President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Because nobody is buying newspapers. You can be the most productive wall licker. If nobody is paying you to lick a wall, your labor is worthless (I apologize, I am putting it into the harshest terms to force the point). Increased productivity leads to higher wages when that productivity is feeding demand for something. Which gets back to what I keep saying. ... as a worker, you are as good as the income you generate. In the aggregate, increases in productivity generate more and more income. That doesn't mean that a product for which the demand dried up remains viable because workers in that industry are more productive. You need buyers for something to generate income from it.

 

Newpspaper circulation was falling throughout the 1990s. According to Pew, in 1990, there were 62.328 million weekly subscribers to newspapers. By2000, it was 55.773 million.

If the Tribune company was printing money, it wasn't because it was selling more and more newspapers.

This has been the newspaper industry over the last couple of decades. The 1990s for that industry were characterized by the cuts you are attributing to a healthy business. ... being a sign that it wasn't a healthy business and its death was coming. They were desperately trying to stem the tide, as subscriptions dropped. On top of it, they were leveraging up to try to hold off facing the reality that their businesses were slowly dying, and while financial engineering can create facade for a while, it doesn't permanently hold off reality.





Once again, you're having a conversation about pagination making people more productive, when the reality was that sales were dropping off across the industry. I don't care how productive your workforce is, if fewer people are buying your product, those workers' value is limited by the droppoff in demand. It doesn't matter that they can do more work in an hour. There isn't demand for that work.