The Wealth of Dragons

Read a cool new guys book, the author is George Orwell, I think you'll like him!

"Worker productivity" has been going up for 50 years, but compensation hasn't been. That extra money goes into the pockets of the board and shareholders and CEOs.

80 years ago, the average CEO pay was about 20x the lowest pay in his company. Now, instead, we have billionaires.

There were some fairly major studies in the UK last year, across many companies and multiple industries, where they reduced the 5 day workweek to a 4 day workweek, whilst keeping the compensation of workers the same overall (i.e. salaried workers got the same salary, hourly workers got 25% more per hour)

The majority of companies involved in the study found that their workers were significantly healthier and happier after adjusting to the new schedule... and as a result significantly more "productive". Profits even went up despite the reduced working time. Most of them elected to keep with the new system once the study ended.

Obviously you can't do this with every industry, certain industries need 24/7 coverage or the like... you can't run an ER 4 days out of 7 - but the takeaway is that it'd be better to employ more people for less time and pay them well - you'll get better results than you will with an exhausted and depressed workforce

In many ways, we have been. The average person has casual access to goods and services that would have been immensely inaccessible without industrialization. Consider the average car for example. The engine alone has hundreds of tightly toleranced parts working in a mechanical dance to harness thousands of controlled explosions per second. That doesn’t even touch on the complex support systems required for engine management or chassis/suspension. I can buy a well running used car for less than the cost of a month’s rent.

Compare that to the pre-industrial era, when a simple shirt would have taken a single person 500-600 hours in manual labor to make starting from raw wool. That’s more than three months’ work with a 40 hour work week.

It’s truly amazing that any minimum wage worker in the USA can buy multiple used cars, a monumentally complex piece of machinery by any historical standard, for less labor than it would take to get a new shirt a few hundred years ago.

That said, I do believe we have the capacity to get these benefits PLUS reduced work hours. We will see that when we demand better worker protections from lawmakers and stop equating a human’s value to society with the number of hours they work each week.

When we hit peak population. This will be the next historical epoch which dramatically changes the fabric of society, because it will lay bare the finite nature of surplus labor, as well as dramatically skew the ratio of workers to retirees. It won't completely eliminate capitalism, but it will largely be the end of consumption driven economics, and will force more and more of this surplus productivity to go towards supporting populations instead of enriching a privileged few.

There will simply be no other option. In some places this will happen violently, but in many places it will be a slow but peaceful transition.

When heads roll

Yeah, IIRC a knight's suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari

While many knights were lords and vice versa, they weren't always

Thats not fair. Gizmo became a vampire and then decided he’d rather be human.

More efficient labor means less issues when drafting all my levies, which in turn means more meat between me and the actual danger