The thing is that hourly wage has to keep pace with hourly productivity. Otherwise, you get into bubble territory.

So the only way you can reduce total wages if productivity is increasing is to reduce hours worked. And since productivity increases mainly due to capital accumulation and gains from scale, this will tend to reduce productivity gains, and thus reduce the gain in free time compared to the possible gain in goods produced. And raw material shortages happen to "someone else." Usually - not always, but usually - someone who has no name and has no face and lives in some far-off place.

Is it possible? Yes. But politically very difficult.

And we have low-hanging fruit from efficiency gains that we can harvest before we need to make genuinely difficult decisions.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.