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To: Don Lloyd who wrote (6658)	8/4/2001 6:55:32 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

< The remaining workers will normally receive higher real wages in accordance with their increased productivity, but the displaced workers will be dependent on the development of new products for new employment opportunities> The Luddites assume that those displaced people don't know what to do and that progress and productivity and necessarily bad. The truth is that humans have always continued exactly this process. Every invention frees people from the daily grind of the rice paddy to do the really good stuff. You gave a very good explanation of why the profits of the productivity improvements haven't show up as profits. The productivity improvements are also exported to everywhere else. So, QUALCOMM exports CDMA technology [which they collect the high monopoly royalties for] to China, which frees Chinese from the daily grind of running messages on a bicycle. Now they just use the latest and greatest technology and get on with doing and inventing something more valuable. The monopoly owner of the productivity improvement is the one who gets the money, not the users, though they too benefit, but only along with everyone else. So, computers improve all businesses [the ones who don't adopt computers go to the wall]. But that savings and improvement results in [as you pointed out] improvements for consumers, not those middlemen users of the productivity-improving technology. But there are nevertheless huge economic gains from productivity improvements. People, because of the crunch, seem bemused and befuddled and are starting to deny that there have been productivity improvements and that those productivity improvements are meaningful. Check out QUALCOMM and Microsoft and Intel market capitalisations over the past 15 years for evidence of the economic gains of productivity improvements. Yes, consumers do well by consuming [as long as it doesn't just become a weird obsession]. Mqurice