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The conversation we really should be having involves answering these three questions: 1. What work could be done that would create a better world for us? 2. W
by cyrus_ 15y ago
The conversation we really should be having involves answering these three questions:
1. What work could be done that would create a better world for us?
2. Why isn't this work being done? Is it regulatory paralysis? Insufficient coordination amongst stakeholders? Are the rewards difficult to capture by the people doing the work? Are there not enough people with the requisite skills?
3. Can we stimulate or coordinate the private sector to organize labor and capital to get this work done? If not, why not?
If you've thought about these questions for a while, it is absolutely shocking to listen to the economic debate going on around us today. We have two camps who are both way off -- some people (e.g. the author of the blog post) assume that throwing money at anyone who asks for it will work, but it doesn't (they just waste it). Others think that letting people keep the money they have previously earned and staying outta the way will work, but it doesn't (they just hold on to it or waste it).
I don't know what the solution is.
- acslater00 15y agoI'm 100% with you. I'd quibble with the phrasing of "create a better world for us", since I think that lends itself to very mushy, subjective notions of "good" rather than "economic good", but you're absolutely right. The problem is not, "how do we create more GDP" (forever and ever and ever) it's "is there demand which is not being met by supply." At the core, that's what a recession is. The answer is clearly yes in some industries (health care comes to mind) and is clearly no in other industries (real estate and retail comes to mind). You can't just will an economy of 300m people to a certain state. If people spent more time thinking about optimal long term outcomes and then spent their time removing impediments to those outcomes, instead of pretending like there's some magic incantation that is simply being _blocked_, we'd be having a much more productive national conversation right now.