cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19046336
No, it is you who are seeing the world as just markets, as if markets is what produces wealth, as if labour were just a pesky cost that you can’t get rid of.
As the pandemic showed, it is workers that produce wealth and are essential. Markets have their place, but need to be controlled so they don’t kill the people who power them.
Also: markets fail very often when the incentives and structure are not aligned with the socially desired outcomes.
workers that produce wealth and are essential
You got it wrong - workers alone won’t produce anything. You need everything: Workers, managers, accountants, capital, financial system, machines, supply chains, logistics, customer acquisition and so on. Each one of these parts is crucial - wealth is only produced if all those elements are correctly allocated.
Half of these things are provided by separate companies, which have their own complex structures, that together create wealth producing market environment.
“I’m a worker so I produce wealth!” Is a harmful simplification. Skilled worker without all that backend isn’t worth a jack shit. This is why there’re so huge wage disparities between poor and rich countries - workers may be equally skilled, but the backend that supports the work in the poor country simply doesn’t exist.
markets fail very often when the incentives and structure are not aligned with the socially desired outcomes.
There’re corner cases that cause issues - but this is why we have legal framework to fix them - antitrust laws, regulation of relations between employee-emplyer, consumer protection, green energy incentives and so on
I agree all of that is needed to produce products in a modern economy, but I disagree with the share of profit allocated to managers. The only reason the allocation of profit is so skewed is because the manageriat abuses their power. They are supposed to be enablers of productivity, not little tyrants.
You’re missing the part of the picture: There are also workers with specific skill sets who are paid extremely well. You don’t hear about them, because they don’t complain.
But the question is why? Why workers with certain skills really well paid, while others aren’t?
The answer is misalignment between availability of types of work, and availability of workers with appropriate skills.
There’s no magic solution that would fix this - core issue is education system that produces surplus of one type of skilled workers and not enough of other types. The end result are huge wages for rare skills, and very low wages for common ones
Fixing that problem requires radical reform of how people pick their career patch and it would take many years for benefits to have impact.
