If you would add up all the labour that goes into the things you consume on an average day, how many hours do you consume a day?
Extra clarification: https://mishathings.com/2021-08-23-how-many-people-work-for-me.html
If you would add up all the labour that goes into the things you consume on an average day, how many hours do you consume a day?
Extra clarification: https://mishathings.com/2021-08-23-how-many-people-work-for-me.html
Not too much I think. I don’t consume many products besides the bare essentials of what I need to survive. Automation means no individual product takes too much labor to produce. Maybe a couple hours I’d think.
I’m not sure if automation really brings down our labour footprint though. For that to be the case, automation would need to lower the number or hours we work, which I don’t believe is the case?
Well, it’s a tricky subject. In the industrial revolution, working hours were at an all time high for all of human history. No one had ever worked longer than those generations. This is the demand of industrialization as factories and infrastructure are being built at a faster rate than any time in history.
However, post industrialization, living standards rise, working hours are shortened etc. So automation both raised and then lowered the hours we work. And the output for those hours is much higher. So overall, for an individual good like a table, what once took hours of dedicated artisanry, now is being put together in part by a machine in minutes. A person could hypothetically make 20 times more tables in a day. The question is where is this new wealth of value going if people are still working such long hours.