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Unfortunately since the US chose to go with Friedman/supply side economics since about the 80s, we're in a race to the bottom. Lower production costs used to e

Unfortunately since the US chose to go with Friedman/supply side economics since about the 80s, we're in a race to the bottom. Lower production costs used to equate to increased consumption, but that didn’t account for finite resources. If we factor in externalities like pollution, the value being produced in the world has been constant for quite some time, maybe as far back as the 80s also. And worse, a whole slew of markets like oil/fishing/timber/mining are in decline. So we’re in this bizarre situation of everything being destroyed, but hey, prices are cheaper than ever. Too bad incomes are in decline too so nobody can afford to buy anything anyway. Contrast this with Keynesian/demand side economics that countries like Germany and Finland have adopted, where one of the top priorities is per-capita income. In Germany, 50% of a company’s board must be made up of labor, and during downturns the government pays people to go on furloughs while they are still employed (to maintain demand by propping up buying power) . And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the economy (I realize this is not sustainable, I’m just saying that it’s arguably better than what the US does). Education, maternity leave, healthcare, pretty much everything that contributes to a higher quality of life is given priority over profit. They’ve been at it so long that their customer base is huge and companies are able to invest in long term planning and research. Jobs are plentiful, one can’t hardly even get fired, and the middle class is huge. Regardless of political ideology, if we look out 10, 20, 30 years, it’s pretty obvious that natural resources are going to go into the toilet and more and more work is going to be done by machines. Communism was able to absorb that by forcing everyone to work unproductive jobs. Socialism seems to be able to absorb it to some degree by focussing on people first. But capitalism.. I don’t know. It’s the economic form of darwinism. If it’s going to survive into the future then I think it’s going to evolve into something unrecognizable. To me it looks like there are two extremes: a Star Trek economy with guaranteed basic incomes or a new gilded age where perhaps 1000 people own all of the wealth on the planet and people’s labor/personal profit is on an ever declining trajectory.

dnautics 13y ago
"it’s pretty obvious that natural resources are going to go into the toilet and more and more work is going to be done by machines" These seem to be contradictory. If natural resources are going to go into the toilet, wouldn't intensive labor be more necessary? What are you using to power and build the machines?
- zackmorris 13y ago
  Hmmm I see what you mean, I was thinking about robots made of steel, running on electricity with some efficiency greater than humans. Sort of like the used car bodies getting crushed in dumps, like we have basically unlimited amounts of iron and whatever remaining fossil fuels would go to run industry instead of feeding people. And then one mechanic could maintain dozens or hundreds of machines and multiply his or her productivity many times. But you bring up a good point, about how if natural resources are in decline, we may be headed back to an agrarian society (which incidentally is not productive enough to feed more than about 1 or 2 billion people, so most of the world would starve). To me, a future in which people are still engaged in manual labor is one where technology has stopped improving or even failed. For example, I’m shocked that people still pick crops by hand. Some of that is propped up by immigration laws and being able to pay farm workers below minimum wage. Otherwise someone surely would have automated it by now. But then, I could say the same thing about almost any manual labor (somewhere along the line, the dignity of manual labor and the compensation we pay for it diverged, so almost all of it pays less now than we think it does, and is declining).
jsnell 13y ago
> And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the economy Finland doesn't border the North Sea, nor does it produce a drop of oil from anywhere else. I'm not quite sure which country you were thinking of there -- Norway quite explicitly doesn't pump the oil money into the local economy but runs a giant fund that invests the proceeds elsewhere, to be used once the oil runs out. It's also completely absurd to claim that Germany and Finland are somehow optimizing for per-capita income (wtf?), or that profit is the last priority, or that jobs are plentiful, or that one can't even get fired, etc. You appear to have built up some idealized version of Europe that has little to do with reality.
- zackmorris 13y ago
  I stand corrected, it's Norway that has the North Sea oil money, not Finland. But Germany does have the policy I mentioned, that inject money directly into employees' pockets during downturns rather than firing them, it's called Kurzarbeit: http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/us-should-try-germanys-unemployment-medicine/ http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/us-should...

dnautics 13y ago

"it’s pretty obvious that natural resources are going to go into the toilet and more and more work is going to be done by machines" These seem to be contradictory. If natural resources are going to go into the toilet, wouldn't intensive labor be more necessary? What are you using to power and build the machines?

zackmorris 13y ago
Hmmm I see what you mean, I was thinking about robots made of steel, running on electricity with some efficiency greater than humans. Sort of like the used car bodies getting crushed in dumps, like we have basically unlimited amounts of iron and whatever remaining fossil fuels would go to run industry instead of feeding people. And then one mechanic could maintain dozens or hundreds of machines and multiply his or her productivity many times. But you bring up a good point, about how if natural resources are in decline, we may be headed back to an agrarian society (which incidentally is not productive enough to feed more than about 1 or 2 billion people, so most of the world would starve). To me, a future in which people are still engaged in manual labor is one where technology has stopped improving or even failed. For example, I’m shocked that people still pick crops by hand. Some of that is propped up by immigration laws and being able to pay farm workers below minimum wage. Otherwise someone surely would have automated it by now. But then, I could say the same thing about almost any manual labor (somewhere along the line, the dignity of manual labor and the compensation we pay for it diverged, so almost all of it pays less now than we think it does, and is declining).

jsnell 13y ago

> And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the economy Finland doesn't border the North Sea, nor does it produce a drop of oil from anywhere else. I'm not quite sure which country you were thinking of there -- Norway quite explicitly doesn't pump the oil money into the local economy but runs a giant fund that invests the proceeds elsewhere, to be used once the oil runs out. It's also completely absurd to claim that Germany and Finland are somehow optimizing for per-capita income (wtf?), or that profit is the last priority, or that jobs are plentiful, or that one can't even get fired, etc. You appear to have built up some idealized version of Europe that has little to do with reality.

zackmorris 13y ago
I stand corrected, it's Norway that has the North Sea oil money, not Finland. But Germany does have the policy I mentioned, that inject money directly into employees' pockets during downturns rather than firing them, it's called Kurzarbeit: http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/us-should-try-germanys-unemployment-medicine/ http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/us-should...