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An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless. No one in America has ever experienced an actual labor short. There are only labor shortages in very narrow subspecialties. If Amazon for some reason needed an experienced Lisp or COBOL engineer, then Amazon needs to spend money to recruit one. Then the sub-occupation of Lisp programmers have a better QoL, and Bezos’ QoL stays exactly the same because he has so much money that it can no longer increase his QoL. We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount. When the QoL and wages of the lower class increase, then they can actually afford to quit their job for months to find a better one, and can actually afford to move to other parts of the country to find a better position. It’s a race to the top in terms of QoL and wellbeing. It’s only bad for the rich who hate the poor. Consider landscaping. A rich person always wants pristine landscaping. In the wealthy areas of the east coast I am familiar with, they universally spend exorbitantly on landscaping and nearly all the employees are illegals who don’t speak English. (The oversees of more sophisticated projects speak English). They are worked to exhaustion and have to eat outside under the shade of trees. What happens when we restrict the labor pool here? If the landscaper doesn’t want to be worked to exhaustion or piss in a bottle, he can quit to find a firm with better QoL; the firms have to compete over QoL in order to retain workers; everything improves for everyone, except the ~0.1% of wealthy properties which did not want to pay more to secure the QoL of the poor. That person may have to hire a local kid to do spotty landscaping, which is also good for the poor. Or maybe the grass grows a little taller (the horror!).
I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”. If we compel them to keep working really hard, while their life may be miserable, it’s worth it for the rest because they get more goodies, like 4k VR porn and even more addictive algorithms. But this doesn’t even apply in America, because if you wanted more tech development you would want to restrict the supply of tech employees, whereas we are saturating the field with Indians and Asians. Now all the creative techies do not have the stress-free working conditions or the income affordance necesssary to really dive into passion projects. I mean some do, but only the most conscientious and industrious, ie not the most creative. So you actually have the worst of both worlds here. Not only do we trade the stress and tears of the poor for more waste at the top, but we even trade the stress and tears of our technologically-interested creatives for more waste at the top. If you wanted more tech development, you would want to restrict tech jobs, particularly in regions known for less creativity and less start-up potential. We have done the opposite. We have guaranteed less innovation, and instead we have Mark Zuckerberg 80 billion dollars on the MetaVerse, and Bezos space vanity projects. I will admit that Musk buying x was a good thing though.
What are some of these examples of huge amounts of wealth being genuinely wasted? That'd have to happen in the form of huge amounts of consumption. Most of the wealth at the top is sitting in the form of stocks, at most you get some yachts, which just aren't much of a blip on any measure of consumption.
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Weren't you just arguing that labor shortages were good and made people better off? Now you're saying that it means business owners have to sell homes and cars and are at risk of homelessness.
So your argument here that things people value and want done will be less affordable?
I know a poor rural family with a smartphone for every member, clean drinking water available when they want, healthcare from Medicaid, a PS5 with a virtual reality headset (seriously, think of how insane it is that even a rather poor family has personal virtual reality now) , nice tasty food from all around the world with spices many in the past would have never tasted. Their life has luxuries that even the richest and most powerful people a few hundred years ago could only dream of, and that was only possible because of tech development. Even the Rothschild's can not compare to what a fast food worker today can access.
Like hunger in the US is basically non-existent! People don't starve to death except by choice, whereas just a few centuries ago famines were common across the world. In fact today's poor are so well off that having too many calories is significantly more common than getting too little calories. The idea that the poor are suffering from economic growth is complete and obvious hogwash. How bad is it for the poor that they and their kids survive, instead of up to 30% of them dying before their first birthdays?
We saved ~471,955 infants in just one year, many of them to poor families.
Really the only thing that is worse than the past is housing, and not by quality or size (like even the poor have indoor plumbing! The richest a few hundred years ago were still shitting in outhouses or dumping it out on the streets) mind you but by price. And that is a deliberate choice by cities and states around the country to artificially restrict the new supply of homes because even the limited resources of land is used more efficiently than ever.
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