Neo-classical-neo-liberalism (UK edition)

[Impenitent]

...I dunno. I used to be a teacher, and when you asked the little bastards what they want to do with the rest of their lives, none of them have a list.

oh sure, but what about the kids whose parents were married?

-Imp

[FlashDangerpants]

I dunno. I used to be a teacher, and when you asked the little bastards what they want to do with the rest of their lives, none of them have a list.

Except the ones that want to be hair dressers, that must be just about the safest career you could pick.

Well, the curriculum is predicated on service industries. So the goal is to turn out annoying little twerps who ring you up to ask whether you have any credible PPI claims, and then to change careers and become annoying twerps who ring up and ask whether you have been in an accident that wasn't your fault.

I believe it was in the 1860s that the services sector first started to grow faster than manufacturing in Britain. Since then there may have been a year or two here and there where this was reversed, but there hasn't been a decade of such reversal, even the decades that included total wars. This same effect becomes true for every economy as it matures.

So it is entirely appropriate that children should, in so far as school prepares them for work at all (really it doesn't very much, it mostly keeps them busy until they are old enough to work), that should be for the sectors that provide almost all the employment. Especially so now that engineering degrees are required for the decent manufacturing jobs.

[uwot]

I believe it was in the 1860s that the services sector first started to grow faster than manufacturing in Britain. Since then there may have been a year or two here and there where this was reversed, but there hasn't been a decade of such reversal, even the decades that included total wars. This same effect becomes true for every economy as it matures.

Well yeah. Once a great deal of wealth has been manufactured, I guess the market for managing it is bound to grow.

So it is entirely appropriate that children should, in so far as school prepares them for work at all (really it doesn't very much, it mostly keeps them busy until they are old enough to work), that should be for the sectors that provide almost all the employment. Especially so now that engineering degrees are required for the decent manufacturing jobs.

So when all markets are mature, who will actually make stuff?

[FlashDangerpants]

I believe it was in the 1860s that the services sector first started to grow faster than manufacturing in Britain. Since then there may have been a year or two here and there where this was reversed, but there hasn't been a decade of such reversal, even the decades that included total wars. This same effect becomes true for every economy as it matures.

Well yeah. Once a great deal of wealth has been manufactured, I guess the market for managing it is bound to grow.

So it is entirely appropriate that children should, in so far as school prepares them for work at all (really it doesn't very much, it mostly keeps them busy until they are old enough to work), that should be for the sectors that provide almost all the employment. Especially so now that engineering degrees are required for the decent manufacturing jobs.

So when all markets are mature, who will actually make stuff?

We do still make stuff, we just don't make cheap bulky goods for export any more, we don't have comparative advantage in that sort of thing. In truth we never really did in this country. If you look at what Britain actually exported outside its empire during those imaginary "workshop of the world" days, it was mostly either coal or part manufactured goods. Stuff such as cotton thread rolled off a mill, but then to be woven and dyed in Prussia where labour was cheap at the time.

Later on we mostly exported a mix of capital and know how. So we would pack up a couple of steam locomotives and ship them to Argentina, along with a huge loan. At the other end, they pulled one of the engines apart to work out how it was made, and used the other to train up drivers for the new railway funded by British banks and to be repaid with handsome interest.

For it to be possible for all markets to mature to the extent that nobody has comparative advantage in shitty jobs plugging things together for distant foreigners to enjoy instead of themselves (a very desirable outcome)... there would have to be no need for such jobs to exist any more. So presumably most of that would be done either by robots or 3d printers, which would be mostly local to the demand thus saving on transport costs without creating huge labour costs.

[uwot]

some interesting stuff.

Really must bone up on my economic history. I was thinking of doing a paper on the history of money; from Mesopotamian clay tokens to the fact that plutocrats and oligarchs effectively own several generations of our descendants. Kinda humbling to realise I know fuck all about it.

For it to be possible for all markets to mature to the extent that nobody has comparative advantage in shitty jobs plugging things together for distant foreigners to enjoy instead of themselves (a very desirable outcome)... there would have to be no need for such jobs to exist any more. So presumably most of that would be done either by robots or 3d printers, which would be mostly local to the demand thus saving on transport costs without creating huge labour costs.

Sounds doable. What about the capitalist pigs?

[FlashDangerpants]

For it to be possible for all markets to mature to the extent that nobody has comparative advantage in shitty jobs plugging things together for distant foreigners to enjoy instead of themselves (a very desirable outcome)... there would have to be no need for such jobs to exist any more. So presumably most of that would be done either by robots or 3d printers, which would be mostly local to the demand thus saving on transport costs without creating huge labour costs.

Sounds doable. What about the capitalist pigs?

What about them? Will they even exist, and if so will their existence be any sort of problem?

The reason we use machine labour instead of human labour, where we can, is to produce stuff more cheaply so that we can make a turn profit while selling it more cheaply. If we ever get to the point where none of the physical stuff we buy is made by hand, and none of it has travelled great distances, it will have extremely low unit costs, which means it will be sold very cheaply. The rich are people who can afford more scarce stuff than the rest of us such as gold and diamonds and very old paintings. As we commoditize and reduce the costs of ever more stuff, that gets ever less meaningful.

So consider food. Once upon a time (300 years ago), only the very wealthy could eat meat every day of the week. Every household spent at least 50% of its income on food. 90% of the human workforce was employed in food production at the dirty end of the system where the ploughs and the poop are. Today, most of the work on our farms is done by a machine. Almost all of the workforce has left the fields. Statistically, if you work in the food sector today you are probably a waiter or a cook. The upshot of that is that where once only a king could have the option of eating Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken every day, nowadays pretty much everybody can afford as much of that as they could possibly want.

Meanwhile the foods that are scarce and luxurious, the ones that belong olny in the mouths and bellies of the rich, aren't qualitatively all that special. There was a huge difference between the food Henry IIX's plate and that of the average working joe in his day. The worker dude mostly ate either a mashed turnip porridge, or plain bread for half of his meals, the king always had variety, plenty, and mutton and stuff.

Today though, what is the food you can't afford, and how much do you care about it? Personally I would feel weird if somebody tried to make me eat a steak with gold leaf on it, in fact fuck it, I just don't want to eat gold at all because it's metal. There's really no super rare, super expensive foods that seem to be importantly better than the stuff we can afford. Whatever difference there is, it can't be considered comparable to the gulf between the farm labourer's dinner and the king's.

So if we can get the same cost and availability effect for all the other goods that we have already with food, then there must come a point in time at which most of us simply can't be bothered envying the rich and their luxury, it will all just be ordinary stuff but with gold leaf on it.

[FlashDangerpants]

As your resident Neoliberal, I would like to point out that during all the Coronavirus stuff, neither I nor any other neolib type, has gone anywhere near these conversations about choosing who should die for the sake of the economy.