For everyone to become richer without working harder, we must develop technologies that allow more work to be done per man-hour. Aside from working out distribution inefficiencies and similar, this is the unique limit on prosperity. This is what I mean by “humans are the universal bottleneck”- we only have so many man-hours, and any growth is going to be of the form “With the same amount of hours, we do more”.
Some segments of the economy have not had as much growth in the above department. For example, houses are assembled manually- all major parts must be done by hand, many with the assistance of only hand-held tools. Because we require shelter and the choice way of getting that shelter is owning a manually built house, this is a drag on the economy.
Domains such as this which have not been as revolutionized by automation have scaling costs due to how directly they are pegged to the price of labor- in particular, houses of constant size cost the same general fraction of our income (if not more) despite real GDP per capita having grown significantly over time, because richer workers demand more pay. Why aren’t houses cheap? This is one of many reasons, and doing some quick googling on how many man-hours are required to build a house, the main factor in many areas of the united states.
Is this way of thinking “new”? Surely not to humanity, but hopefully to the reader.
Why is this limit unique? Why can’t we be working on “distribution inefficiencies and similar” for the next 100 years?
In the case of real GDP per capita per hour worked, this limit is exactly unique- “distribution inefficiencies and similar” doesn’t apply. Indeed, this is tautologically true as you say. Think about what it would look like for an increase in real GDP per capita per hour worked to not have the form of “Something allowed for more work to be done per hour per person”. It wouldn’t look like anything- that doesn’t make any sense.
I would completely ignore my comment on “distribution inefficiencies and similar” until you know what I mean by this. To explain my comment, real GDP per capita per hour worked is not the same as the nebulous “prosperity” I was referring to, which also contains some level of preference for how material goods are distributed.
Maybe I’ll ask this, does your statement regarding universal bottleneck apply explicitly to humans? Or does it also apply to apes and bacteria and AI?
Because we particularly care about how much work humans do, and how wealthy they are. We do not really care about the work hours or prosperity of bacteria. Economic productivity is measured relative to how much money people have and how much they must work to get it. Just read my previous comment and/or the post again- this would seem to be a really basic sort of confusion that I can’t fix for you.
For everyone to become richer without working harder, we must develop technologies that allow more work to be done per man-hour. Aside from working out distribution inefficiencies and similar, this is the unique limit on prosperity. This is what I mean by “humans are the universal bottleneck”- we only have so many man-hours, and any growth is going to be of the form “With the same amount of hours, we do more”.
Some segments of the economy have not had as much growth in the above department. For example, houses are assembled manually- all major parts must be done by hand, many with the assistance of only hand-held tools. Because we require shelter and the choice way of getting that shelter is owning a manually built house, this is a drag on the economy.
Domains such as this which have not been as revolutionized by automation have scaling costs due to how directly they are pegged to the price of labor- in particular, houses of constant size cost the same general fraction of our income (if not more) despite real GDP per capita having grown significantly over time, because richer workers demand more pay. Why aren’t houses cheap? This is one of many reasons, and doing some quick googling on how many man-hours are required to build a house, the main factor in many areas of the united states.
Is this way of thinking “new”? Surely not to humanity, but hopefully to the reader.
In the case of real GDP per capita per hour worked, this limit is exactly unique- “distribution inefficiencies and similar” doesn’t apply. Indeed, this is tautologically true as you say. Think about what it would look like for an increase in real GDP per capita per hour worked to not have the form of “Something allowed for more work to be done per hour per person”. It wouldn’t look like anything- that doesn’t make any sense.
I would completely ignore my comment on “distribution inefficiencies and similar” until you know what I mean by this. To explain my comment, real GDP per capita per hour worked is not the same as the nebulous “prosperity” I was referring to, which also contains some level of preference for how material goods are distributed.
Because we particularly care about how much work humans do, and how wealthy they are. We do not really care about the work hours or prosperity of bacteria. Economic productivity is measured relative to how much money people have and how much they must work to get it. Just read my previous comment and/or the post again- this would seem to be a really basic sort of confusion that I can’t fix for you.