Predictions on the state of work in the year 2000

But instead, we decided to make a very small number of people extremely rich.
- Bernie is pushing for 32/week.
  If he was president we might have gotten it, but Biden sure as shit isn't even going to mention it.
  American workers are more productive than at any point in history, it's just all the wealth goes into a very small number of pockets, and instead of having to pay taxes, they pay a small percent to politicians in both parties to ensure workers don't get any
  
  I wouldn't say we'd have gotten it. Being president doesn't mean you control Congress.
- We nothing. Hold the people who voted for Reagan responsible.
- How do I argue that this is a bad thing to my boss.
  I will preface by saying that my boss is a great guy. I don’t have targets and I get freedom and feel empowered in that sense.
  But we often debate about the world and he seems to argue that on the whole society is doing a lot better than we did in the past. Living longer, more luxuries etc.
  
  On the whole.... how would you define that? The mean? The median? If it's mean, he may have a point because the richest people don't have to work for many thousands of years each. But the median person is likely under poverty level.
  And better..... also what is the definition of that? More money? More free time? Less crime/risk of injury? Etc.
  And then there's the case that it doesn't matter if it's "better" than it was however arbitrary time ago, it matters that it could be better for a massively greater percentage of people. But in the current state it is only insanely better for only a select few, and nearly the same for the vast majority of people.
  
  Living longer: technology has improved childhood and old-aged mortality, but how is this relevant if we are expected to work for a larger portion of our lives? Retirement age continues to increase, while the increase in life expectancy provides relatively marginal improvements to quality of life in old age while the years we have the most energy are spent toiling away doing work that we are coerced into by way of the threat of homelessness and death.
  Luxuries: technology has improved and many of what were considered luxuries in the past are now commonplace. As our definition of luxuries has changed, has our access to the contemporary luxuries expanded? Relative to someone 100 years ago, can you afford access to a different amount of luxuries than past generations could? Compared to even a couple generations ago, younger generations have less access to necessities such as housing and food security than previous generations. We do not own necessities any more. What good is having access to 500 different brands of wine when you struggle to keep a room over your head and food on the table? Maybe this access is different for your boss than for you.
  How we define how society is doing is subjective without clearly-defined goals. Is our goal to improve the living conditions of the people? On average, this has been decreasing for decades. Is our goal to grow the wealth of our people? When adjusted for inflation, most people have less money relative to what we had a few generations ago with the exception of those who own to make money instead of working to make money.
  I would argue that most countries do not have clearly defined goals, so they are, in essence, floundering along with no roadmap for our progress. Regardless of how this relates to the past, this is not a good place to be in.
  If your boss is the owner, remember that even if he is nice, you are working to produce value and he is taking a portion of that for himself based on owning the company. A manager is not useless, but an owner is. You could own the company. You and your coworkers could all own the company together. An owner brings no value to the table that could not be achieved by other means. The owner does not create anything of value by owning, they just benefit more than the people working to create value. You trade your work and time for payment that is not 100% of the value you produce. Maybe that's fine by you, but chances are you could take more of that value home without a single boss. Maybe you don't see this as theft now, I don't know, but when life drives home the fact that you can never regain lost time and health, maybe you'll see your relationship with your boss for what it really is. I promise you that he is well aware whether he's a middle manager or an owner.

Here's the thing. We could have that right now, today, we're there, they're right. Computers and just useful software (fuck AI) alone have increased productivity so much that one guy with fancy Excel can do the work of what used to take 98 people (7 banks x 14 person abacus teams). And that's just one regional bank. Before email, corporations had internal mailing departments, now there's dirt cheap and super convenient email. There are untold numbers of shell scripts out there quietly replacing whole ass departments of people. Soft automation alone, no robots needed, has increased human productivity to an absolutely bonkers degree since these statements were written. Thanks to the Friedman doctrine and Reagan and Thatcher and their ilk, all the benefits of that productivity got turned into a benefits for the asset holding class, while the middle and lower classes got lectures on the morality of hard work.
- Flawless .
  People talk about the age of abundance - we’ve been living it for decades. Money is created out thin air, automation and industrial have done the rest.
  Marx called it 100 years ago. Thomas Piketty nailed it down a few years ago : Surplus goes to assets owners - the more assets you own, the more surplus you accumulate and it’s effective are compound over the time. Until you have a handful of people people who own all the asset, which is where we are now.
- People used to physically carry boxes of paper checks out to planes to be shipped between banks.

As a kid, my dad used to tell me stuff like that. He believed it too. He worked 2 jobs 6 days a week all his life to die in relative poverty.
People make wealth issues generational. It's not. It's a narrative to divide and conquer.
It's the rich vs the poor. It's always been.
- My dad still works in his 70s and fights vehemently against any talk of making life easier for the younger generation. People are weird man.
- Wise words.
  The rich have power in money, but the poor have power in numbers. We can improve our lives by organizing and standing together. Unions are a great start.

damn this sounds like a lovely world where republicans ceased to exist since 1967

By the year 2040, you'll eat bugs on your way into your 16 hour job making 13 Bezos bucks an hour and you'll love it because the serotonin patches and nightly dream implants (implant so that you dot wake up while your frontal cortex is being used to mine doge coin).
- The best part is, for every 10 commercials you watch in your sleep, you get up to 1 dream back free at the end of the month!
  
  The "up to" makes this particularly depressing. And realistic.
- I hope you don't mind, I just went to your profile and clicked "favorite"
  😄

Interesting predictions from the 60s.
It turns out that in the early 70s, “we” decided to give everything to corporations and those already wealthy instead. Productivity did indeed continue to skyrocket, but wages have stagnated since then. For 50+ years we’ve been getting robbed.

Billionaires and bastard corporations: Yoink
- Greed? No no, these are just our record profits! Invest. Now.

They're right.
We could do this.
We just don't.
- And it would even be better for the planet

This would have happened if Reagan hadn't sunk that ship. Now realistically, if it hadn't been him it would've been someone else. Politicians are cheap.
- It was rigged against us from the beginning. Reagan didn't help, but he was only one more straw in the pile of bullshitters.
  The concessions granted by those in power to the people are only meant to keep them in check, not to fulfill all of their needs. If our needs were met, there would be little incentive to slave away most of our lives.

The timeline where Reagan didn't fucking gut the unions.

To be fair, these were good predictions. All of this is actually possible. It's just capitalism being the problem it usually is..
- We choose to do this. We could just as easily choose something else.
  
  Well know. Unless you are one of about ~20,000 people in the US that are in the 1% of wealth, you don't get to choose anything.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- The late 60's is when George Welch became the head of the GE plastics division, in 71' he also became the head of the GE metallurgy division. Throughout the 60 he developed and popularized "rank and yank", basically firing 10% of your lowest performing employees on a regular basis.
  The idea of corporate having loyalty to their consumers and workers died at the hands of George Welch. The obsession with quarterly profits, paper profits, and maximizing short term gains are all basically the invention of this one little man.
  He was made a titan of industry for parting out one of the most iconic and profitable businesses in US history. Pretty much every CEO has walked in his image since, despite the fact that he ran He into the ground.
  
  I think you mean Jack Welch.
- Is the takeaway from that site unpegging the USD from gold caused the current wage crisis?
  
  Pretty much its about the federal reserve, unpegging from gold just let them go hog wild. Inflation is the best tool they have because it is taxation that the poor and middle class dont tend to notice.

Hey they were close! We make 30-40k in (2024 Dollars)
- The sheer amount of jobs that post that range as the expected salary is insanely depressing and disgusting...
  I don't think people truly understand just how much of our economy operates with those pay scales. I'm uneducated so I don't have a specific industry to get tunnel vision with, I see a broad range of jobs and holy shit it is gross what is being "offered."
  On a side note, my friend in computer science just mentioned a coworker who makes over 150k is quitting because he has too much down time at work. Just kill me already, I've had enough torture...
  
  You may find David Grieber's book Bullshit Jobs interesting. TL;DR: human beings have a natural drive and need to spend their lives doing useful work. If that need isn't met, they get depressed. Getting to do something actually useful at work is considered a privilege, a job perk. Companies offer more pay as compensation for the lack of job perks at jobs that don't do anything useful.
- That was for nonworking families.

This is so uniquely depressing. They were accurate on my annual wage in 2024 yet they assumed I’d be working less than 40 hours 😭
- I think you misread that, because $40,000 in 1966 is roughly $385,000 in today's dollars.
  Edit: conversely, $40,000 in today's dollars would be $4,176.25 in 1966.
  
  Pretty sure that's the joke
  
  That was the joke. I make $40k today.
- I got that wage, but not accounting for inflation...
- With the 1966 labour share of income you probably would be working way less (or making way more)
- Is it really accurate? They wrote this is '66 about the year '00, which is 34 years. It's been another 24 years since their prediction date.

"HAHAHA...no"
– Capitalists

This is what it was like when the people of the country worked together to make the future better for everyone. Not self improvement, not local; it was understood across the country that people should plant trees without expecting to sit in its shade. Plan for the future and give the next generation the best chance.
Those articles were written in the 60s. At the very least each author was born 18 years prior, part of the silent generation. The future they hoped, expected, and built was for boomers.
A generation of greed has killed almost all hope for future generations. It only took one to fuck it up for everyone else.
- Well, on the bright side, the housing market will collapse in the next few decades as boomers die off/move to retirement homes, leaving a massive glut of housing (unless it all gets bought up by corporations). That'll cause its own set of issues, but ample housing would certainly go a long way.
  
  (unless it all gets bought up by corporations)
  This will happen though. Unless we get to "adventure time" somehow before the boomers die which seems unlikely. We're gonna have to get waay hungrier
  
  Yeah so aside from housing being bought up by corporations, privatized health care will bleed that generation of the rest. There will be nothing left.
- A generation of greed has killed almost all hope for future generations. It only took one to fuck it up for everyone else.
  TO be fair, that generation is also kind of a bunch of cunts.

For reference, $30,000.00 in 1966 would equate to over ~$285,000.00 in 2024's USD.

I'd say in a given week I do maybe fifteen minutes of real, actual work - Peter Gibbons

:(

If only this picture had the next paragraph...
"There are some who gloomily expect a society run by a small elected elite, presiding over a mindless multitude kept happy by drugs and circuses, much as in Huxley's Brave New World. But most futurists believe that work will still be the only way to gain responsibility and power."
https://time.com/vault/issue/1966-02-25/page/35/

I would encourage almost any American to get a remote job (or three) and move abroad to a country that has a visa for remote workers and good healthcare. It might be the only way some workers will be able to save and retire some day.

Well, in Germany we have legal Holdiays at least...
- And on average the 39,5 hours work week and 25-30 vacation days per year. Also unlimited payed sick days.
  
  Not unlimited. 6 months would raise eyebrows.

Man it's amazing how they didn't understand capitalism at all. Of course I don't think many people do now that I think about it.
- Hell, i didn't realize the scope of capitalism's destruction until recently and i thought i had been paying attention. I probably still have more to learn but reading that stuff makes my eyes shake if i read too much at one time