Cory Doctorow

But the difference is that if you're a 19th century coal boss who wants to

figure out how much the lowest wage each coal miner you're hiring is willing to take.

You have to have an army of Pinkertons that like are figuring out the economic situation of every coal miner.

And you have to have another army of guys in green eye shades who are making annotations to the ledger where you're calculating their pay packet.

It's just not practical.

So automation makes this possible.

And you have this vicious cycle

where the poorer a nurse is, the poorer they become, the lower the wage they're offered.

And as they accumulate more consumer debt, their wage is continuously eroded.

And I think we can all understand, like, intuitively why this is unfair and why as a nurse you might not want it, but also, like,

Do you really want your catheter inserted by someone who drove Uber till midnight the night before and skipped breakfast this morning so they could make rent?

This is the thing that makes everyone except one parochial interest worse off.

And this is not a free-floating economic proposition.

This is the result of specific policy choices taken in living memory by named individuals who were warned at the time that this would be the likely outcome and who did it anyway.

I think...

One way to frame this rather than around efficiency is around optimization.

And I think that we can understand that for a firm, the optimal arrangement is one in which they pay nothing for their inputs and charge everything for their outputs.

So optimization, things are optimal from the perspective of the firm when they can discover that.

who is most desperate and pay them as little as possible, or who is most desperate and charge them as much as possible.

But from the perspective of the users and the suppliers, things are optimal when you get paid as much as possible and are charged as little as possible.