My blog. Obviously. If you're reading it, you probably already know me one way or the other and so it's clearly a subset of my thoughts and experiences. If you somehow stumbled on this blog without knowing me, that's cool too, but, well, there's not much more of a description.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Macro Economics 101
As I mentioned in my last post, sometimes I contemplate the economic future my values would tend to create in America. I'm not a master economist - or even a minor one, but let me start with one observation: Fundamentally, we pay money for one of two 'goods':
Labor: We pay for someone else's time, expertise, and energy.
Resource: We pay for 'ownership' of non-manufactured resources (land, gold, sand, oil, water, etc.).
So how do I think industries would fair? Here's a few thoughts...
Clothing: Very badly. The whole designer name brand bit would do very badly. I'm a big fan of inexpensive quality clothing. Something like
4 comments:
Anonymous
said...
This is a cool exercise. (It's also amusing, as I think both of our jobs would disappear in an America with these values. ;)
You forgot the game industry, though. Something tells me they'd make a modest living. :)
While it looks like a great way to save money and get the most bang for your buck, it seems like less of everything is all we would get out your plan. Less money because of our now obsolete jobs, less choices because of the businesses that shut down.
One of the reasons we have "designer clothing", expensive automobiles, fancy restaurants, and so forth is to help redistribute the wealth. If we didn't have luxury, the rich would get even richer, and the poor would have less jobs. Unless everyone made about the same wages, I don't think that plan would work.
We would all be working very low paying jobs making your "inexpensive clothing" instead of high paying engineering jobs designing expensive automobiles.
Meanwhile, the owners and executives of the remaining industries will have money they can't spend wastefully... so instead they just use it to buy out all the other businesses in the world. We will all live under their repressive, tyrannical rule.
Extra money you earn, if you have any extra given your downsized job, will have to go to the church as charity cash to support all of us newly poor people.
Currently there isn't a problem producing sufficient clothing for Americans. With a bit of technology, we could free up more people from making clothing.
Remember my initial comment - we pay for resources and labor? Basically, under my system, we shift the labor pool from it's current activities to a different set. It's not that we would all go get low-paying jobs; it's that the production level of our economy can afford to pay numerous people to pursue other careers without significantly reducing our production rates.
I hope that you support one of the coolest industries out there -- the chocolate industry. ;)
Another interesting exercise is to try to list the industries/charities/groups/organizations you do support, and decide if by doing so you are actually supporting everything that you'd like to support.
About me? In a few sentences? That's tough. It's probably why I never liked college essays either. Like most people, a few sentences can't really describe me. At least, I hope I'm not that simple. One can hopefully get a sense for part of me from the blog. And feel free to leave a comment with questions.
4 comments:
This is a cool exercise. (It's also amusing, as I think both of our jobs would disappear in an America with these values. ;)
You forgot the game industry, though. Something tells me they'd make a modest living. :)
I think my job would go bye-bye too.
While it looks like a great way to save money and get the most bang for your buck, it seems like less of everything is all we would get out your plan. Less money because of our now obsolete jobs, less choices because of the businesses that shut down.
One of the reasons we have "designer clothing", expensive automobiles, fancy restaurants, and so forth is to help redistribute the wealth. If we didn't have luxury, the rich would get even richer, and the poor would have less jobs. Unless everyone made about the same wages, I don't think that plan would work.
We would all be working very low paying jobs making your "inexpensive clothing" instead of high paying engineering jobs designing expensive automobiles.
Meanwhile, the owners and executives of the remaining industries will have money they can't spend wastefully... so instead they just use it to buy out all the other businesses in the world. We will all live under their repressive, tyrannical rule.
Extra money you earn, if you have any extra given your downsized job, will have to go to the church as charity cash to support all of us newly poor people.
Currently there isn't a problem producing sufficient clothing for Americans. With a bit of technology, we could free up more people from making clothing.
Remember my initial comment - we pay for resources and labor? Basically, under my system, we shift the labor pool from it's current activities to a different set. It's not that we would all go get low-paying jobs; it's that the production level of our economy can afford to pay numerous people to pursue other careers without significantly reducing our production rates.
I hope that you support one of the coolest industries out there -- the chocolate industry. ;)
Another interesting exercise is to try to list the industries/charities/groups/organizations you do support, and decide if by doing so you are actually supporting everything that you'd like to support.
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