Why Technology Makes Us More Productive but Not Richer

harshakcheruku

Author here. Happy to answer questions or discuss the data sources. The labor share shift is the part I found most surprising when I dug into the BLS numbers.

titzer

In short, it's the oligarchy.

prakhar897

The article has grand total of 27 em dashes.

applfanboysbgon

Looks LLM-generated. Was already disinclined to read it based on hatred for that style of writing alone, but it is also just extremely vapid as far as I got before giving up at this line: > Technology redistributes the existing pie. It doesn’t reliably grow it. Technology is the reason there are 8 billion humans on this planet. It is the reason that you can pick from hundreds of different foods at the supermarket. It is the reason everyone can buy cute or cool clothes and 10 pairs of shoes. It is the reason why everyone can have a machine that cools their food, three machines that heat their food, a machine that washes their clothes, and a machine that performs billions~trillions of calculations per second to do magic. It is the reason a significant portion of the labor force in technologically-developed countries does work that involves standing around and talking to people or sitting at a desk instead of working their asses off in the fields. Maybe the article gets into making some point about wealth distribution later, but it is before then making factually incorrect statements about technology so any conclusions based on that are probably faulty anyways.

creddit

> Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% today. That’s a modest rise over four decades — and it has essentially plateaued since 2010. > This matters because it tells us something important: technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consume. It’s redistributing how we consume, and who profits from it. This is mathematically illiterate and appears to be central to the point.

ricksunny

Haven't opened the article yet, but surprised the comments so far are generally in the framework of "oh, economy produces more X, but too much more of a proportion of X is going to [the fortunate few] and too little to [the unfortunate many]." where is X is some kind of fungible consumable. Rather what I see are asset holders and liabilities holders (same spectrum, some enjoy the positive side, some struggle on the negative side). Goods (the consumable, fungible sort) flow in, around, between, and all throughout them. But the only ledger that matters, the one that makes some stressed out and others feel empowered & satisfied, is the asset-liability spectrum. Update: And now I've read at the article. Decent, it might sa well be the GPT of "Update Das Kapital for the 21st century". (GPT here being a figure speech, i.e. irrespective of whether an LLM helped in composing the piece). Article still fixates too much on differential parceling out the flow of economic product, and not the asset-liability ledger which everyone is jostling around with each other on. (It almost touches on it in "Mechanism #3", but not quite).

why_only_15

This seems like a really poorly thought out article. You should take more care on making sure your understanding is correct before publishing in the future. Taking the Amazon example in Part 2: For e-books (simpler), Amazon gets 30% for running the store, doing advertising, etc. and then authors get 70% [1]. For print books, I'm a little less clear but it appears Amazon buys the books for roughly 50% of list[2] which for Hachette in 2025 is $26.50 so Amazon pays $13.25 to the publisher and then Amazon retails the book for $14.84. So for $100 of books sold on Amazon, $89 goes to the publisher and $11 goes to Amazon. It appears that the cost to produce these books is maybe $2/book (though I'm very unsure on this, this is a guesstimate from public data) and then the rest flows back to authors, advances, etc. Amazon.com (not AWS) has a 7% profit margin in North America (FY25), so of that $11 they get in revenue they get $0.77 in operating profit. Ok and this also annoyed me: you say $1.7T/y is $10.5k/worker, which is accurate. but then you say for the average household it's $26k/y. This is not true. There are 134m households in the US [3] so it's $12.6k/y for the average household. Maybe you meant something else like the median household but it seems more likely you just said ~2.6 people/household and multiplied the number of people/household by cost/worker. This is obviously wrong and you should have caught errors like that earlier. [1]: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210 [2]: https://www.readersfirst.org/publisher-price-watch [3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TTLHH

kkfx

https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg simply.