To admit to the outcome you suggest would mean that politicians will have to face up to what a steady state economy might look like. A corollary would be the need to address income distribution. If the carrot of continued growth is removed from those who want more in the way of income, then income distribution policy will have to be addressed. Few politicians want to admit to this or deal with this.
arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 4:30 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Reculer pour mieux sauter The personal computer has already had its day. It has never been an iconic consumer product in the same way as family photographs, bicycles, radios, phones, fridges, washing machines, televisions or cars were. That is, they were all extremely expensive to start with and took weeks, months or years of hard saving to buy as they gradually filtered downwards from the very rich to the ordinarily poor. These are the sorts of things that have powered the industrial-consumer revolution for the last 200 or 300 years. These iconic products have stayed with us, too, largely unchanged. They are permanent features of our typical way of life. The personal computer has never been one of those. Within a lifetime, it has proceeded from being a toy for boys, to being a status symbol for the educated elite, to being a revolutionary catalyst in industrial and commercial organization and a sub-assembly in many products. It will soon be as small as, as cheap as, and as easy-to-use as a mobile phone. The personal computer has never been unique in the same way as all the other iconic products were. It was always an amalgam -- albeit a very brilliant one -- of the library, or the personal letter, of board games, or pornography, of journals and newspapers, or schools and universities, of the concert hall and cinema, and many other things besides. Versatile though it has always been, it will soon disappear, particularly when very powerful and very advanced voice recognition software is available from a cloud on the Internet. But where are the new, unique, iconic consumer products? Where are the things to power economic growth in the coming years? They don't exist. They petered out, roughly with television and cars, at around the 1980s. Unconsciously, manufacturers and retailers realized that they had no more consumer products for which people would save hard. This is why, since then, there has had to be a string of financial innovations in the credit industry from hire-purchase through to credit cards through to the most fanciful derivatives used by the banks. It is this, at bottom, which may well be the reason why Western Europe, Japan and America are now poised, dithering, on the edge of what will prove to be a long-term economic recession (in the terms that economists presently use). Consumers, investors, manufacturers and retailers are all losing confidence in the future, according to all the polls. Maybe there's still hope for the emergent countries such as China, India, Brazil and several more. Together, their consumer market, as yet unfulfilled, is already almost as large as the consumer market of the West. If they get their act together with a stable common trading currency then they could survive and catch us up. In the West, this is a classic Emperor's New Clothes dilemma. Very few economists, and almost no politicians dare whisper the possibility that we might now have reached a sort of 'locked-in' way of life. In truth, a steady-state economy might have already arrived. If economists and politicians were imaginative enough to admit this possibility then they could perhaps begin to see that this needn't be the end of the world. We're still innovative. We can still become more efficient. We can still increase the satisfactions of daily life and vastly increase our educational methods and health care. In material goods for everyday life we have simply reached a pause point. It may be a case of reculer pour meiux sauter, as the French say. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/
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