To discuss another of Pete Vincent's replies, I've started another thread.
> What consumer products, presently enjoyed by the rich, await mass production? Well watered, warm sunlit land. We'll be waiting a while.
Yes, this is about the only high status good left. And this, of course, is not mass-producible. (Even Picasso paintings and perfect diamonds could be mass produced if legally allowed to be.) It is this sort of limitation that the economist, Fred Hirsch, pointed out 40 years ago. A fully-functional, fully-democratic consumerist society implies a much reduced population. Five per cent of what it is now perhaps? (As far as England is concerned, a population about the size of that in Roman or Saxon times would do very nicely -- so long as you could share the land equally.)
But today, with no uniquely-new potentially mass-producible high status consumer goods on the horizon -- as occurred all through the industrial revolution until about 1980/90 -- the natives are restless, though they are not precisely sure why in most cases. But whatever their problems or shortages, they now expect the government to solve them. That's what governments are for, aren't they?
Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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