Let's all buy an airplane? Most of us would like
to fly, wouldn't we? After all, a good engineer,
such as our own brilliant James Dyson, could soon
start turning out first-class, reliable,
beautiful machines for, say £75,000 or $100,000.
In real money terms this is no more than the very
first family photographic albums, or bicycles, or
radios, or televisions, or cars cost when they
first started to change from being hand-made
items to the very earliest stages of mass
production. In due course, with full-scale mass
production, an airplane need cost little more
than a mid-range car. The family airplane is just
about the car's most natural and obvious successor.
And, just as all the former consumer products
did, family airplanes would create such a steady
momentum of demand all the way down the social
strata (for consecutive status reasons) that it
would stimulate saving, investment and thus
economic growth. Western Europe, America and
Japan would be back on track again. While China
was still catching up with mass car ownership in
the next 30 years or so, we in the West would be
able to forge ahead and export airplanes to their
richest people in order to balance up our
increasingly deficient balances of trade.
Why not?
Because we're already locked into a densely
populated urban way of life. There'd be
insufficient air space for mass commuting. And
this would apply even if, instead of airplanes,
we were to have individual rocket packs or
suchlike (which even the richest in the world are
not yet commissioning nor, probably, ever will
do). In short, we have arrived at a
characteristic way of life which is as unique and
as permanent as was the countryside-estate
aristocrat-peasant way of life that held sway in
all the agriculturally-advanced cultures of
Europe and Asia (however different they were in
cosmetic ways) before the industrial revolution.
We cannot possibly change our present locked-in
way of life until populations of advanced
countries are reduced to a fraction of the size
they are now. The environmental constraints (in
the spatial sense) are too great. Only the very
richest among us will be able to possess
beautiful homes in beautiful settings.
Proportionately, there are too few of these
desirable products. Prof Fred Hirsch, the
brilliant economist of Warwick University, who
tragically died in his 30s some 30 years ago, was
the first (as far as I'm aware) to point this out
in his seminal work, Social Limits to Growth (1976).
Like it or not, whether the Great Recession --
the double dip -- occurs imminently or not, the
advanced world is already entering a steady-state
economy. Whether the rest of the world manage to
industrialize to the same extent as we have done
is doubtful for all sorts of other reasons. But
this is relatively unimportant. They, like us,
are also becoming locked-into dense urban
conglomerations. The countryside needs to be
vacated for modern agricultural methods.
It is the non-arrival of the family airplane (or
some equally magnificent consumer item) which is
the real reason why, since about the 1980s, the
normal currency inflation of previous years
turned into a gallop with a huge rise of
credit-making innovations from the mass personal
credit card and so on. Western governments and
their close buddies in the financial sector were
so desperate to keep economic growth going by one
means or another that they broke all the normal
sensible rules about money. It is the
artificiality of this credit expansion which
caused the crunch of 2008/9. This is far from
being fully played out yet. A great many home
foreclosures, business bankruptcies,
cancellations of property development and
government defaults have yet to occur before the
main body politic and economic will finally start
to realize that the most insightful economist of
the last century had better be paid attention to.
I described Fred Hirsch's book as "seminal".
Unfortunately, it's only considered so by a very
small number of economists at the present time.
Social Limits to Growth won't really become
seminal until Hirsch's ideas become lodged in
minds as open, fresh and young as his own was. So
we'll probably have a generation of distress and
social mayhem until some constructive ideas of
progress can take root in this or that city, region or country.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/
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