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I'm intrigued by your comment that you have an advanced degree in economics. I don't, but it seems obvious to me that you're missing something (I'm happy to be corrected here!): the problem isn't the lack of consumers so much as a lack of incentive to produce.

If everyone becomes an entrepreneur, compelled to be stingy and just do productive things for the fun of it, then they're still being productive, and the world is still getting useful stuff. But, it seems your concern is that if everyone just does the work they'd like to do then there will be a misallocation of labor: certain things that need to get done won't get done.[1]

Is this really true? Are there well-organized economies that are stagnating while people are engaged in their own independently productive pursuits? Is Japan's economy stagnating because they consume too little or because they are working too little?

[1] An immediate counter-argument here is that people are likely to be more productive when they love their work.

Actually that is NOT at all what my argument is. My argument is that people can produce as much as they want, but you still need someone to consume your product. Just being productive gives you only the supply side, but what about demand, why make would make something when people do not demand it.

Remember PG's rule: Make something that people want. Want is demand.

You cannot make things without taken into contention who would consume them and by how much. A business is based on how many people actually USE what it makes, and are ready to pay for it.

> but you still need someone to consume your product

Do we? We're not trying to make a lot of money, just enough to get by. And we're talking about an entire economy here, not about the profitability of an individual business. The whole point is that people in this model don't really care about how much money they're making (or, put another way, they place a very high value on their time).

The question is whether there would be something fundamentally wrong with a society in which people spent very little, but were nonetheless productive doing "their own thing".

. . . they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid . . . --Micah 4:3b-4a

But you still need "enough to get by", and OP's living might not reach that if everyone was following it. What then?

> You cannot make things without taken into [consideration] who would consume them and by how much. A business is based on how many people actually USE what it makes, and are ready to pay for it.

Exactly. Perhaps a good way to view this would be to resrict the definition of supply to be only something that has a demand. So a fisherman that "supplies" rotten fish that nobody wants is not providing a supply, he is just wasting resources.

The hard part of economics is always the supply part: how can you increase supply? (Supply defined as what people want.) When productivity is below the subsistence level, increasing supply consists in just producing more food. But as productivity grows beyond the subsistence level, the challenge becomes an informational one: out of all the things you could do, what should you do to increase the total supply the most? A man who is hungry just wants more food, any food. But a man who is sated will only want certain particular kinds of food or maybe something else entirely.

This is what prices in a free market are for: they provide information about what the economy needs the most. In an economy of hungry people, any kind of food will sell. But as the population gets sated, prices will tell producers that common-place food is not needed anymore and that they should produce something else.

You're just redefining terms without adding anything new.

Parent's question is: what if people are stated, and like OP, they don't want different kinds of food, or anything else? What if, like OP, they're happy consuming only a small part of what can be produced by all those entrepreneurs?

The point of trade is to allow each party to get what they want at less cost than they would be able to get independently. If one party wants to sell, but the other party doesn't want to buy, then trade does not happen. This is not bad thing. In fact, per Micah, it's even idyllic: "every man sitting under his vine and under his fig tree." That is, every man having his own food supply so that he is not dependent on someone else.

Defining supply to require a corresponding demand makes this explicit. An entrepreneur can't just start producing stuff that nobody wants and then complain that there is no demand for his supply. He's not entitled to force a trade.

Examples make this clear. The auto industry has the capacity to produce many more cars than they do. But they will not be heard to complain that people should be forced to buy more cars so that they can produce more. Likewise movie theaters with empty seats are not allowed to force people to buy tickets.

By the way, there are industries that partner with government in order to be able to force trade. The money industry is the biggest one. See G. Edward Griffin's presentation of The Creature from Jekyll Island (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6507136891691870450).

The reason you are being down voted, just so you know, is because you're being flippant and dismissive.

I am not trying to be dismissive, but I am trying to talk with some theoretical base. Initially Nirvana derided my claims, in my opinion, without producing an actual theoretical base for his claims. He also said I should learn economics from Hazlitt's economic philosophy, rather than from a university, which is quite demeaning.

I'm sorry you feel demeaned by my advice to read Hazlitt's book in order to learn some basic economics. I didn't think that it would be appropriate to advocate that everyone should go to a university to learn economics, especially given, as as you later made clear, that some universities don't even teach economics to those who get degrees in it.

You have no theoretical base. You are regurgitating a political ideology that is, quite frankly, nonsense. You focus on demand, when it is irrelevant to this discussion, and your argument presumes that "advising people to save is bad" because "if everyone saved there would be no demand".

Obviously, when people run their lives prudently, they don't eliminate all spending (and thus all demand is not eliminated). Obviously, consumers are not the only source of demand in an economy. And obviously you can't really defend your point and that is why you spend your time characterizing others -- and in fact your "economic" argument is really just disparaging a savings plan with a fallacious -- but oft repeated by political hacks-- story.

So, of course, I was dismissive. Your "argument" was easily dispatched.

If you really want to have this argument with me: lets do it privately, my email address is in the profile. I will even invite some economists into the midst for some discussions, and you are welcome to invite whoever you want. I always appreciate counter points, and counter arguments. So I think it will be a very interesting debate. Lets keep it civil.

I think I've heard this one before...

How many economists does it take to change an ideology?

> Next time you want to argue regarding economics, please argue with actual theoretical knowledge rather than some flimsy theoretical base that you have created in your own mind.

I can't imagine a better base for economics knowledge than Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson."

> I know every economics model there is in and out.

Then you should be familiar with Austrian economics.

Though that is probably not covered in an "advanced degree in economics!"

Well of course there is that other Austrian Economist, you know the one produced the Chicago School of Thought with Milton Friedman: Friedrich Von Hayek, who is one of the biggest reason that monetary economics came to the fore. And with all due respect Henry Hazlitt, as brilliant as he was as a public intellectual, he is not an economist that is often taught in curricula. Economics is highly quantified and Hazlitt's contribution was economic philosophy.

And here is a concise history of Austrian School of thought, most of which came from London School of Economics post-1930, Nowhere does anyone mention Hazlitt:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AustrianSchoolofEconomics...

> who is going to consume these products if people are saving?

Peter Schiff tells the story of a six guys stranded on a deserted island: five Asians and an American. They divide up the work as follows: one Asian hunts, one Asian fishes, one Asian gathers vegetables, one Asian cooks, and one Asian tends the fire. The American has the job of eating.

Peter says that an economist would look at the situation and explain that the American is the key to the whole enterprise. Without the American, the Asians would not have jobs.

The truth is that supply is its own demand. Whatever you produce that is surplus, you can trade for another's surplus. The problem in economics is not how to increase demand, but how to increase supply: how can people produce more useful things so that they can trade their surplus for the surplus of others.

This is clearly the "build it and they will come" bullshit. I had hoped the Hacker News crowd would be the first to recognize that demand doesn't just "appear."

Supply and demand are just two sides of the same coin. To Apple, the iPhone is supply. Apple supplies iPhones to meet consumer demand. But the iPhone is also Apple's demand. Its production of IPhones determines how much other things it will be able to buy.

To consumers, the IPhone is something they want (demand). But their demand is determined by what they supply. A programmer ability to pay for (demand) an iPhone depends on his ability to supply programs that someone else wants.

"Build it and they will come" is truth as long as you're building something someone wants. A farmer who decides to plant corn or soybeans will have a demand for his crop, because people want corn and soybeans. The price/demand fluctuates based on how badly they want it.

Programming is no different. If you build something people want, they will come. The problem is that programming has so many degrees of freedom and it's so scalable that it's a lot easier than farming to supply something that no one wants.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551813

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2739027

I am not saying producing is not important, my point is that you cannot just demote consumption to an unnecessary side variable, because even when you trade your surpluses, you each are the market for the other.

Does that not make consumption as important? What if no one likes fish other than the one Asian? What happens in that scenario?

If no one likes fish, then fish are not "supply." They are waste from an economic standpoint. Toyota famously took this view, that over-supply is waste. Their just-in-time production was designed to eliminate this waste.

If you are going to be a self-sufficient farmer, you need land. Otherwise, you need something you can trade for food. If you can't produce something that anyone wants, you are labor isn't worth much. If you labor isn't worth enough to eat, you starve.

China inflates its currency to buy dollars. Then, US consumers use those dollars to buy products from China, which requires employing lots of people.

The government could just hand out money to poor people, but that could just result in lots more corruption. They can also create useless jobs but that also has problems.

"I actually have an advanced degree in economics,"

If this were true, you'd be able to comprehend what I said, and you'd be able to repeat my argument correctly, and then you'd be able to present a counter argument based on the science of economics. Your appeal to authority just tells me you made a really bad economic decision yourself.

I'm not going to debate your political ideology, because, why should I? The current economic state of the USA proves that endless government and consumer spending does not produce a healthy economy.

Your ideology is disproven by reality. The "stimulus" resulted in higher unemployment and a worse off economy. Bush's handing out "stimulus" checks to the people did the same thing.

Reality has already disproven your ideology.

Now, I know, having seen your ideology before, all the standard excuses. "The patient died because we didn't apply ENOUGH leeches!"

But they are not economic arguments. They are ideological ones. They are based on trying to rationalize a particular set of political positions. There's really no point in attempting to debate your desire to rationalized. I can't stop it.