Why Technology Didn't Produce Increased Leisure

[pbrower2a]

(06-18-2018, 03:28 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-18-2018, 12:10 PM)tg63 Wrote:

(06-16-2018, 09:34 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Do any of you see any hope for another period of time charged with radical fun if you want it? Seems that mindset disappeared circa the mid-1980s when society went from hedonistic to workaholic almost overnight. Aren't there at least some left who want to love, play, dance and create?

I do miss those sentiments, but they certainly aren't values that are considered noble or even desirable in this phase of the cycle. After all, they aren't qualities that  contribute to increasing productivity.  

Increased productivity is no longer a net plus, unless you are in the ownership class.  All the benefits flow there, while all the efforts to achieve are produced by the work-for-a-living crowd.  At some point that may finally sink into the skulls of hoi polloi, and the paradigm might shift.  So far, the workers are identifying with the moneyed interests, because they have so much in common.  

Exactly. It goes to economic rent. The rentier gets to exact from the worker or consumer a charge (essentially a privately-collected tax) for the privilege of living in the rentier's world. It is much like the dues that a feudal lord exacted from a peasant.

In a competitive economy, increased production and innovation tend to drive costs of getting things down to a bare minimum. So it has been with the high-tech objects of the time, whether the bone china of the Wedgwood family, the Model T Ford, or most of our electronic gadgets.  A capitalist might get rich with an innovation whether in the invention or production of objects, but eventually everything goes obsolete and requires fresh innovation for a desirable product or some new trick of cutting cost on the production line. Nineteenth-century bone china might still be useful, but a Model T Ford is too under-powered (among other things) to be safe on a modern road, and the $1295 color TV set from 1953 (which cost about as much as a new car at the time for a 15-inch-screen display) might be in use today -- as a plant stand. A 15" display is fully adequate for a portable computer.

Rentier capitalists (and Donald Trump is a prime example) are more concerned with how much they can exact from a customer than with efficiency. They sacrifice efficiency for gain. They can exact much of the fruit not only of toil, but also innovation and imagination. They are the sorts of capitalists who best fit Karl Marx' stereotype. Needless to say, they are not the most admired of capitalists.

Of course the other sorts of capitalists grade into rentier capitalists, and we have another exploitative elite, to wit the managerial elite which has come to resemble the Soviet nomenklatura, a class that has shown the possibility of exploitation without ownership.

Exploiters are hated, but they usually are able to lavish funds upon intellectual shysters able to bamboozle people , political hacks willing to serve them in complete submission in return for a near-sinecure, and in the end brutal enforcers. We are in for a very rough ride, and we can't get off the infernal vehicle that has us trapped upon it. Donald Trump may be an incompetent do-it-yourself despot, but you can count on this: he will have more competent successors more effective at turning up the terror on anyone who balks at seeing his highest purpose in life enriching some idle-rich creep who charges us heavily (in suffering) for the privilege of living in his world.