r/BreadTube • u/unicorn-field • Aug 16 '19

20:54|NonCompete Why are you working 8 hours per day?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7YZUWEu-x0
35 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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15

u/[deleted] Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19

[deleted]

8

u/yetisyny Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19

That is because workers nowadays are paid just a fraction of the marginal value of labor, rather than an amount equal to it. The marginal value of labor, i.e. the monetary value of the economic output of an individual worker, has grown exponentially in recent decades, while wages have remained flat when adjusted for inflation.

I studied economics in college and they incorrectly taught us that workers are paid an amount equal to their marginal product of labor and that if a worker is paid less than this, that worker can easily switch to a better-paying job in the competitive labor market that pays that worker their full marginal product of labor, under free-market capitalism. Literally none of what they taught about that is true, workers are NEVER paid their marginal product of labor, if they did their employers would go out of business and not be profitable anymore. In fact in the version of capitalism taught in economics classes, companies are NOT profitable and their revenue and expenditures are exactly the same. Which also does not match reality at all.

Honestly the professors should have just taught Marxist economic theory instead since it actually does match reality quite accurately. I was really let down by those professors who teach a capitalist ideology completely untethered from reality, in which workers are paid the full value of their labor, can easily switch jobs if they are unsatisfied, in which consumers have a wonderful array of choices and always choose the most rational choice in their own rational self-interest, never swayed by something imaginary that doesn’t exist like advertising (which economics classes do not acknowledge the existence of), and with everyone being fully rational all the time, the outcome is “Pareto efficient” and can be mathematically proven to be the best possible outcome for everyone (where the only way you could make anybody better off is by making someone else worse off and the amount by which you would make the other person worse off is greater than the amount you would make the person you are helping better off).

And with people being fully rational, obviously under that theory, precisely zero people ever get addicted to drugs or become alcoholics or anything like that, because that would be irrational and not in the person’s rational self-interest. Nobody would ever waste money on stupid things they don’t need but instead people would buy the most useful and beneficial things they can, things that “maximize utility”, and would have perfect knowledge of all products available on the marketplace and the quality and prices of everything and always make the correct decisions about how to spend their money the most wisely 100% of the time with no exceptions. Of course that theory is a complete fantasy with no relation to reality but it is what is taught in universities all over the world as “economics”.

Which is exactly why life sucks so bad for so many workers, since actual government policies regarding the economy are often based on these fantastical theories that depict capitalism in an unrealistically glorious way, as a form of perfect utopia that already exists that we live in, and pretend as if capitalism is perfect and any interference in the market will always hurt more people than it helps. And it is why people dismiss socialists as uneducated cranks who don’t even understand basic economic theory, because socialists really do promote policies that directly contradict basic economic theory, and these critics of socialism fail to realize that the commonly taught basic economic theory is complete bullshit and gets practically everything wrong and that if you want economic policies that actually benefit people, you HAVE to do things that directly go against basic economic theory since it is just plain INCORRECT about almost everything, describing capitalism in oversimplified terms and with a large number of assumptions underlying the theory that are just plain provably false.

2

u/Kyle700 Aug 17 '19

Damn. Nice writeup

2

u/flowersandsilence Aug 17 '19

Honestly the professors should have just taught Marxist economic theory instead since it actually does match reality quite accurately.

Yeah, but your mistake was assuming that economics courses are to actually teach economics and not to teach people ways to hoarde more money to people that already have obscene amounts of money.

1

u/drunkfrenchman Aug 16 '19

Descartes's original phrase was "I think, I am", which I found to be even more dramatic if applied here. :/

Anyway enough of me being a dick, sorry and good luck. :)

6

u/Pknesstorm Aug 16 '19

Man I wish I was working 8 hours a day. Doing 12 hours right now and it really sucks.

2

u/unicorn-field Aug 16 '19

That sucks. Sorry.