If that were to happen all of capitalism would crash and the markets would completely burst under their own weight overnight.

Sustained wage growth is impossible without sustained productivity growth.

So if we freeze productivity at current levels forever, we’ll freeze wages at their current level forever.

That’s the simple answer. In the real world I think we need ~1% productivity growth just to maintain wages, largely due to the costs associated with increasing productivity. Since a significant portion of our economy revolves around increasing productivity, it wouldn’t be pretty if we just stopped. I don’t think wages would drop to zero, nor do I recall Marx claiming it would in actuality, but I don’t want to think about what the new normal would look like.

If productivity froze 1960s style capitalism would be fine. You could invest in a corporation and it may or may not grow, but it could make reliable profits and pay dividends. Capitalism should not have to depend on ever increasing productivity. But, financial capitalism does. Ever increasing productivity means not steady, but growing returns on investment, which means not steady, but increasing "value". This is where financial capitalists make money as they are not making money off of dividends or profits, but off of increasing value. And in the modern world where we have things like a nominal value of derivatives of a quadrillion dollars - more than 10 times the global GDP - a decrease in the rate of increase of productivity causes problems.

I haven’t argued otherwise. My argument is that increasing living standards depends on increasing productivity. So sure, we could go back to 1960 and halt productivity growth, but we’d be left with essentially the same living standards people enjoyed back then. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be any advancement at all, but it would be severely stunted, like maybe 1970 standards today.

Actually you explicitly said something about a 1% annual growth rate of productivity being required to maintain a standard of living. But really the graph shows that the same rate of increase of growth rate that increased standards of living up to the early 70s, no longer does so. (I see how you cherry picked the end date of 1999 - which is dishonest. It is quite clear from the graph that the relationship between productivity, at least as the statistic is measured, and real wages has changed.

Amazon really does some difficult things exceedingly well with distribution.

Which I immediately qualified: "we need ~1% productivity growth just to maintain wages, largely due to the costs associated with increasing productivity."

Or, since the demarcation line is somewhere around 1973 and bls data only goes back to 1947, I went back from 1973 25 years to 1947 and forward from 1974 25 years to 1999... just to not cherry pick.
Of course it has, that's what I've been saying: Productivity growth fell off a cliff in the 1970s and took wage growth with it. You're free to deny my causal link, but the correlation between declining productivity and wages is glaringly obvious.

Well now that doesn't sound horrifically dystopic at all.

You're being disingenous. You're talking about 25 years from 1974-1999 and ignoring the 20 years after 1999 when productivity increased faster than it had in 1947-1974 and enough to make up for the slower increase in the growth of productivity from 74-99 and yet wage growth is still detached from rapidly increasing growth in productivity.

This is obvious enough that it's like 99% you're just trolling and one of a recent trolls that that Kavenaugh hearings seem to have brought into the forum.

Dvault (and I) made the point that the data before 1947 makes it more difficult to make the connections and that perhaps the question should be why were productivity and wage growth seemingly linked between 1947 and 1973. Maybe it took many disparate factors for them to be so well aligned and a variety of shocks could potentially have disrupted the relationship.

How are we defining 'living standards'?

Like they say, "Give a man a fishing pole and he can feed himself; give him a fishing net and he can feed the whole village," or something like that.

My daddy always done told me, son, he said, son, teach a man to fish and he might eat for a lifetime but own the fishing hole and you own his soul.

Ok John, we invented a fishing robot, FishBot3000. Now what?

No it didn't; not even close. From 1999-2017 productivity grew on average 1.9%.

Can't argue with that logic.

Mostly due to capital consuming labor's share of business income, which has really accelerated since 2000. Partly because the price of goods workers consume (food, household items, etc.) rise at a faster rate than goods workers produce (machinery and other B2B items); so when they adjust for real dollars with cpi, there's a disparity, i.e., if workers consumed what they made, their wages would have grown more.

Since "we" invented it, I guess we're okay. Short answer, though: I think occupations will die but jobs will live on. Just like people 100 years ago couldn't conceive of what we'd be doing today job wise, who knows what people will be doing 100 years from now.

Here's an article on the subject. It links to a paper too. I read the article, not the paper yet (if at all). I don't feel like the question is answered or anything.

John, the acceleration of capital consuming labor's share of business income is what people are complain about here. If that weren't happening then real wages could rise with rising productivity regardless of the rate of change of productivity.

Funny how the resident communists have admitted that they don't use Amazon or see much benefit to it. Kind of how everyone mocked Steve Jobs for the uselessness of iPads when they first came out. It's a basic acknowledgement that in their version of society none of these things would likely exist. A perfect illustration of how terrible central planners are in predicting the preferences of the population, and how the market along with bold, entrepreneurial leadership is necessary for innovation.

I get massive personal and professional benefits every day from using Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

True. Scientific research has always been highly regressive in that it gives tax payer money to an ultra elite few, who are already rich (by forum standards) and work at multi billion dollar universities that only teach the intellectual elite.

The sane answer is that their work has the potential to benefit everyone, sometimes in vey unexpected ways. But if you don’t consider CERN data transfer to NSFNET to internet a shining example of that because Bezos, Zuckerberg and Tim Cook are rich and “own” the research you “paid” for you definitely should be against state funded scientific research. The internet has just gone from benefiting the research science elite to the business science elite and nobody else!

I STILL think the iPad is pretty useless. Gonna go down with that ship even though there are prob 5 or 6 at my house somewhere.

Einbert is the only avowed communist, certainly as far as "central planning" is concerned, but I reckon this means you're a big consumer of everything popular. So you're the reason we had Justin Bieber and The Apprentice.

No you should be for state funded research and for the fruits of that research being public. Nationalise Facebook.

I left off the link.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.235e677ebe78

that's the article and the paper is here

https://piie.com/system/files/docume...71109paper.pdf

Sure maybe I should have said communist-sympathizers. Popular things can be good or bad. I never watched The Apprentice but I won't deny having a guilty pleasure for Despacito. The masses should only be followed politically but not culturally?

Regardless of that, things that let you communicate easily with any human around the world, or that have virtually any item sent to your house in one day for a relatively low price are pretty f-in useful whether you are rich or poor, bourgeois or prole.

I don't know what you're getting at with "the masses should be followed politically but not culturally?" Do you mean that if you support democracy you have to actually watch The Apprentice? Or shop at Amazon? Or use Facebook? Ok, you don't mean that I would hope.

I don't begrudge your right to make bad choices like The Apprentice, Justin Beiber, Facebook or Apple. I don't consume any of those things because they suck (Apple makes good hardware, but they suck hard in other ways). I do avoid Amazon because I don't like the company, there are plenty of alternatives, I don't consume much and I don't like megacorp putting everyone else out of business.

You don't have to consume them but you should probably understand why people like them and maybe not view them in such a bad light.

If the things you like aren't popular and vice-versa, it's not a great sign. If you can't even build a cultural movement how are you going to build a political one?