhere else in the west at roughly the same time btw, i was just citing nazi germany as an example because there’s extensive literature about that one, but you can probably find fair amounts of literature about the situation in england and the US as well.
anyways, food production got optimized as much as possible early on, in the first half of the 20th century, and as a consequence, food production could not ever be truly improved (from an economics point of view) ever since, because it’s already “maximum performance”. as a consequence, the price of food production (in terms of real resource use and labor use) is already the lowest it could be and did not change in the last 75 years. that is why, from a realist point of view (i.e. one that looks at objective reality such as materials used and labor hours worked) its cost has stayed constant for a long time.
on the other hand, luxury products like TV screens, entertainment, and such had not experienced similar optimization in the first half of the 20th century, instead these things got tackled only much later starting around 1970 when companies realized that there was still a lot of improvement among these products so they continued to invest and develop the production processes for these products. as a consequence, from a realist point of view, the production processes for these products got much more efficient in the last 50 years.
I made this diagram a while ago:
Basically, human labor is required to make the economy grow, but to sustain it doesn’t need so much labor.
That’s like when you’re building a house, a lot of working hours goes into building it (10 men for 1000 hours each), but sustaining it can be done by a housewife in her spare time after she took care of children all day. (I’m deeply sorry about the gendered language but i feel it gets the point across more clearly - maintenance requires significantly less work than building something in the first place.)
This leads to the following phenomenon:
As time goes forward, we have more resources available due to better automation (consider farming robots) but at the same time there’s less demand for human labor also due to automation.
This changes the way that society operates significantly. And it also makes it very displeasant for the people who only identify through the labor they produce to have children, because these children will have a difficult time finding meaningful employment.
Note that this phenomenon takes decades to roll out, but that’s also the time in which children would grow up, so it matches on the timescale and that’s why it’s relevant.
PS the word “homemaker” exists. …Just wanted to tell you!
I’m genuinely curious, where are theses numbers from? Could you please cite the source of your graphs?
it doesn’t seem that they are based on any data, it just illustrates their point
yep
I just want to add to my description above that the cost of living is actually decreasing if you looked at it from an objective perspective. However, we are humans and don’t look at things from an objective perspective, but from a subjective one instead, i.e. how much can i buy with my money.
And that is becoming less. Because the wages decrease faster and more dramatically than the cost of various products. As a consequence, if you divide the cost of products by our wages, things still seem to get more expensive in relation to our own buying power.
So what is this “objective” perspective? Could you break it down like you broke down the subjective one?
the objective perspective is if you compare prices to food.
historically, food was one of the first type of products to be optimized as much as can be, because people in the 19th and 20th century understood very well how central and important food is for a society. like, for example, under hitler, in nazi germany a whole lot of focus was put on how to produce as much food as possible on the area available. as a consequence, everything about the food production process got optimized as much as possible. the same happened everywhere else in the west at roughly the same time btw, i was just citing nazi germany as an example because there’s extensive literature about that one, but you can probably find fair amounts of literature about the situation in england and the US as well.
anyways, food production got optimized as much as possible early on, in the first half of the 20th century, and as a consequence, food production could not ever be truly improved (from an economics point of view) ever since, because it’s already “maximum performance”. as a consequence, the price of food production (in terms of real resource use and labor use) is already the lowest it could be and did not change in the last 75 years. that is why, from a realist point of view (i.e. one that looks at objective reality such as materials used and labor hours worked) its cost has stayed constant for a long time.
on the other hand, luxury products like TV screens, entertainment, and such had not experienced similar optimization in the first half of the 20th century, instead these things got tackled only much later starting around 1970 when companies realized that there was still a lot of improvement among these products so they continued to invest and develop the production processes for these products. as a consequence, from a realist point of view, the production processes for these products got much more efficient in the last 50 years.
so you consider the price basket excluding luxuries to be objective?
yeah, more or less, especially food.