Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Is This Why Productivity Has Tanked and Wealth Inequality Has Soared?

Needless but highly profitable forced-upgrades are the bread and butter of the tech industry.

One of the enduring mysteries in conventional economics (along with why wages for the bottom 95% have stagnated) is the recent decline in productivity gains (see chart). Since gains in productivity are the ultimate source of higher wages, these issues are related. Simply put, advances in productivity are core to widespread prosperity.



But that's only half the problem--productivity gains have flowed to the top of the income-wealth pyramid as financialization and cartels have replaced real-world wealth creation as the source of wealth-income.



Longtime correspondent Zeus Y. recently identified one cause of declining productivity and the narrowing of financial gains in the top: the quasi-cartels that dominate our economy profit by introducing and maintaining inefficiencies, not eliminating them. This runs counter to the accepted wisdom in classical free-market capitalism that generating efficiencies increases profits.

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Corporations no longer seek a coercive old-style monopoly that violates anti-trust laws; today they eliminate competition by scaling up to dominate a sector. I covered this in Are Facebook and Google the New Colonial Powers?(September 18, 2017).

Once a corporation achieves dominance, it can impose profitable inefficiencies (for example, healthcare and higher education), force customers to perform labor that was once done by companies as part of their service (self-checkout, endless software updates), and profit from customer data with little fear of blowback: now that you need us, we can extract maximum profit from you without fear of regulation or competition.

Once customers are dependent (or addicted, in the case of opioids, mobile telephony, Facebook, etc.), then corporations can impose all sorts of burdens on their customers and demand annual ransom, a.k.a. software licensing and/or update fees.

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http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/201...tanked-and.html