Gains in productivity don't help the working class much; they mostly help the ow... | Hacker News

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psychometry on May 19, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: How did we get so busy?

Gains in productivity don't help the working class much; they mostly help the owners of companies. Those owners have no financial incentive to reduce working hours to compensate for gains in productivity when they could rather cut half their workforce and tell the remaining workers they need to work harder/longer because there is more competition for their jobs now.

Those who predicted a "leisure society" back in the 1950s obviously didn't realize Marx predicted the opposite would happen a century earlier.

mey on May 20, 2014 [–]

Exactly. To achieve a leisure society we would need to see GDP grow while the productivity index either was flat or decreased.

If you use the same link and look at GDP per capita on that same graph, in 2008 area, productivity started to overtake GDP.

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