We need to understand that this large scale economy is very fragile. We need to reinvest in antifragile local communities. And no, I'm not talking about of going back to dark ages just to reduce the scale, maybe to the levels of 30 years ago.
we should not put all the eggs in the same basket even if our quality of life changes.
Regarding quality of life, this economy based on material wealth can only give a sense of well being up to a point.
Outside of the bubble that is HN tech workers - wages have stagnated. The wealth being generated is severely concentrated at the very top. I think your average person walking down the street would gladly exchange their $2 gallon of milk for a $4 gallon of milk if they had a $40k/year salary vs. their current $7/hr.
Cost rising isn't the fault here. It's costs rising faster than wages (especially minimum wage).
That relationship was broken, but not the assumption that if you are poor, you are lazy.
What this is really doing is providing welfare to all the companies paying below-poverty wages - the taxpayers pay for benefits to allow the workers in those positions to live, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits.
The portion of GDP going to wages has almost never been lower than it is now [1]
It is about corporate regulatory capture redesigning the economy for corporate wealth extraction and not for the benefit of the citizens.
I swear I've heard this before.
I really hate when people do this. Those are totally different scales, and it's not obvious how they compare.
According to this converter [0] (and ignoring specific differences between wage and salary like overtime), using the defaults of 40-hour work week and 50-week year (to account for holidays):
* $40k/year is about $20/hour
* $7/hour is about $14k/year
Which ones could we not?
For example, I found out that my country, Portugal has the highest number of houses per inhabitant (6 million houses for 10 million inhabitants). It's natural that now that large-scale tourism has collapsed it's not possible to make more houses.
We must therefore not only question whether we can change the means of production to a smaller scale, but whether these means of production make sense.
The problem is the creation of work but then we could think of other forms of wealth distribution such as universal basic income.