Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | Inflation is "too much money chasing too few goods". When student loan debt is a trillion dollars, when medical costs are 16% of the economy, when real wages have actually declined over the past 50 years, etc, etc.: the people who might be inclined to spend just don't have any money. If governments have made a mistake, it's to try and keep this thing going against the headwind of steadily increasing income inequality.
Ask yourself, what do poor people do with their money, they spend it, what do rich people do with their money, they invest it. When poor people don't have any money to spend the rich people don't have any place to invest it. Even if you buy robots to make widgets, you still need to sell the widgets to somebody.
But even beyond that, our society and economy is undergoing a radical transformation from one where human labor had value to one where everything will be done by machines. The consequence is that we have a massive surplus of human labor that the economy just doesn't need. Unfortunately, when you don't need a machine, you can park it or scrap it, humans on the other hand still need to be fed, housed, cared for, etc. What's worse, humans, some anyways, actually have political & military power and are disinclined to be left to starve. Trump didn't promise coal mining jobs to the mine owners, he promised coal mining jobs to coal miners, even though it's clear that coal is more expensive than natural gas as fuel.
Traditionally, when you had a surplus population, you raised an army, invaded you neighbor and the ensuing death and destruction brought the population back into balance. Today, if you try that, both you & your neighbor bomb each other into nuclear oblivion so it's no longer an option.
Maybe, just maybe the smart thing to do is to take steps to dramatically limit population (with birth control) , absorb the sunk costs of the surplus population until it dies off of it's own accord and get the system, including the economy back into some kind of balance between people and machines, before the machines decide to do it for you. |
economics and markets
