The article says as much:

> In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time that the workers could devote to the joys of leisure. But, as Russell observed, this rarely happens. Instead, the factory owner will opt to keep half the workers on the same hours and lay off the rest. The gains from the advances of technology will be realised not as an expansion of leisure but rather as drudgery for some and jobless destitution for others, with the savings enjoyed only by the winner, the factory owner.

First, workers gain skill by the hour. It's more efficient to have forty hour work weeks for a workforce of half the size than twenty hour work weeks with the same size.

Second, many things in the economy are arms races. Housing[0], cost of education, status goods, actual arms for our militaries, etc. We have enough productivity for things like food to be very, very cheap but it just drives up prices elsewhere.

[0] Specifically land value, but also housing in the physical sense since raw materials and labour are not unlimited.

edit: the reasonable expectation is that half of the workers are fired and the remaining workers' salaries are cut. The Luddites were a result of noticing technological improvements lowered wages and employment at the same time.

Then the incentives are aligned - the more productive, technologically advanced the economy is, the greater your stock returns and the better off you are.

Is that not more or less the case for many people that have lived in the developed world for generations? You do not need to save a lot every month in order for it to compound into a meaningful stock ownership after 200 years. Median household net worth in the UK is £300'000, and that includes many many recent arrivals. For comparison, with a net worth of £500'000, you could draw ~£15'000/year in perpetuity if you wanted - is that not a much better alternative to UBI?

I like to think of what an amoral money machine would do as a base-case for what we set up the incentives to be. Then we can tweak the incentives to get the outcome, but we start with the machine. After all, moral outrage alone rarely has lasting change without policy change.

Things that encourage fewer-people w/ more-work-per-person are:

* Laws that explicitly disincentivize larger companies (that kick in at >24 people or >49 people, or that are flat per-person-on-payroll fees like medical benefits)

* The learn rate of individuals given sustained work

* Increased overhead with more individuals (i.e. communication costs, scheduling costs, hiring costs)

There's portions I can't immediately nail like the fact that if I share a desk with someone I can't spray my things all over it like I normally do. My hardware has to be out of the way and clean for the other guy.

I think one other solution is to keep the work force, but double the output. I think this also happened (in addition to the other two that you identified). The overall productivity and output of society has massively increased.

All of the automation I'm familiar with is making the design and manufacturing processes more fluid, giving faster iterations at reduced cost. This allows the tech/process/whatever to progress faster. You'll finish your product sooner, but that means you can start the next sooner.

This whole concept of having more time assumes there's nothing else to do. There will always be something to do if you're not making something static, like soap.

Technological progress has made labor productivity itself a lot more uneven and sharply unequal than it used to be when Keynes was writing. So the currently most marginal workers tend to be laid off first, especially given the increasing regulatory barriers that have made low-productivity positions unsustainable since then.

As technology increases you need fewer people with higher skills to produce everything, but there is no reason why they should spend all their time producing a surplus to supply everybody else. They would rather stop and have Thursday and Friday off.

We all work in solidarity with those we need to work. Because it is more difficult to share out the unemployment than it first appeared.

The solution is to retire people earlier and have a public job option so younger people can always contribute their labour hours for others. Retiring people at 50 makes sense in a Covid world.

He was semi right. We've actually made work weeks longer, but less than 50% of people work (at all, let alone full time).

The issue here is equality. Keynes assumed everyone would be viewed ad equal and given the same time off. Instead a large number of people have been allowed to opt out entirely and others have been forced to pick up the slack...

I can't find the comment, but I do remember someone on HN suggesting that the gains of extra productivity are claimed by a corresponding increase in credit and therefore debt.

I would argue that the reason for that is that they more directly see the fruits of their labour.

[0] I mean unless there's a real and successful socialist revolution.

For central planning, one proposal I saw offered that the workers could be organized into sectoral unions that participate as a sector in government. This weight and common interest allows them to counter the weight of voters that ask for too much. It's also large enough of an agglomeration that the workers still represent society as a whole to a great degree.