If you're selling a part-time educational product or service, your biggest competitor is Netflix. Even if you convince someone to do an evening course instead of watching Netflix and then they choose someone else's evening course, you've still grown the market in a way that will probably benefit you.
Similarly, Netflix's biggest competitor is sleep.
It is, perhaps, one of the motivators behind self-driving cars. It gives people more time to watch movies or engage in productive work. Any time not spent consuming or creating is bad for the economy.
Haha, this might be an economic "spherical cow". Realistically, we can't be consuming/creating all the time. People need downtime (you can't argue time spent sleeping is bad for the economy when people cease functioning when they get sleep-deprived enough).
Say, during COVID, I think many people suddenly discovered that they do not need as much consumption as they thought they did. Replacing going out or shopping with a walk in the park was a pleasant change for some. And yet instead of learning something from the experience, people are pressured to return to their old consumption habits as if it is some sort of civic duty, because it is "good for the economy". It is the equivalent of breaking windows and fixing them up again to create an economic boom - it is bad for the economy and the people and is just a transfer of resources to a specific trade.
This sounds horrific to me. Why would we want to avoid bad stuff "for the economy"? Is the economy some kind of god we have to serve by the ritual of media consumption?
This view is only one step away from telling me I'm foregoing my patriotic duties by choosing to just make tea and sit in quiet or talk to people without going to the movies or doing something "structured".
> "gives people more time to watch movies"
Why do you immediately accociate to movies and productivity? How about give them more time to talk to their neighbors or their family or to contemplate their life or whatever else?
This is a complete countersense toward the etymology of "economy" and I would even say toward its only possible natural goal.
The concept of economy is about reaching goals with the least effort. And the selection of those goals can certainly not be "the economy", that would be circular, an attempt to optimize arbitrary conventions that is completely meaningless.
So having a good economy is certainly not possible by the furious consumption of unneeded things.
I couldn't care less about "the economy" if its goal has shifted toward the selection of our new masters. And that state of mind about "the economy" will certainly not favor neighbourhood stores but more probably megacorps and their (often very few) owners.