Global Trajectories

[Professor]

[Spider]

We have an ideal standard of living now as a result of the cheap labor of hordes of poor people. Otherwise things like palm oil, coffee, and kitchen appliances would be far, far, more expensive. Our enviable position on the supply chain can only be balanced by ten times more people on the other side of it.

With a small population that enjoys higher wages, the costs of everything goes up, and the resulting standard of living gets diminished.

This is not to say we couldn't still be healthy and happy, but consumerism would have to end. No more smartphones and mango salsa and cheap shoes for the masses.

Which really wouldn't be a bad thing, in the final analysis. I just wonder about what effect diminishing returns would have on the development of truly useful technologies.

[exploited]

I'm not an economist, so bare with me here. This is just kind of a musing, not a serious policy paper.

The problem, as I see it, is that the market system we've setup punishes people by perception. If Canada's GDP doesn't grow this year, it will be called a recession, and people will stop investing in Canada. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess the way to change that would be to convince people that less is more. That we can have a high standard of living without knocking up so many houses or generating so much economic activity per year.

I mean, I guess I don't understand why growth is the determinant of a good economy. If people can buy food and have a place to live and afford a decent amount of luxury goods, that is a successful economy, in my admittedly economically uninformed mind. If things don't get better, why do we make them worse? When is having enough good enough?

I just don't understand it. It all revolves around perception, and that perception of rampant consumerism and perpetual growth is destroying us.

[Professor]

[Darkhorse]

Our high standard of living has distorted our understanding of what is really normal. Picking through garbage sounds like a terrible existence, but is it any worse than things used to be for these people? When old Chinese subsistence farmers consider awful factory jobs an opportunity for their children, you have to think about how terrible things used to be. Would the Maldives really be better off without tourism? I don't see how.

[eynon81]

[Dylan]

[eynon81]

[eynon81]

[Professor]