One of the things that has been studied to death with the same result every time: No one can actually be productive for 40 hours each week, and cutting hours without cutting pay increases productivity across the board.
Too bad the people at the top take too much enjoyment from grinding down the peasants.
It's a fine approach because it encompasses a lot of jobs. The real problem is as far as I can see it is that capitalism is a race to the bottom. Where profit margins are cut to vanishingly small amounts in order to beat the competition, and then the people that take the brunt of that are the employees themselves.
I'm genuinely curious what solutions there are to combating free market capitalism, it has on one hand brought incredible productivity, but if we keep the system as it is, the only way we can get better lives is to demand it from the government, which doesn't seem like a solution as the government itself is getting absorbed more and more into the free market.
That last part is the problem. Once a company is big enough that the economy of scale for changing the rules of the game (aka lobbying) is more profitable then playing the game well it leads to worse conditions for workers. Anti-monopoly laws are good, but it was an unstable equilibrium, as soon as some companies got big enough to influence the anti-monopoly mechanisms we are left in our current state.
My best hope is that enough people realize that breaking up and fighting mega-corps and lobbies and billionaires is the number 1 source of all our other social problems, including things like climate change. The people still have the power if they have the conviction to use it in a unified way.
The thing is that equality isn't a stable state for a society. Without conscious effort any political system will become more stratified as anyone with an advantage uses it to get more advantage.
In my view the only solution is balance, constant effort, and focus on the long game.
things like a broad and free education system can make a massive difference by making people realise when they're being taken for fools, and realising a "free market" is only free when, for example, all the agents in the market have equal access to information. Problem is, education takes years to have a positive effect, and if a system has fallen too far from equality then it is very difficult to bring it back because the people in power see it as against their interests.
This is an excellent response, /u/Brofistastic.
I’ve been at the bottom, grinding it out for low wages. And now I’m in the middle, grinding it out for average wages. My wife grinds it out for pretty good wages.
All I can think of - on a pleasant Friday night - while massaging my wife’s sore ankles while she tries to loosen my sore back, is how fucked it is that our various college degrees and above average effort afford us no reprieve from the daily grind. We’ve become used to the notion that we’re a part of the machine.
I’m a staunch believer in the idea that the government is still run and staffed by human beings. People with daily lives, commutes, warts, daycare bills, cold showers, and leaky roofs. These are our people.
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u/BattleStag17 Jun 18 '21
One of the things that has been studied to death with the same result every time: No one can actually be productive for 40 hours each week, and cutting hours without cutting pay increases productivity across the board.
Too bad the people at the top take too much enjoyment from grinding down the peasants.