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The main point is the productivity/production has been shifted elsewhere. Once upon a time if you wanted to be wealthy, you had to produce physical stuff. Today
by kesor 5y ago
The main point is the productivity/production has been shifted elsewhere. Once upon a time if you wanted to be wealthy, you had to produce physical stuff. Today you just find somewhere else in the world where people are forced to produce for pennies and you make them produce cheap crap for you, while the west does a lot less production than its potential and mostly just reaps the benefits.
But the problem is not that production was mostly removed as the enabler to buy stuff. The real huge problem in the last 45 years is that the constraints on financing were removed.
Once upon a time in order to buy cheap labor from another country, you had to pay with something physical, probably something you actually produced. Today you can just punch a key on your keyboard and give them extra numbers that are backed by nothing really, there is no need to produce anymore.
When the only constraint on production is to find more fools to produce for you, eventually you run out of fools.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago"The main point is the productivity/production has been shifted elsewhere. Once upon a time if you wanted to be wealthy, you had to produce physical stuff. Today you just find somewhere else in the world where people are forced to produce for pennies and you make them produce cheap crap for you, while the west does a lot less production than its potential and mostly just reaps the benefits." This just isn't true. People were wealthy slave owners and got rich because you had forced labor. You didn't even have to pay them pennies. We have a long history of unpaid labor, globally, and the fact that we still have low-and-unpaid labor shouldn't be a surprise (even if we find it wrong now). Lawyers have been somewhat well-to-do for some generations now, alongside other things you had to go off to college for, and I'm not sure they produced anything either. Perhaps not in the US, but churches were freaking wealthy at one time too, and I can't really think of things they consistently produced either. Same for royals: They didn't directly produce anything.
- sokoloff 5y agoTaking away someone else’s best option rarely leaves that person better off (especially in the short-run)