12-30-2016, 07:01 PM
Quote:Absolutely, all this is true. Automation will make all sorts of things possible. But are the worthwhile? How does universal recycling gain the consumer who pays for it a benefit to compensate for the increase cost? And if there is not increased cost, then it CANNOT grow the economy. Same thing is true for distributed power. I already HAVE power. What benefit will distributed power grant me that will compensate me for the greater costs/hassle. And recall if costs are down then it doesn't grow the economy.
Is it "worthwhile"? The answer to that question is are people willing to pay for it? People's tastes and preferences change. Regulatory shifts make externalizing environmental costs less feasible, and this may increase in the future (probably not during the Trump administration). Resources may (will) become more scarce, and recycling technology cheaper, changing the incentive structure further. People may be willing to pay a premium for "green" stuff (see organic foods). And this is just an example of something
And I think your economics is a little off. People aren't going to pay more for the same thing. It needs to be cheaper, or it needs to be "better". Better of course is in the eye of the beholder, and can include intangible, top of the Maslow-hierarchy-of-needs type stuff. Cheaper is easier to quantify, and frees up money to spend on other things and/or spurs increased usage of the resource/good/service in question by decreasing the marginal cost of its use (see Jevon's Paradox for an explanation of how this works.)
Quote:Most people do not understand how the economy grows. Economic growth over the long term comes from the creation of new categories of demand. The classic example is personal transportation. In 1895 very few households budgets had a personal transportation entry. Personal transportation was free, provided by your own two legs. Sixty years later, most households had such an entry consisting of car payments and insurance, gas, oil and repair expenditures. And then their were the secondary effects, new spending catalyzed by personal transportation. Having the ability to commute from farther away meant longer commutes were possible allowing people more room to live allowed for bigger houses. As George Carlin noted, a house is a place to store your stuff, and so that meant more stuff and a bigger budget item for furniture, appliance, household goods and other stuff. All these are the creation of new kinds of demand for things.
Yes, but demand is not sufficient in itself. Effective demand requires production, too. The things that made effective demand in previous k-waves (don't think I didn't recognize the Thompson & Modelski stuff
) were new technologies, organizations, or territories that made provisioning those desires feasible. Quote:In my own life I say how the information economy created the need for a IT assets and services in consumer households. In 1980 my dad and I looked as PCs and couldn't find anything with remotely the capability of the dial-up time sharing system we were using then. In Jan 1983 my dad bought a Commodore 64. At home one weekend I implemented a stochastic model for the level distribution of retired NPCs in my D&D world I was running then. It worked an I thought I need a PC. So I got one and have had one ever since although I haven't written a program in more than 25 years. I strictly use software now and know zero about computers today. By the early 1990's there was a compelling reason to have computing power at your disposal. GAMES. There was nothing like it. These games had long existed in standalone devices but now even non-gamer PC owners could get incredible games. And the MUDs and their descendents, all of which have huge potential for addiction. All of this is creation of new demand, leading sectors I call them and also of an unsually old fashioned type. Just like the tobacco, rum, tea and coffee leading sectors of centuries ago (all of which are recreational drugs and so addictive) the new video game products were too. And these were new, they did not take away from some former business that did the same thing, so they were like persona; transportation. But as the IT economy unfolded, too much of it was offered for free, to be supported by advertising and so IT ceased to function as a growth sector. And this is more or less where we are today.
My problem with this argument is that it ignores that all of those gizmos, server farms, fiber optic lines, and the like had to be built, installed, and maintained. And paid for upfront.