15 ms·

For all of human history, people have had to deal with a scarcity of resources. Yet in the last few years, that has changed. Our problem is not that we can't ma

For all of human history, people have had to deal with a scarcity of resources. Yet in the last few years, that has changed. Our problem is not that we can't make enough stuff for everyone to be happy, it's that we're still acting like that is the case. The age of inflation is over because producers in nearly every industry (there are a few notable exceptions) can absorb almost infinite demand for their products. The sooner governments and central banks accept this, and the sooner we move past the notion that a "job" is not an end but a means to an end, the sooner we can end poverty, achieve high levels of growth, and overcome our fear of globalization and technology.

NhanH 10y ago
Can you elaborate how inflation is connected with scarcity of resources?
- baron816 10y ago
  Prices are driven up when there is too much demand competing for a limited amount of goods. When a company can scale infinitely, they don't have to raise their prices. Lower prices keep demand up, so producers tend to want to keep their prices low.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Inflation has nothing to do with scarcity. It is the result of the supply of money increasing relative to the value in the economy. It's supply & demand, which applies to money just like everything else. Scarcity does raise prices, but that is not inflation, because if X's price rises, you spend more on X, but you have less to spend on Y, which lowers that price.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Scarcity changes the price of something. Inflation can really be thought of as expansion of the money supply while all other things remain steady - stuff just arbitrarily gets more expensive. Central Banks target 2% inflation so that we don't fall into a deflationary trap. It's like keeping the treadmill running just a little bit, to force the person to run forward. Austrian school economists basically equate inflation with money printing - to them it's the same thing. But most things increase in price due to a) better quality product and b) regular dynamics of business c) currency. So when the beer gets more expensive it's: a) Better beer (at least in the eyes of the consumer), i.e. longer brew times, better taste, better ingredients b) More expensive input costs c) Currency issues with imports etc. Those are not inflation, just price fluxuation. Inflation is when the exact same thing gets costlier, all other things being equal.
sjg007 10y ago
We support globalization to prevent war.
nickthemagicman 10y ago
This is brilliantly put. So whats the solution?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- baron816 10y ago
  UBI probably, but funding it with newly printed money. Another way to think of what I'm saying is this: there are billions of people out there in the world who want more stuff. There are lot of companies and workers who want sell those people more stuff. And there are enough resources out there to make all that stuff for them (energy for a long time was the big limiter). Obviously, there is an economic disconnect that is limiting people from getting the goods that they want and need. What's really happening is that poor people just don't have anything to trade with. The solution is to give them something to trade with. We don't have to do a UBI. I think we would be fine if central banks did something like give the bottom 20% of income earners a one time payment of ~$20k.
  - jganetsk 10y ago
    This is called helicopter money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money It sucks because it is irreversible. This is unnecessary. Just have the government finance UBI. After all, people like Larry Summers, with his "secular stagnation" theory, are calling for a shift from monetary policy to fiscal policy. And I think UBI, as you say, would be a very effective fiscal policy tool.
  - DamnYuppie 10y ago
    I am not attacking your idea but am curious to know how is this not inflation for everyone else?
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      UBI goes to everyone and affects everyone. Who's the "everyone else"?
Alex3917 10y ago
> Our problem is not that we can't make enough stuff for everyone to be happy, it's that we're still acting like that is the case. The real issue is that the ruling class makes their money off capital. That's why Tiny Houses are banned in San Francisco and elsewhere. Because no one really needs more than 400 square feet of (well-designed) living space, but if people were allowed to buy houses and apartments that small then they wouldn't need to go into debt. If the basic necessities of life become free then capital itself becomes devalued, so don't expect it to be an easy fight.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  It's called the studio apartment :D NIMBY has many reasons behind it, and one of them is trying to increase housing values. Other things are guarding precious "free" parking spaces, being old and not liking change, or being afraid of changes effecting the quality of your children's school and other things.
  - shados 10y ago
    the parking spot issue is real (I don't drive, but I can see people struggling with that every day). Adding too many units in an area plagued by grid lock can also be problematic and you have to add public transportation first. My personal reason for being NIMBY is pretty simple though: I just want to sleep at night. and since municipal rules are hardly ever enforced in high density areas, I'll have to deal with kids screaming, idiot drunks trashing the place at 3 am, graffiti and people having parties at all hours of the night and day with the cops telling me to just deal with it because I live in a high density area. So when they try to build more on top, I'm like "Err, no". I literally dont care if my property value dropped to zero, as long as I can sleep without needing earplugs. I already have to run the A/C or heat twice as much as I should because I can't open the windows without "enjoying" whatever activity my neighbors are doing that involve screaming on top of their lungs. Besides, I live in one of the top 10 most densely populated neighborhoods in the country, and then people want to add more. ::shrugs:: In my home country this was not an issue because people could respect each other, and rules were enforced. In that case, build as much as you want in my backyard.
jganetsk 10y ago
Citations needed. I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity of resources in the last few years. Additionally... to say that nearly every industry can absorb almost infinite demand for their products is absurd. Near infinite claims need near infinite evidence. Can we produce near infinite food? Can we produce near infinite precious metals? There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  You, as a human being, can only consume so much water. So much energy. So much food. Its already within our means to feed everyone (green revolution), shelter [1] everyone, and energy? Please! Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year (you will never see the price of power go up again [2] [3], renewables are simply too cheap now, and will continue to be deployed at a rate somewhere between linear and exponential, pushing out generation sources that have a consumable fuel with marginal cost). Surely we'll need to drive down the cost of healthcare and housing [4]; that'll be tough and expensive to solve. But everything else? Its all clean energy, automated manufacturing, and bits across a wire. We must choose to provide for everyone not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The economy does not need to grow further; growth is not the problem, distribution is ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation [3] http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/bernstein-solar-coal-lng.png http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/... (TL;DR Cost of energy from solar is dropping faster than Battlestar Galactica through a planet's atmosphere [3a]) [3a] https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s [4] https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg
  - intended 10y ago
    > The economy does not need to grow further This is pretty much false, because on the one end we have people in poverty who will hopefully move out of it, which will cause growth. On the other end, most people on this forum are involved in finding new ways to unlock "value" and thus create new wealth. The economy is not a pure zero sum game.
dasil003 10y ago
The problem is that stuff isn't what makes people happy. Sure if you give a poor person money they'll be happier, but that effect doesn't work for the middle class and above where people generally want a little more than they had before, and a little more than their neighbor. Of course a lot of people realize that material wealth won't make them happy, but that's an individual philosophical point that doesn't carry a lot of weight when you feel comparatively disadvantaged. The real problem you have to solve then, is not the quantity of stuff, but the allocation of stuff. This is very difficult one to solve, especially in America, because of the deep puritanical culture. It's going to get a lot worse too as robotics, software and automation lead to ever greater consolidation of wealth. This is where capitalism starts to break down as economies of scale push us towards something resembling a feudal society, but the problem is we don't have any other system that people are ready to accept as "fair".
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  The problem is wealth affects happiness more than it used to because of things like health care. Give yourself a nice middle class healthcare plan. Give me wealth. If we both get cancer I have a lot more options and more ways to guarantee the highest level of care. Wealth makes happiness if it enables you to stay alive. Likewise with opportunities for raising children - there are lots of ways to help children thrive with wealth, but it's not what i would consider the classical "material need".
  - Svenskunganka 10y ago
    I disagree with you, because there are countries on earth where wealth doesn't play as big of a role in happiness as it does in the American culture. Take Sweden for example, where I'm from, where literally every citizen has access to top-tier healthcare & education that's free (funded through taxes), 16 months paid parental leave, among many other nice things. This while still being very liberal (although social democratic) and one of the world's most developed countries in terms of technology, energy, transportation and taking care of the environment. Over here happiness can be found without being wealthy, and generally you don't have to worry about your financial status as much because you'll always have access to top-tier healthcare, education and benefits if things goes south at some point, no matter what.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
True and not true. It is true that economists have not factored in the economics of information into their analysis of GDP yet but it isn't true to say we live in a post scarcity world or that we are even yet approaching such a world. What is true is that we've probably reached the point where competition for programming jobs will put negative pressure on salaries. Basically Google and AWS make 90% gross margin on the electrons they convert from electrical power to search advertising or web services. They can live on probably a third of that. Today we see the excess margin being spent on speculative things (Google X as an example) but as the margins get squeezed that will go away, then excess salary will go away. We talk about ageism but really there is a ceiling on salaries for most people and if they aren't in the "special 1%" they are replaced by cheaper people as soon as their salary hits that peak. That used to be around 50 now it seems it is around 40 and has been coming down nearly linearly for the last 5 years. Basically any job that can be done by someone fresh out of college with a modicum of search skills on Stack Overflow or other forum sites is going to have zero real wage growth. I had a really interesting exchange with senior folks at IBM talking about office space and office plans. Looking at it at the surface, saving money on office space helps increase the money you can pay the employees and keeps margins up. But when you look at it in the context of dollars of margin per employee, it makes no sense at all. Consider a classic "widgets" company. Perhaps 5 people designing widgets, 10 engineering the parts and designing flows for assembling them, maybe 20 on a factory floor putting them together, testing them, and putting them out for shipping. All to sell thousands of $45 widgets making $15 gross margin. How much do you spend on office space for those 35 people affects if it is $15 gross margin or $10 gross margin. But when you have 3 people designing, 2 developing, and 2 testing and releasing a software product that sells millions of units at $4 with $2 gross margin, you have cut revenue per sale 10x but increased sales 1000x. And because the employees are still living in the lie about "we have to keep costs down" you get these companies pocketing billions of dollars in free cash flow that they just sit on. The economics of information are completely different than the economics of goods and using "classic" economic analysis you get really out of whack numbers and expectations. Think about this, Google could literally lay off half the engineers in the company with zero impact on their revenue numbers. It will be interesting to see how this settles out, I don't expect programmers to suddenly get a proportional share of the revenue from information goods, but I also think work is going to be vastly different. I can easily see the goods economy moving to large conglomerate fabricators like FoxCon which end up manufacturing anything and everything to the wishes of a handful of designers and engineers. Their forte' is electronics, LG has appliances pretty much sewn up (no pun intended), can you imagine if Ford or Toyota could create the 'foxcon of auto manufacturing' ? Existing economic models have a bunch of ways GDP recirculates in an economy, those ways are mostly toast in an information economy leaving behind giant pools of cash. Finding a way to put that cash back into the economy will be the challenge for the information revolution.
lossolo 10y ago
I like what Gandhi said about resources: 'The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.'
themodelplumber 10y ago
> the sooner we can end poverty, achieve high levels of growth, and overcome our fear of globalization and technology. How? Curious to know more, thanks.
roflchoppa 10y ago
"The age of inflation is over because producers in nearly every industry (there are a few notable exceptions) can absorb almost infinite demand for their products." why do we need so much crap? lets roll back the consumerism.
- pixl97 10y ago
  Just say that you will keep your cell phone over a year or two and you'll get 10 replies here on why they upgrade their perfectly fine phone every year. Waste is an addiction, and it's a common one when it comes to electronics.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    I'm the other way around, I'm using a 5yo desktop (i5-2500k) and a four year old phone. Both do exactly what I need them to do and upgrading would be a marginal improvement. I loathe buying technology my gf says I'm the worst techie ever :)
    - roflchoppa 10y ago
      2 year old phone, Macbook Pro 15' from 2009 (the only model not to have video card issues since, what? 2007?) I'll replace it eventually.... i was also referring to clothing that looses material quality rapidly....etc etc.
jomamaxx 10y ago
It has almost nothing to do with raw materials. Resource consumption is growing, but as economies have long ago shifted to services and advanced products, it's less a part of the equation. Your mac, your iPhone, your 'Internet' your 'wireless mobile' , your Netflix, your 500 channels - these are all new services which everyone pays for and consume very little 'resources' in the classical sense. Even as we switched from drip coffee to Lattes, from crappy restaurants to better ones - this does not affect 'resources' so much.
IanDrake 10y ago
I think you misunderstand inflation. Inflation is based on a the supply and demand for a currency - not goods that the currency can buy.

NhanH 10y ago

Can you elaborate how inflation is connected with scarcity of resources?

baron816 10y ago
Prices are driven up when there is too much demand competing for a limited amount of goods. When a company can scale infinitely, they don't have to raise their prices. Lower prices keep demand up, so producers tend to want to keep their prices low.
WalterBright 10y ago
Inflation has nothing to do with scarcity. It is the result of the supply of money increasing relative to the value in the economy. It's supply & demand, which applies to money just like everything else. Scarcity does raise prices, but that is not inflation, because if X's price rises, you spend more on X, but you have less to spend on Y, which lowers that price.
jomamaxx 10y ago
Scarcity changes the price of something. Inflation can really be thought of as expansion of the money supply while all other things remain steady - stuff just arbitrarily gets more expensive. Central Banks target 2% inflation so that we don't fall into a deflationary trap. It's like keeping the treadmill running just a little bit, to force the person to run forward. Austrian school economists basically equate inflation with money printing - to them it's the same thing. But most things increase in price due to a) better quality product and b) regular dynamics of business c) currency. So when the beer gets more expensive it's: a) Better beer (at least in the eyes of the consumer), i.e. longer brew times, better taste, better ingredients b) More expensive input costs c) Currency issues with imports etc. Those are not inflation, just price fluxuation. Inflation is when the exact same thing gets costlier, all other things being equal.

sjg007 10y ago

We support globalization to prevent war.

nickthemagicman 10y ago

This is brilliantly put. So whats the solution?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
baron816 10y ago
UBI probably, but funding it with newly printed money. Another way to think of what I'm saying is this: there are billions of people out there in the world who want more stuff. There are lot of companies and workers who want sell those people more stuff. And there are enough resources out there to make all that stuff for them (energy for a long time was the big limiter). Obviously, there is an economic disconnect that is limiting people from getting the goods that they want and need. What's really happening is that poor people just don't have anything to trade with. The solution is to give them something to trade with. We don't have to do a UBI. I think we would be fine if central banks did something like give the bottom 20% of income earners a one time payment of ~$20k.
- jganetsk 10y ago
  This is called helicopter money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money It sucks because it is irreversible. This is unnecessary. Just have the government finance UBI. After all, people like Larry Summers, with his "secular stagnation" theory, are calling for a shift from monetary policy to fiscal policy. And I think UBI, as you say, would be a very effective fiscal policy tool.
- DamnYuppie 10y ago
  I am not attacking your idea but am curious to know how is this not inflation for everyone else?
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    UBI goes to everyone and affects everyone. Who's the "everyone else"?

Alex3917 10y ago

> Our problem is not that we can't make enough stuff for everyone to be happy, it's that we're still acting like that is the case. The real issue is that the ruling class makes their money off capital. That's why Tiny Houses are banned in San Francisco and elsewhere. Because no one really needs more than 400 square feet of (well-designed) living space, but if people were allowed to buy houses and apartments that small then they wouldn't need to go into debt. If the basic necessities of life become free then capital itself becomes devalued, so don't expect it to be an easy fight.

mahyarm 10y ago
It's called the studio apartment :D NIMBY has many reasons behind it, and one of them is trying to increase housing values. Other things are guarding precious "free" parking spaces, being old and not liking change, or being afraid of changes effecting the quality of your children's school and other things.
- shados 10y ago
  the parking spot issue is real (I don't drive, but I can see people struggling with that every day). Adding too many units in an area plagued by grid lock can also be problematic and you have to add public transportation first. My personal reason for being NIMBY is pretty simple though: I just want to sleep at night. and since municipal rules are hardly ever enforced in high density areas, I'll have to deal with kids screaming, idiot drunks trashing the place at 3 am, graffiti and people having parties at all hours of the night and day with the cops telling me to just deal with it because I live in a high density area. So when they try to build more on top, I'm like "Err, no". I literally dont care if my property value dropped to zero, as long as I can sleep without needing earplugs. I already have to run the A/C or heat twice as much as I should because I can't open the windows without "enjoying" whatever activity my neighbors are doing that involve screaming on top of their lungs. Besides, I live in one of the top 10 most densely populated neighborhoods in the country, and then people want to add more. ::shrugs:: In my home country this was not an issue because people could respect each other, and rules were enforced. In that case, build as much as you want in my backyard.

jganetsk 10y ago

Citations needed. I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity of resources in the last few years. Additionally... to say that nearly every industry can absorb almost infinite demand for their products is absurd. Near infinite claims need near infinite evidence. Can we produce near infinite food? Can we produce near infinite precious metals? There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
You, as a human being, can only consume so much water. So much energy. So much food. Its already within our means to feed everyone (green revolution), shelter [1] everyone, and energy? Please! Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year (you will never see the price of power go up again [2] [3], renewables are simply too cheap now, and will continue to be deployed at a rate somewhere between linear and exponential, pushing out generation sources that have a consumable fuel with marginal cost). Surely we'll need to drive down the cost of healthcare and housing [4]; that'll be tough and expensive to solve. But everything else? Its all clean energy, automated manufacturing, and bits across a wire. We must choose to provide for everyone not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The economy does not need to grow further; growth is not the problem, distribution is ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation [3] http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/bernstein-solar-coal-lng.png http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/... (TL;DR Cost of energy from solar is dropping faster than Battlestar Galactica through a planet's atmosphere [3a]) [3a] https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s [4] https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg
- intended 10y ago
  > The economy does not need to grow further This is pretty much false, because on the one end we have people in poverty who will hopefully move out of it, which will cause growth. On the other end, most people on this forum are involved in finding new ways to unlock "value" and thus create new wealth. The economy is not a pure zero sum game.

dasil003 10y ago

The problem is that stuff isn't what makes people happy. Sure if you give a poor person money they'll be happier, but that effect doesn't work for the middle class and above where people generally want a little more than they had before, and a little more than their neighbor. Of course a lot of people realize that material wealth won't make them happy, but that's an individual philosophical point that doesn't carry a lot of weight when you feel comparatively disadvantaged. The real problem you have to solve then, is not the quantity of stuff, but the allocation of stuff. This is very difficult one to solve, especially in America, because of the deep puritanical culture. It's going to get a lot worse too as robotics, software and automation lead to ever greater consolidation of wealth. This is where capitalism starts to break down as economies of scale push us towards something resembling a feudal society, but the problem is we don't have any other system that people are ready to accept as "fair".

WhitneyLand 10y ago
The problem is wealth affects happiness more than it used to because of things like health care. Give yourself a nice middle class healthcare plan. Give me wealth. If we both get cancer I have a lot more options and more ways to guarantee the highest level of care. Wealth makes happiness if it enables you to stay alive. Likewise with opportunities for raising children - there are lots of ways to help children thrive with wealth, but it's not what i would consider the classical "material need".
- Svenskunganka 10y ago
  I disagree with you, because there are countries on earth where wealth doesn't play as big of a role in happiness as it does in the American culture. Take Sweden for example, where I'm from, where literally every citizen has access to top-tier healthcare & education that's free (funded through taxes), 16 months paid parental leave, among many other nice things. This while still being very liberal (although social democratic) and one of the world's most developed countries in terms of technology, energy, transportation and taking care of the environment. Over here happiness can be found without being wealthy, and generally you don't have to worry about your financial status as much because you'll always have access to top-tier healthcare, education and benefits if things goes south at some point, no matter what.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

True and not true. It is true that economists have not factored in the economics of information into their analysis of GDP yet but it isn't true to say we live in a post scarcity world or that we are even yet approaching such a world. What is true is that we've probably reached the point where competition for programming jobs will put negative pressure on salaries. Basically Google and AWS make 90% gross margin on the electrons they convert from electrical power to search advertising or web services. They can live on probably a third of that. Today we see the excess margin being spent on speculative things (Google X as an example) but as the margins get squeezed that will go away, then excess salary will go away. We talk about ageism but really there is a ceiling on salaries for most people and if they aren't in the "special 1%" they are replaced by cheaper people as soon as their salary hits that peak. That used to be around 50 now it seems it is around 40 and has been coming down nearly linearly for the last 5 years. Basically any job that can be done by someone fresh out of college with a modicum of search skills on Stack Overflow or other forum sites is going to have zero real wage growth. I had a really interesting exchange with senior folks at IBM talking about office space and office plans. Looking at it at the surface, saving money on office space helps increase the money you can pay the employees and keeps margins up. But when you look at it in the context of dollars of margin per employee, it makes no sense at all. Consider a classic "widgets" company. Perhaps 5 people designing widgets, 10 engineering the parts and designing flows for assembling them, maybe 20 on a factory floor putting them together, testing them, and putting them out for shipping. All to sell thousands of $45 widgets making $15 gross margin. How much do you spend on office space for those 35 people affects if it is $15 gross margin or $10 gross margin. But when you have 3 people designing, 2 developing, and 2 testing and releasing a software product that sells millions of units at $4 with $2 gross margin, you have cut revenue per sale 10x but increased sales 1000x. And because the employees are still living in the lie about "we have to keep costs down" you get these companies pocketing billions of dollars in free cash flow that they just sit on. The economics of information are completely different than the economics of goods and using "classic" economic analysis you get really out of whack numbers and expectations. Think about this, Google could literally lay off half the engineers in the company with zero impact on their revenue numbers. It will be interesting to see how this settles out, I don't expect programmers to suddenly get a proportional share of the revenue from information goods, but I also think work is going to be vastly different. I can easily see the goods economy moving to large conglomerate fabricators like FoxCon which end up manufacturing anything and everything to the wishes of a handful of designers and engineers. Their forte' is electronics, LG has appliances pretty much sewn up (no pun intended), can you imagine if Ford or Toyota could create the 'foxcon of auto manufacturing' ? Existing economic models have a bunch of ways GDP recirculates in an economy, those ways are mostly toast in an information economy leaving behind giant pools of cash. Finding a way to put that cash back into the economy will be the challenge for the information revolution.

lossolo 10y ago

I like what Gandhi said about resources: 'The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.'

themodelplumber 10y ago

> the sooner we can end poverty, achieve high levels of growth, and overcome our fear of globalization and technology. How? Curious to know more, thanks.

roflchoppa 10y ago

"The age of inflation is over because producers in nearly every industry (there are a few notable exceptions) can absorb almost infinite demand for their products." why do we need so much crap? lets roll back the consumerism.

pixl97 10y ago
Just say that you will keep your cell phone over a year or two and you'll get 10 replies here on why they upgrade their perfectly fine phone every year. Waste is an addiction, and it's a common one when it comes to electronics.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  I'm the other way around, I'm using a 5yo desktop (i5-2500k) and a four year old phone. Both do exactly what I need them to do and upgrading would be a marginal improvement. I loathe buying technology my gf says I'm the worst techie ever :)
  - roflchoppa 10y ago
    2 year old phone, Macbook Pro 15' from 2009 (the only model not to have video card issues since, what? 2007?) I'll replace it eventually.... i was also referring to clothing that looses material quality rapidly....etc etc.

jomamaxx 10y ago

It has almost nothing to do with raw materials. Resource consumption is growing, but as economies have long ago shifted to services and advanced products, it's less a part of the equation. Your mac, your iPhone, your 'Internet' your 'wireless mobile' , your Netflix, your 500 channels - these are all new services which everyone pays for and consume very little 'resources' in the classical sense. Even as we switched from drip coffee to Lattes, from crappy restaurants to better ones - this does not affect 'resources' so much.

IanDrake 10y ago

I think you misunderstand inflation. Inflation is based on a the supply and demand for a currency - not goods that the currency can buy.