While you are all busy perfecting your non-stick surfaces I’m going to disrupt the market with perma-stick surfaces. Who wants a shiny, clean guillotine when you can have one spattered with the blood of every person it has ever killed. Sure, eventually it stops working but then it’s time to put it in the museum and buy a new one.
You beat me to this one. If we are going this way they’d better get working on the Soma.
Well yes, but that won’t last forever. When the haves have too much and the have-nots have too little the killing starts eventually (the killing the the haves, I mean - the have-nots killing each other happens immediately and frequently).
Didn’t this have to happen eventually anyway? Looking at the world it seems like an awful lot of “growth” is based on using up natural resources and fencing off land; think of how much “growth” we could inject into the markets with the selling off of national and state parks. How much time would that buy us before we were back to where we are now?
If they are pushing policies that make life miserable for the vast majority of humanity simply to help further economic growth, shouldn’t we ask whether the world economy exists for us, or if we exist for the sake of the world economy?
And then if the logic is that furthering economic growth helps raise the standard of living, then austerity and cutting wages is one step forward and two steps back. It sure seems like we can’t rely on “growth” anymore to make our lives better. Even the rich aren’t actually improving their own lives by getting another billion to stash away-- it’s not like they are going to buy even fancier caviar or sports cars or yachts, or that those things would really make their lives measurably better. Clearly having another billion is more about power and ego, and if that’s what you need to be happy then you’ve got really serious psychological issues.
Honestly, though, the more rich people that leave your country the better. Chase them all out with a stick if necessary (that stick being a kind of exponential taxation system that makes it so a ten-fold increase in pay only results in a two-fold increase income).
This is just cynical pandering. Their reasoning flies in the face of reality. The periods of highest growth were the periods of lower inequality. They seem to be assuming a major reversal of well demonstrated economic facts without presenting any evidence.
I thought that these OECD guys were supposed to be bright?
They have overlooked the obvious, and the only one that will work, solution. Make said intangible assets, tangible. And then return to the tax rates that created the middle class and shared prosperity.
I agree, however I think that one of the problems of the slow-growth we are having has to do with high energy prices. I’d suggest reading The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin (oil analyst and former CIBC economist), he argues convincingly that all the recessions in the last 30 years were always lock-step with high oil prices, and conversely times of growth coincided with low oil prices.
As former CIBC economist and oil industry analyst Jeff Rubin argues, (and I think convincingly) in THE END OF GROWTH, that we are seeing low growth because of high peak oil prices (they are at least 4-5x what they were a decade ago). He also points out it is not necessarily a bad thing - in that it tends to make people focus on local economies, and while I think that so much of growth of the past 200 years has been about making stuff for other people to buy - and it has raised our living standards, we are seeing movement away from throw-away over-consumption, characterized by the rise of the slow-food and maker & crafts movements. Getting a car has been a right of passage for young people for decades but since 2007 when US auto sales peaked at 17 million and have since declined to (about 12million) at the same time we are seeing huge growth in club cars etc. I think things are slowly changing.
As costs of production fall across numerous industries, consumer price inflation is fragmenting across the end product ranges that we buy.
It’s something that foxes economists, pundits and bankers. Precisely because it’s the very, very last thing they want to happen.
The concept of GDP and the associated indices and metrics were very prevalent in the wake of Adam Smith; yet they’re only suited to industrialised economies, and can only use money as a proxy for measuring what’s truly happening - the transfer of goods and services around the economy.
There is no realistic way to put a common denominator value on everything, so essentially, the whole thing’s an illusion - but an illusion that causes people to lose their houses and so on.
I’m confused. The article you linked to is about an OECD proposal to form a worldwide agreement between governments to favor particular corporations. In what way is that “pro-market”? A pro-market stance would argue for removing the existing trade restrictions - nothing more. You seem to be confusing crony capitalism with the market.
Like some folks confuse socialism with totalitarianism?
‘Pro-market’ is a term overwhelmingly used in the euphemistic sense I assumed you employed; for all the world it looked as if you were claiming the OECD aren’t a pack of neo-liberal scumbags.
I think it’s safe to consign ‘pro-market’ to the dirty words list.
Besides, at the end of the day there isn’t a lot of daylight between the two concepts; after all, r>g.
Of course, because so much of how the modern world runs is based on petroleum-- every product brought to market needs fuel to get there, and the fuel of choice is in limited supply (and will run out someday)-- this should be the big selling point for renewable energy.
I would like to think that one could sell renewable energy to conservatives on this idea of “it helps the economy” (clearly global warming, pollution and national security aren’t good enough reasons to ditch fossil fuels as far as they are concerned), but then I think they need to economy to be bad so they can pitch austerity and tax cuts as the only cure.
I haven’t read The End of Growth, but if I get a chance I’ll take a look. There’s always the question of which end is pushing the string and which is pulling, i.e., major price shocks of any kind will test whether an economy is ready for a correction.
Either way, it gives even more reasons to move away from oil .
In thirty years as James Burke predicts - we might have a solution that will turn worlds economy upside down. We will all have personal nano-factories which (as Richard Feynman postulated in ‘plenty of room at the bottom’) will be able to manufacture anything you want - gold, the Mona Lisa, a bottle of chardonnay etc. if it is made up of molecules (and what isnt?) it can be manufactured.
ANd Nano-technology is proceeding at a rapid scale.
(Just out of curiousity you can read papers (by serious scientists) right now that discuss the effect of personal nanofactories on the economy - what will it mean when you can manufacture your own food?
What effect will this have on the concept of work? We are so used to economies of scarcity rather than abundance.
