So many companies cut their workforce as much as 10-15% citing that those jobs can be fully automated by the use of AI but I am still waiting to see any meaningful price cuts of their products from the said companies, etc.
Otherwise this will mean that they are doing this just to increase their profit margins and please their shareholders and don’t care about their customers or workforce.
Nope. Worker productivity has increased many fold over the last 50 years, meaning each person can produce many times more goods.
Wages have been stagnant and cost of living is through the roof, despite all of this increased efficiency, productivity, fewer workers and much cheaper operating costs.
We’re fucked lol
But the number, and wealth, of billionaires is way up!
Genuine question. Why hasn’t free market forced the prices to drop? If company X makes Y twice as cheaply, it could drop its prices like 20% and having way more customers and way higher profits. Why hasn’t this ever happened?
Good question. I personally think it’s because of conglomerates and large companies. Nestle has so many brands that it’d be a full time job to avoid their products. They are unfathomably huge, and so are many other food companies. They know how to play ball with each other, people have to eat, and they will pay anything.
Additionally supermarket chains likely play into it, same concept. Walmarts, targets etc killed off many small business and local grocery stores, they can also charge whatever they want. In fact the dollar store would go to tiny towns, compete and murder the local grocery with low prices, and monopolize the towns food needs with processed crap, these are called food deserts.
Nestle has so many brands that it’d be a full time job to avoid their products.
Not quite. I actually checked a couple years back and there was only 1 product that I bought from them: bagged Starbucks coffee. I just had to switch to a local coffee roaster to fix that.
That being said, I tend to make the majority of my food from scratch, but that’s actually not that hard if you know what you’re doing. Plus I don’t eat snacks, which also helps.
The core thing the rich left out when they invented “Trickle Down Economics” was that it’s not money that trickles down onto us.
Same goes for efficiency or productivity improvements. Those haven’t done to the US workers since Nixon, and definitely not since Regan.
Yeah economics is about “how do I maximize profit and never reduce prices.” Then they just lie about how supply and demand works or how productivity increases and mergers will help prices go down. Prices only ever go up.
NO COMPANY WILL WILLINGLY GIVE UP MORE PROFIT.
The way supply and demand works is the thing that forces companies to give up profit is a competing company willing to take a little less profit (and hence undercut prices).
It doesn’t work if there’s no competition, or insufficient competition.
So in other words, it doesnt work in the real world
exactly
economics is a dumb field, we should get rid of it (and the economy)
Shall we drop a few asteroids on the planet while we’re talking about destroying ourselves?
Don’t defend economics, you aren’t being paid too. All of economic thought is either trivially true or brought to you by someone who has a motivation to lie.