The Wealth of Dragons

Aw man, imagine using technology to reduce the amount of time people had to spend working, rather than making rich people more money... what a crazy world.
- It’s wild some of the creative settings they come up with in fantasy!
  
  Read a cool new guys book, the author is George Orwell, I think you'll like him!
- It's crazy. I've read in a few books (fiction, of course) that mention, in passing, that the 40 hour workweek was now replaced by a 32 hour workweek, or something similar.
  When do we get to reap the benefits of all of these boosts to productivity?
  
  "Worker productivity" has been going up for 50 years, but compensation hasn't been. That extra money goes into the pockets of the board and shareholders and CEOs.
  80 years ago, the average CEO pay was about 20x the lowest pay in his company. Now, instead, we have billionaires.
  
  There were some fairly major studies in the UK last year, across many companies and multiple industries, where they reduced the 5 day workweek to a 4 day workweek, whilst keeping the compensation of workers the same overall (i.e. salaried workers got the same salary, hourly workers got 25% more per hour)
  The majority of companies involved in the study found that their workers were significantly healthier and happier after adjusting to the new schedule... and as a result significantly more "productive". Profits even went up despite the reduced working time. Most of them elected to keep with the new system once the study ended.
  Obviously you can't do this with every industry, certain industries need 24/7 coverage or the like... you can't run an ER 4 days out of 7 - but the takeaway is that it'd be better to employ more people for less time and pay them well - you'll get better results than you will with an exhausted and depressed workforce
  
  In many ways, we have been. The average person has casual access to goods and services that would have been immensely inaccessible without industrialization. Consider the average car for example. The engine alone has hundreds of tightly toleranced parts working in a mechanical dance to harness thousands of controlled explosions per second. That doesn’t even touch on the complex support systems required for engine management or chassis/suspension. I can buy a well running used car for less than the cost of a month’s rent.
  Compare that to the pre-industrial era, when a simple shirt would have taken a single person 500-600 hours in manual labor to make starting from raw wool. That’s more than three months’ work with a 40 hour work week.
  It’s truly amazing that any minimum wage worker in the USA can buy multiple used cars, a monumentally complex piece of machinery by any historical standard, for less labor than it would take to get a new shirt a few hundred years ago.
  That said, I do believe we have the capacity to get these benefits PLUS reduced work hours. We will see that when we demand better worker protections from lawmakers and stop equating a human’s value to society with the number of hours they work each week.
  
  When we hit peak population. This will be the next historical epoch which dramatically changes the fabric of society, because it will lay bare the finite nature of surplus labor, as well as dramatically skew the ratio of workers to retirees. It won't completely eliminate capitalism, but it will largely be the end of consumption driven economics, and will force more and more of this surplus productivity to go towards supporting populations instead of enriching a privileged few.
  There will simply be no other option. In some places this will happen violently, but in many places it will be a slow but peaceful transition.
  
  When heads roll
- I mean, knights weren't exactly poor people. This knight found a way to make his serfs make him more money.
  
  Yeah, IIRC a knight's suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari
  
  While many knights were lords and vice versa, they weren't always

“But if I keep sending more wheat to the dragon, I’ll get to be a dragon one day. They told me so on the Internet.”
- And G-Money is going to be a vampire any day now!
  
  Thats not fair. Gizmo became a vampire and then decided he’d rather be human.

It's actually quite fitting that the knight, part of the aristocraty, isn't interested in Kapital
- eh, knights were a tad more worldly and should at least realize that it'd be fucking brilliant to not starve when going to war, which has historically been a massive issue.
  
  More efficient labor means less issues when drafting all my levies, which in turn means more meat between me and the actual danger
- The knight,fifteen years later...
  Ok,I finally got the gold. Had to kill twenty thousand peasants for it. Took me ages.

The arts also tend to flourish with technological innovation making other tasks less time-consuming. More comics with this cool dragon could be made.

I can't go back to the princess with this nerd shit
LOL!

Nerds, annoyingly being useful. Being useful while being annoying
Gdam nerds

This is amazing! Now we'll be able to free humans from manual lab-
Cotton Gin gets invented
- I’m just gonna leave this here

I did'nt expect that, lol.

Discovered this community and subscribed. Thanks ♥

Thresh from League of Legends suddenly makes even more sense! The whole reaper\agriculture analogy is amazing.

Thank you for sharing this here and thank you so much for also linking the source! I love to see it!! Both the comic and the sourcing each made me smile and I appreciate ya! :)

I prefer hand cranked winnowing for my hobby grain processing, personally, I think the Dragon was making too big a leap straight to fully automated threshing.
EDIT: My dictionary apparently doesn't think winnowing is a word ffs
- Gotta upgrade to the Nerd Dragon Dictionary