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I don't see a law saying that wages must keep pace with productivity:
"2. This means that highly productive workers are highly paid, and less productive workers are less highly paid."
There is a distinction between what I said (where productivity might have nothing to do with the workers personally) and what the statement in your link says. In a world of high automation, one could easily argue that all workers are less productive and deserve much lower wages. Or we could imagine two countries. One where workers get 50% higher wages from productivity rising 100% and one where 20%, that could fulfill what I said and what 2. says. We have observed a general trend in the last 50 years where productivity rises much faster than wages rise: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Housing is indeed restricted by vested interests but it's just one example of an asset that could be bid up by increasing wealth. They could do it to shares or land as well. Pure market competition is not desirable in a situation where power and production is wildly, massively unequal. I am not going to be able to compete with a 200 IQ robot working 24/7 at $0.10 per hour. We have a mixed market economy to balance these competing interests. Now I don't want some govt planning board controlling automation and getting snookered by vested interests but I do want some kind of power/capital redistribution that preserves incentives for innovation without immiserating 90%+ of the population.
And I think the best chance we have of that is by not totally and unflinchingly embracing automation (even when it makes a lot of sense). We should establish a precedent where the gains of capital and automation are distributed even to wildly unsympathetic people.
Right there:
That's not the way productivity measurement works.
https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-productivity-measured/calculating-productivity.htm
Automation makes individual workers more productive.
EPI is a bullshit factory think tank funded by labor unions to produce propaganda. Their """researchers""" are paid to sit around all to figure out how to twist economic statistics to push their ideological agenda.
If we're going to go for low quality sources, here's a reddit thread on that bullshit graph:
https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/productivity_pay_gap_in_epi_we_trust/
The EPI graph is an embarrassment designed to draw in ignorant young people on the internet to believing something that isn't true because it's not like they can check it. Pretty much everything you've absorbed about the economy from the internet is bullshit lefty propaganda.
And I think we should let consumer preferences drive the evolution of the economy.
So now you're taking a definition that axiomatically assumes the answer you're looking for? If the marginal product of labour is 0 because machines are doing all the work, the wages offered would logically be 0 but the productivity of the corporation or country would be enormously high! This is the common-sense conclusion, bereft of the economic jargon. If we take Xiaomi's automated phone factory as an example for the future of production, the value-adding is coming from the machinery, not the human workers because they aren't doing anything since they're not even there. Maybe there are a few engineers who fix whatever broken machinery the AI can't handle. They will not be earning a substantial portion of the returns from that factory. The paradigm of productivity you're invoking does not apply to the systems I'm describing, like how Newtonian gravity does not apply at high speeds.
OK, so the EPI graph is wrong and misleading in showing that wages haven't kept up with production. They're only counting production and non-supervisory roles... the easiest jobs to automate. And they ignore the massively overpriced non-wage healthcare that workers receive from their jobs as well, horrible! And everybody ignores the people who were automated out of work entirely, that falling male participation rate...
So what's really going on is that inequality between workers (and the no longer working) is rising massively, presumably due to technology substituting for human labour in value-creation and a shift towards highly skilled, highly renumerated human labour. This doesn't really counter my main point.
I don't think you understand me. I am not a leftist. I have invested a large amount of money into NVIDIA, Tesla, Lockheed Martin and various cryptocurrencies. I believe in the market system. But I do not trust that it has my best interests at heart.
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