A Quote by Erik Brynjolfsson
Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don't share in that gain.
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Competition is the most promising means to achieve and secure prosperity. It alone enables people in their role of consumer to gain from economic progress. It ensures that all advantages which result from higher productivity may eventually be enjoyed.
Productivity and the growth of productivity must be the first economic consideration at all times, not the last. That is the source of technological innovation, jobs, and wealth.
Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.
We're not children here. The law is-how should I put it? A convenience. Or a convenience for some people, and an inconvenience for other people. Like, take the law that says you can't go into someone else's houseI have a house, so, hey, I like that law. The guy without a house-what's he think of it? Stay out in the rain, schnook.That’s what the law means to him
You know, I had a new kind of thought on Black Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter thing. And the best way to explain it is if we're all sitting around at a table having dinner, and everybody gets pie except for you and you say, my pie matters, I don't have pie, and everybody at the table looks at you and says, I know, all pie matters, it shows that the people at the table aren't really listening.
Worldwide, most people dress more casually these days, don't they? They have done for the last 20 or 30 years, I suppose. So, every place that I go to, the majority of people really wear jeans, trainers, T-shirt - everybody seems to dress more for comfort. Whereas, even in my lifetime, even up to the early-'70s, there was still that thing of dressing up.
People with a scarcity mentality think there is only so much in the world to go around. It's as if they see life as a pie. When another person gets a big piece, then they get less. Such people are always trying to get even, to pull others down to their level so they can get an equal or even bigger piece of the pie.
Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.
There's a diversion between economic reality - integration, global village, everybody depending on everybody else - and cultural reality, which is people feeling invaded, undermined, threatened, wanting to have "stand-your-ground" legislation all over the place. It's alarming because at the moment, the fear is outweighing the benefits, and that's partially because the benefits have been so unequally distributed that lots of people don't feel better off. They feel threatened, angry and despairing.
There's no question that California, in the last three or four years, has been privileged to add disproportionately to the economic growth of America, and to contribute to its technological productivity.
By holding down natural wage growth in labor-intensive industries, immigration serves as a subsidy for low-wage, low-productivity ways of doing business, retarding technological progress and productivity growth.
In a sensibly organised society, if you improve productivity, there is room for everybody to benefit.
Just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.
For nations and societies, the 'good' or benefit of technology is often expressed in economic terms, in measures such as workplace productivity and business growth.
If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.
The only way to create prosperity is to do more with less. In economic terms, an increase in productivity is an increase in the amount or quality of output generated for each unit of input. Jobs do not make society wealthier - productivity does.
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