Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone.
Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money.
I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?
But your money buys stuff that 50 years ago would have been too expensive for the richest men in the world. A pocket supercomputer, advanced diagnostics and medicine, instant access to information anywhere in the world.
Material gains (produced by more productive workers) don't offset the increases in
the number of expenses required to minimally live
(ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and
the ever escalating costs of those added requirements
Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in complexity for basic living factors - complexity that consumes internal resources and time.
More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.
Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money.
I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?