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I'm not a fan of "diagrams" in economics, but sometimes... This is a screen capture of slide 36 from a SlideShare presentatio... -
JW Mason : "... in retrospect it is clear that we should have been talking about big new public spending programs to boost demand.&quo... -
Bosch season five air date: 18 April. Ten episodes. Four days later, six of the transcripts were already available. A few days later, the ... -
First, this summary of an observation made in 1850, from the Liberty Fund : Frédéric Bastiat, while pondering the nature of war, concluded ... -
In the Google News this morning, "The Fed may have saved the economy by hiking rates for 18 months—and may have guaranteed crisis for...
2 comments:
The third of those Toynbee quotes, and in particular this...
"The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten"
... came to mind when I read this JS Mill quote from 1848:
"Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot…"
Mill imposes a condition on it -- population control -- but sees the same "futurity" that Toynbee sees.
1. I took the Mill quote from Brad DeLong.
2. I don't know if Mill was right about the need for population control as a stepping-stone to the future he and Toynbee envision. But it seems he might be right. For otherwise, sharing the wealth will eventually bring everyone, including the producers of the fruits of technology, down to the Malthusian poverty level.
Come to think of it, Keynes also saw population control as part of the solution.
We Americans -- though I don't know who decided this for us -- don't much like the idea of population control. Amazon Prime Video, for example, offers the "One Child Nation" movie (which, before I could even find out what it was about, seemed to be trying to convince me that population control is bad bad bad. I don't like to have television create my opinions for me, so I didn't watch it).
Apart from that, in the USA we already have slower and slowing population growth. Myself, I think this is a result of the decline in living standards: We can't afford to have so many children, so we don't. It's almost Malthusian, but maybe in reverse: We're trying to preserve our standard of living by reducing our costs by reducing the number of children we have. Trouble is, this solution doesn't get us back to a rising standard of living.
We reel in horror at the thought of a government that would impose population controls. But we can go for decades in a declining economy, limiting our own population by our own free will. People are weird.
And immigration: Since productivity has been low, and we can't increase output-per-worker, I've seen people make the argument that we should encourage immigration (and thus the number of workers) in order to increase our GDP. That one's just stupid: It still doesn't increase output-per-worker. It doesn't make us any better off.
I'm all talked out now.
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