Post Scarcity Economics
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
"If I gave you a budget of zero dollars and said, 'Get me as much Internet porn as you can for that amount of money,' how much porn would you come back with?
I'm thinking the answer is, 'All of the porn.'" http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-b...
Those youtube-for-porn sites are pretty random, and places like usenet and bittorrent are even less organized, and require a bit of, er, delayed gratification. By paying a site to exercise editorial control he got exactly what he wanted with zero hassle or delay.
People are still very willing to pay for original, quality content that would not otherwise be produced. The value proposition is that you're not paying for porn that has been produced, you're paying for porn that has yet to be produced by making it lucrative for the models, photo/videographers, editors, technical folks on the back end, etc to stay in the market.
Without that sort of sponsorship, I couldn't stay in business, and the women that own the sites I operate wouldn't be in it either - they'd be stripping or working minimum wage retail - and there'd be less porn in the world, and some people are still willing to pay for that.
The main thing is that it's about the interaction - people can chat directly with the models, there are forums, requests are often fulfilled with no additional hassle, that sort of thing.
Maybe that's why Culture citizens are genofixed to be sociable and use a language, Marain, that "places much less structural emphasis on (or even lacks) concepts like possession and ownership, dominance and submission, and especially aggression".
The reason his industry exists is because people want it. A similar, if not worse, industry is tobacco, yet it doesn't have the same proliferation as pornography for a good reason, not as much demand. It is just as addictive and even more destructive. You also have marijuana, which is laughably easy to get in California (legally) and Amsterdam, it also is not as widespread as pornography.
If people did not want it, it would not exist.
Correct. This is not my full time occupation - I do it mainly as a favor, with some beer money thrown in.
Probably more significantly, it affords a reasonable living to otherwise unskilled women. Their alternatives are extremely limited - if it's exploitation to give people an alternative to poverty, so be it.
Maybe it's because she/he is paid much more than the actual value her/his technical contribution, like most of the programmers servicing simple user sites, and wants to protect her/his niche?
Rather the opposite, I'm afraid. It's not even enough money to bother with, only profitable in good months, but it affords a living to women I know who would otherwise be destitute.
I know several people in the sex industry, including some who are professional porn models. None of them feel that they're being exploited -- they do this work because they enjoy it.
I am certain that there are people who are forced into this work who don't want to be there, but it's far from everyone.
The former reason suffices quite well on its own, but the latter is not entirely inconsiderable, much as one tends to choose among the sturdiest of one's footwear when dressing for a visit to one's friend the chihuahua breeder.
(The sheer, blinding gall of flinging vitriol at a declared and justified sockpuppet, under the guise of an undeclared sockpuppet, I shall leave uncommented save briefly noting the fact of it; while I know your ilk of old and thus suspected your hypocrisy on the instant, readers lucky enough to lack such experience probably wouldn't be so likely to spot it on their own.)
If it ever actually became a problem, I'd point the women I work with at them. One of them is a gender studies major and perfectly willing to systematically dismantle "think of the poor defenseless women" arguments about the adult industry.
Edit: The Kindle version.
But these very people don't understand that they are currently enjoying one abundance right now: Free air.
The question is: How many things can we make as abundant as air?
OSS is there in fact. I would argue that electricity is next, then education (Khan Academy and the like), and one day fresh clean water.
We just have to keep knocking down one scarce resource at a time. The same way we don't take a single leap straight up the staircase, but instead take small steps to get to the top.
Liquid metal battery seems to offer some hope in this regard.
So when PV prices fall to the bottom (trends indicate they will), electricity prices produced by PV will fall as well. Coal/Nuclear/etc will become unviable. What do we do then? Electricity will be basically free then.
In reality, what is happening is that because of "alternative" sources of energy, electricity is plentiful during the day, and scarce during the evening. Also, only turbines (hydro/thermo power plants) can be adjusted to keep current and voltage in the network constant, so we still need them, but because of the "green" sources, they are becoming less profitable for the operators.
TL;DR: alternative energy sources cause us to have too much electricity during the day and too little during the evening, both of which is costing us money.
If you produce energy, you get paid for it, but also pay a levy depending on how well your supply fits the demand. The levy goes to whoever fills in the gaps.
For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at idle. The cost of actually running the turbines is covered by a separate daily auction for actual electricity production.
It won't be entirely free, but with enough effort, it might get very cheap.
Fresh clean water is much the same way. Water is so cheap, its market price doesn't reflect its value and you get companies pretty much wasting ridiculous amounts of it, which in turn causes problems.
I once lived in a condo suite with free heat and hot water. My showers were longer than they would've been had I been paying for each drop.
But I still believe the merits of abundance outweigh the demerits.
As someone who has spent many hours hacking on open source software, I'm not sure I'd call it 'abundant' in that the production of said software is very much a costly endeavor. Once it's out there, yes, it's non-rivalrous, but that's a different thing.
Imagine the costs of getting a service oriented internet company up and running in a world where the only choice is Windows and IIS.
I wonder how much longer it would take sites like Youtube to scale to their current size.
At the moment we already have plenty of people, but most of them aren't highly educated yet, and they need to spend all their time on stupid jobs that exist mostly because people need to have jobs. So more education and basic income could go a long way towards fixing this situation.
Once we can make "replicators" like in Star Trek, food will probably become free, too, but that's probably going to take another 100 years until nanotechnology is mature and cheap enough.
One of the more interesting questions we will face is given the productivity leverage, how do we get there rather than a big apartment of rich people and a sea of slums.
Take Open Source Ecology for example. They're making the Global Village Construction set, a collection of Open Source machines that cost a fraction of what proprietary solutions do today. I think the impact of what they are enabling is hugely catalyzing towards that end (post-scarcity communism [collective ownership of capital). To the uninitiated, it it might sound like they are do-gooders just trying to make cheap machinery available for developed regions, but in reality the kind of people who will benefit immediately are other engineers. The more these engineers are liberated by the technical/economical advances of the GVCS, the more time they'll have to put back into into the project. I can already imagine the first few small semi-sustainable towns popping up, packed with engineers, ideally mushrooming into the kind of ending Manna so wonderfully illustrated.
The more collaboration we see around giving people the technologies they need to look after themselves/family/community, the less likely we'll be living in a capitalist-dystopia.
For me personally, if I was given the option between being a billionaire and being able to have everything that I want, or helping to actively build with others towards a future where we can all get what we want... I know I'd have to go with the latter.
[1] The hypothesis is that the baseline human genome encodes a master race, but has been spoiled by a handful of mutations. Fix the mutations with "simple" proofreading and out pops a race of handsome, athletic geniuses.
The idea is fascinating: although you're getting downvoted for saying "master race", the notion that the vast majority of random mutations are "bad" while the DNA we hold in common is "good" holds a lot of water. We have no idea how to edit our own DNA, however. We simply can't do it yet.
Trivial also in the sense that the general path to proofreading DNA is "obvious". Make a DNA segment that aligns upstream of the mutation. Glue a dicing enzyme to one end. This breaks the chromosome upstream of the mutation. Repeat for the downstream side, chopping out the mutation. Then incubate with the correct sequence and DNA repair enzymes. Voila, the mutation is repaired. This is nearly off the shelf. The not off the shelf part will be getting methylation and histone packing to come out right, otherwise you get subtle but appalling birth defects.
The next phase of US prosperity will be fueled by Asian immigration. They want to spend their money on college fees and houses, cars and city apartments, legal fees and taxes. They kept Australia, NZ, and Canada afloat for the last 20 yrs, but they prefer America. By 2050, half of all Americans might be ethnic Asians.
As for immigration, it is much easier to immigrate to the Commonwealth countries than to the United States. They all have point systems for skilled immigration.
It's possible to immigrate into the United States by making a $500,000 investment. But that policy really only captures the upper middle class looking for a backup plan.
Therefore, GDP growth have slowed (because most people are underperforming or doing wrong jobs as their view of the worls is lagging behind). Therefore, there is a redistribution of income to the top 1% because to all previously existing factors of success, a new a huge one added being the ability to adapt to change quickly.
Bad thing about this is that it is a permanent condition and is only likely to get worse. And, we don't want that to stop because there is little growth factors except technology left out (all free and good soil is taken 100 years ago, cheap labor is also gone, capital is abundant and cheap, too - we can't make it any better). Even change in how we grow children is unlikely and undesirable (imagine telling your child 'you don't need to be loyal or do a good job, just look where the money goes and follow'). So, this is here to stay.
I would that argue that since the 70's, technology has mostly improved the stuff at the top of Maslow's pyramid - entertainment, communication, computation - while the stuff at the bottom (housing, food, clothing, energy) has been fairly stagnant.
The good news started for most consumers in the 1980s and has continued since then. In the decade before, food prices rose at average annual clip of 8.4 percent, which was more than a full point above the overall inflation rate. But in the 1980s, the rate of inflation on food items declined to 4.6 percent annually, nearly a point below general inflation. That downward momentum continued in the 1990s, when food prices rose by a mere 2.8 percent annually, a trend that has pretty much continued in the new century until the last few months.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=301... (2008)
Okay, Lets fund science.
So where to next? IMHO what we need is less people looking backwards to theories but rather looking forward to systemic change that is more closely based on reality. A system in which tropical fruit in December is either produced locally, taxed in some way or otherwise socially frowned upon. A system in which a dildo that's imported half way around the world for a frigid, antisocial society of sterile worker-drones living in a fantasty of fear and loathing becomes unnecessary.
How do we get there? I think significant change in financial systems is the most realistic path. I think the way to achieve that is by systems that allow the exchange of new asset types that can represent social or environmental value, and also by allowing innovation in financial services (currently next to impossible), and by governments eventually wising up to grant tax or other types of incentives to parts of their community contributing to more educated, peaceful, sustainable, locally-grounded, holistic ways of life.
Put it this way: big capital which controls much of politics says no. Environment says your days are numbered. IMHO there's really no option but to engineer a more holistic/realistic modification of the existing system operating closer to reality - in which big capital can profit from environmental and social concern. Pure capitalism - selling fresh air - is not an option that will preserve biodiversity.
He has a speech here and the book is on Amazon:
You mention that the 'right' industries will shrink and the 'wrong' will expand. Let's make that leap and follow it through, ignoring the pedantry of arguing what's a 'right' and 'wrong' industry. I get the point you're trying to make with that. There are two obvious paths. First, that as it stands now, increased corporate profits has not translated to increasing wages or employment. Regardless of whether the 'right' or 'wrong' industries expand, that still translates to less money in the hands of those that have the most need to spend it. The article does a much better job communicating the consequences of that. On the second path, I'll ignore the previous and just look at the overall growth consequences. If we assume that indeed only the industries producing things consumers need expand that eliminates a ton of research, development and source of unexpected discoveries (and jobs and wages and... I digress). How many 'useless' web apps and services are out there that also contribute to open source? Did consumers really need Google? Not at all, but damn if we don't all enjoy many of the things Google has contributed to our sector.
The following isn't in reply to you, Kokey, but I want to get it out there.
Of course government spending on things that don't contribute to real growth are a terrible idea. Government spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare, however, contribute more than the sum total of their costs. Most like to use the NASA example to illustrate that point, but how about finally investing in upgrading our power grid? A nationwide upgrade would put hundreds of thousands to work including a huge number of engineers and other knowledge jobs. Not to mention, we'd also be increasing our knowledge, expertise and intellectual property as a nation in a sector vital to every country on the globe during the process. What about using the next few billion we were going to subsidize telcoms with to upgrade our internet infrastructure (I don't know anyone who has been informed of the billions given to telcoms to upgrade infrastructure that wasn't used for that at all, that wasn't furious about it)? But what about healthcare? Surely that's just a money pit, right? A healthy population is more productive. Simple as that.
I doubt anyone reading this can't see that these kinds of large government spending projects and programs pay for themselves many times over in all sorts of varying ways.
If our basic needs as a society can be met by a small fraction of the working force due to innovation then we're left trying to expand the definition of what our "needs" are to create demand for the remainder of society.
As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago. It's the relationship between innovation, needs and demand that I find most intriguing.
Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare, education and housing.
I'd happily ditch my smartphone if I could reverse the price increases on those things.
Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be least disrupted by technology.
The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.
Healthcare costs may be drastically increased in the US (although just $60/mo here in Canada) compared to what they used to be but the offering has changed completely as well.
Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry isn't. Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.
>The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.
Generic antibiotics may be a few cents a pill for a hospital but that's not what you end up paying for it as a patient in the US, and to get the prescription you have to see a doctor and the price of THAT has gone up, and the doctor will also do tons of useless tests (which increases the price still further).
Coursera is not disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. Github is disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. There are plenty of businesses today that have absolutely no concern for your education of you have alternative proof that you can put out solid, high-quality results, and it's the internet's high information density that's making that possible.
And it's only made headway in computer science jobs.
If at some point we find out that gemstone prices are rising because people are competing about who will wear the biggest gems - then gem prices aren't a problem that needs solving but just a posturing/signaling game about who can waste the most resources.
If 'educational reputation' bubble bursts, then noone loses - if we can get good mass scale education without the reputation, then we get the societal benefit of education anyway; and the brand on the sheepskin is just analogous to the posturing with huge gems, people will compete on outspending each other to get the prestigious title, but that's okay.
No, Keynesian economics is not how America recovered from the depression, nor was mobilization for wartime production (checkout the book "Keep From All Thoughtful Men" for a truly in depth analysis of the US economy during that period). No, abundance and worker productivity are not why unemployment is so high and the world economy is on shaky ground. None of these things are correct, and buying into these theories leads to erroneous decision making that will serve to exacerbate the problems rather than make them better.
Much of the problems describe are due to government action, not economic transformation. The labor laws that exist today are tightly coupled to a particular model of employment and work which is no longer dominant in the economy today, and the impedance mismatch causes a huge reduction in economic efficiency as well as misery and limitation of opportunity for many workers. Onerous regulation, as exists today in every aspect of economic activity, heavily favors the consolidation of economic activity into large corporations. And that disadvantages the individual worker in a variety of ways, as well as limiting the innovation and responsiveness of the market, down to the scale of the lone entrepreneur.
Add to that the deterioration of public education in America over the last quarter century (to such a degree where even basic literacy cannot be presumed of the holder of a high school diploma) forcing the escalation of credentialism for many entry level knowledge worker jobs toward college degrees. Meanwhile, the widespread availability of cheap, government backed student loans combined with the disruption of public funding for many public higher education institutions has led to a massive explosion in the cost of higher education. At the same time "trade school" education has become denigrated in society even though many of those jobs are high paying, well in demand, and the necessary education is often quite affordable.
Add to that the bursting of a real estate bubble of unprecedented size in the US and the follow-on worldwide financial crises. Much of it caused or exacerbated by the same reasons as above, regulation and government backing creating banking institutions that were "too big to fail", but not too big to gamble to the tune of trillions of dollars. The worldwide economy still has yet to fully recover from that disaster.
Add to that the profligate borrowing of the world's governments as if there was no tomorrow. Except tomorrow has come, and governments that have been collecting as much revenue as they possibly can and using it on social programs that everybody likes are finding that they've created a system with insufficient slack to deal with any disruption, even disruptions such as paying the debt they owe before it blows up in their faces.
It's facile to blame the economic problems of today on technology. It makes it seem as though these problems are some sort of inevitable consequence of advancement when in reality they are the product of specific choices that are now coming home to roost.
I opened up the Hacker News homepage to see if anyone was discussing the US debt crisis. (I'm not American, and I find HN a fairly good source of commentary on US events). There's a non-negligible possibility that the world is about to be plunged into another round of financial crises. I guess from one point of view the current state of the world economy is just a temporary downswing in our epic quest from the caves to the stars. But I'm becoming more inclined to believe that industrial civilisation has already passed its apex, and is now growing increasingly unstable as it attempts to continue infinite growth on a finite world.
What's the no #2 article on HN? How our biggest problems are dealing with too much abundance!
Surely deregulation will lead to more competitive free markets! Take a look at the 19th and early 20th century economy for some excellent examples of how wonderful monopolies are (railroads, oil, etc). I'll assume you're not against government regulation of utility infrastructure since I'll assume you wouldn't like hoping a company will decide your area is profitable enough to build out or having to have new wiring and piping run to your house to switch to a competitors infrastructure.
Labor laws. Pffft. Who needs those? We have unions to ensure businesses don't mistreat workers. Oh wait. Surely an employer would never take advantage of someone to pad their bottom line. Yeah.
Are there areas where the government does some ridiculous things? Sure. Does it cost money to protect and treat workers respectfully? Sure. Are we worth the ideals we stand for if we don't? NO.
Oh gee, better quit those social programs! We sure wouldn't want accidentally melt down the economy ensuring our population is healthy or providing benefits to veterans or pensions for government employees or teacher salaries or infrastructure -- I think the everyone gets the point there.
We don't have near the tax burden in the US that we did mid century so I guess we have a ways to go before our government is "collecting as much revenue as they possibly can".
No need to reply expecting a debate, I've said my piece. :)
There should be little doubt that onerous regulation not only exists but is commonplace in the US at the moment. The sheer size of the federal register is indication enough, it's simply not possible for any one person to fully understand the law that they are subject to, period.
Effective regulation is often good. For example, I don't think the western world would have so quickly improved its air quality in the mid to late 20th century without regulation, and that has improved the lives and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. But effective regulation is difficult and sometimes requires great skill to create. In contrast, the hodge podge of laws and business rules that we have today is downright kafkaesque in its maddening mixture of arbitrariness and severity.
Most importantly, even laws and rules put in place by people operating in good faith and with the best of intentions can have ill effects. The law of unintended consequences is perhaps the most important factor in creating regulation, but it is a law that is frequently ignored by policy makers.
Consider something simple, the labor laws which force a transition in employment type around the 40 hours per week boundary, such as offering benefits and so forth. This causes many employers to use a larger number of part-time workers. Is this because those employers are evil or shirking their responsibility? Well, not necessarily, it may not be feasible to have employees for a given position provided with benefits. And even if it were and the employers were merely being "greedy bastards", would it change anything? Has the law been able to compel employers to avoid hiring part-time workers? Not at all. And the unintended consequence is that if someone has a desire to work 40 hr weeks (or longer) at an entry-level position in order to have a higher income this is just not available to them (at least without working "under the table"). Instead they need to work multiple part-time jobs, but they end up spending more time traveling to/from each job and they may have difficulties with the schedule of each job meshing with the other. In the end many people end up worse off with these labor laws, because it is more difficult and more costly to be able to work enough hours to make a decent living. And these are the workers who are the poorest, working entry-level jobs, and with the greatest desire to work. Precisely the people most in need of help, and instead they are put at a disadvantage.
As to your point about the tax burden mid 20th century, it's utterly off base. The government is collecting a much higher percentage of the total GDP of the country today than it was then. Regardless of the nominal tax rates (which are rarely reflective of effective tax burdens) the actual revenue collection has gone up. Additionally, I wasn't talking about the US in that case, I was talking about countries such as Denmark, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. Each of those countries has a tax burden higher than 1/3 of the GDP, in some cases approaching half of the GDP as in Denmark and Sweden. When you consistently take so much of the GDP for government use and you use so much of it on programs that impact the daily lives and livelihoods of so many citizens there is frequently no room for paying off debt because doing so means not just reducing outlays to the level of a balanced budget but even deeper to provide a surplus.
While any "narrative" is going to be imperfect as an explanation, I thought this article was actually pretty insightful.
The vast majority of the economics profession agrees that the problem right now is a lack of demand. Consider the possibility that they are right and that it is yourself that has the misunderstanding.
Besides which, are accusing me of being fallible? That's not a difficult task, all humans are so. As to what "the vast majority of the economics profession" believes, I would point out that the track record of that profession in predicting the economic outcome of different decisions is poor at best.
But I admit my critique is a bit unfair and "ad-hominem".
I've been reading the financial press (in London, I work in the City) for the last 5 years. The austerity "caucus" - those who have advocated "austerity" policies - have simply been wrong every step of the way. They predicted hyper-inflation, high US treasury yields, and a strong recovery in Ireland (where austerity has been forced by the ECB). Instead we've had moderate to low inflation (too low at times), unprecedented low yields for sovereigns who can borrow in their own currency, and a never-ending recession/depression in Ireland.
The "Keynesians" (Paul Krugman, Martin Wolfe, Joseph Stieglitz and many others) have been right. They have a working model (IS LM) which they refined after observing Japan's lost decade. They've used it to make predications, and been proved correct.
Look at the countries that got hit hardest in Europe. Spain had a larger housing bubble than even the US. Ireland also had a housing bubble. Greece went on a massive debt-fueled spending binge.
What you're describing contributes to a vicious cycle. Lowering prices means less revenue which translates to lay-offs, scaling back and cutting corners. That means worse quality and less demand, which means lower prices again - so on and so forth. Unfortunately, a simple supply and demand curve doesn't come close to describing a functioning modern economy.
Increasing demand and thus supply, requires increasing use of energy, land, raw material, etc. Which is at some point limited by the physical realities of our world.
There is a limit to growth. Have we reached it?
Depends. Growth of what?
There are aspects of life I see as having unlimited growth. Evolution has a way of crashing through barriers and trampling anything that stands in its way. If humans somehow exhaust a resource, we'll evolve a new one, as we always have. Perhaps painfully, but it'll happen.
Send us back to ancient Greece... and startled peasants would worship at our feet.
Ancient Greece was not so much about peasants as about citizens. People with some capital and some position in their world. They aren't going to worship you, they would try to figure you out.
Vast majority of people on unemployment, barely subsisting. People who have viable businesses dig in and isolate themselves (if necessary declaring independence). Ever-growing consolidation of power and every institution falling to the influence of ever fewer power centers.
Fortunately, a mere 10 years of steady state economy won't get us to that point. Today we're already at the point that something like 60-70% of the world's population is useless (if you killed all of them tonight, tomorrow there would be no visible difference at all). That number is increasing fast.
The cure ? Remove the scarcity of electricity might do it. Find something to do (the way some medieval economies solved it was to employ 70% or so of the population for building cathedrals - manually. Every last thing manually cut from stone. That could work). War is another option, used in the middle east did (well, one particular group, really). As long as they keep winning, their borders expand, their economy grows, and it can last quite a while in that state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...
The sectors of wealthy economies which are still breeding fast are generally the poor (scarcity again) or people from social groups that were used to breeding lots, who are slowly getting the memo.
The optimistic scenario is that 'soon' (a) 10-20% population working at 20hours per week can produce enough "stuff" to sustain everyone; and (b) there is enough population who would actually do that even if they don't have to - because the work gives them fun, meaning and motivation.
If right today everybody was given really good basic income, most would take a long vacation from their jobs - but quite a few would go back to productive work afterwards; not at 80 hour weeks but at a reasonable amount, and it might just be productive enough to sustain the world.
And if everybody was given a 'sustenance' basic income, then almost everyone would still be motivated to work for a slightly better lifestyle and luxuries. Again, it wouldn't motivate people to juggle two jobs with raising kids; but we don't actually need anyone to do that, we have more workers than we need anyway.
Less snarkily, evolution always selects for the maximum number of descendants. If education prevents population growth, then evolution will breed a race of uneducatable people. (The high fertility rates of people with ADHD or low IQs are an object lesson.)
The only possible outcomes are:
1. Extinction.
2. Population growth up to the carrying capacity.
3. Artificial selection.
No difference visible to you, perhaps. I'm thinking it might be visible to their friends and families. It would certainly be visible to them, were it not for the accident that you're contemplating killing them rather than, say, just permanently disabling them.
If you view people solely as units in the economy -- devices for providing goods and services that other people will pay money for -- then it may be true that 70% of the world's population is "useless". But if you take a look you may notice that most people do other things besides providing goods and services for money. No one is paying me when I read my daughter a bedtime story, listen to a friend who's having relationship difficulties, or bake chocolate chip cookies to take to a party. Those activities may (or may not) be less valuable per hour than my highly paid day job, but if you think they are useless then I think you are looking at the world through a filter that blocks out some important things.
The original comment is valid, many people are not relevant to the economy and indeed there are lots of articles on how we are all just wasting our time in meaningless jobs. Some studies have even found that certain jobs (like investment banking) have a net negative creation value.
Isn't the kind of activity like reading your child a story, working for free in a social group and the entire maker movement targeted at the kinds of goods that are both great and beautiful and desirable but also non-essential? Exactly the kinds of goods that people will stop paying for when they have less money to spend.
So maybe we just need to find a way to distribute the essentials and some money differently so that we can all work on beautiful but useless things instead of trying to get us all the kind of job that everybody will immediately admit they don't even want.
Just some random thoughts. ;)
I hate to say it but unless I got entirely the wrong impression, you're wrong. For most of these unemployed their friends and families would take weeks or months to notice. Hell, the staff at the local supermarket will probably notice before friends will.
You see the same in the paper. They're isolated, unemployed, and there's large numbers of them. So it happens quite regularly that one of them dies - and if it's for a dumb or catchy reason, the papers go after it. Carbon monoxide poisoning is always reported. Someone who was ill - and this is a country with nearly-free healthcare before you say money - and didn't go to the hospital at all, then died, or someone who was seriously ill, but with little symptoms at first, got sent home, then died in their sleep. There's usually at least some mention of how they arrived at this conclusion and it tends to include how they were found. Depressingly often it's the smell or a loan collector, or- less often, thankfully - panicked kids who found this happened to their sole parent, then did something like running screaming outside, attack a police officer (not seriously, but enough to get them to "tell their mam"). Even if they have friends and family, that someone disappears from these neighborhoods without telling anyone is not exactly a rare event, usually related to crime they committed, so it does not raise any alarms.
So no, in most cases I don't think it would be visible at all. Some areas in large cities that nobody really goes voluntarily to would go quiet. And yes, the supermarket would notice.
There are a lot of reasons why a London home that was 300,00k in the 1970s is now worth three times that. More people are living in London now than then, and due to London's "green belt" policies and height and zoning restrictions, there just hasn't been a great supply of new houses.
Tom doesn't even mention things like the oil shock, the impact of technology and automation, or demographics. It's kind of hard to get a reasonable picture of the economy without considering these things!
I agree with the basic point that we should have more Keynesian spending, but the history felt like a distraction. Calling the 70s a "golden age" is just... what is this, I don't even. Yeah, with the Vietnam war, OPEC, Silent Spring, and the threat of nuclear war, it was a real picnic...
You seem to think that one must incur debt when deficit spending. Patently ridiculous. ;)
Houses on my block in the United Kingdom that cost £3000
in 1970 are now going for over £1.5 million.