Austerity measures have they ever saved an economy?

Sounds exactly like lazing about to me. Lazing doesn't have to mean sitting on the couch or avoiding the expenditure of energy. First of all, life will never be that easy. Secondly, a society in which only button pushing is required will be technologically stagnant. Thirdly, someone must tend the machines. Finally, stop watching the Jetsons.

I think you are defining service jobs quite narrowly. No, you cannot get your hamburger cooked abroad, but legal services, programming, product support, sales, advertising, etc. can all be performed off shore. Yes, you can outsource teaching Yoga to China.

I'm certainly thinking of jobs like waitressing/waitering, bagging groceries, cutting hair, performing a service to someone right there with you. Can't be outsourced because you have to do it where the customers are, you can't put it in a box and ship it in from China. But those, properly understood, are manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing legal papers, manufacturing software, manufacturing advice, manufacturing sales contracts, manufacturing advertising materials. Just because you don't do it in a factory - but what is a law office, besides a factory for legal papers? - doesn't mean it's not really manufacturing. It means that it's not considered manufacturing by the Department of Labor, but so what? Teaching Yoga to Americans? How do you do that in China to Americans who are in America? How do you correct someone's posture by touch from a thousand miles away?

Being "productive" doesn't have to mean "doing something for money", then.

Then what is wrong with lazing? This was a hypothetical scenario to illustrate my point that once a society has reached a satisfactory level of production, where everyone's needs and wants are satisfied, then there is really no reason to invest further resources into the production of unconsumed goods and services.And, of course, business owners the world over agree with me: when people stop buying their products, they've got the good sense to stop making them.Jon

[qs=NoNukes]My answer is still the same. The society you describe is stagnant and fragile. I don't believe it is adabtable enough to external forces that will change. I don't see the motivation for technological advance or for people to educate themselves in anything hard. I can hardly be criticized for responding to what you actually posted, and I don't believe your illustrated point is correct. The point at which needs and wants are satisfied is not some static point, but is a point subject to change as population increases, resources are consumed, and external factors change. Yet the society itself appears to be stagnant. It sound like Jetson's style utopian nonsense. Read Huxley and skip the Hannah Barbera.

Do you have any example of that? The West is overwhelmingly a society where people are cashing in productivity gains in the form of additional leisure hours - either during the workweek or in the form of early retirement - especially in Europe. But the US and Europe overwhelmingly seem to be the center for innovation. 12-hour-a-day workweek China is certainly productive, but they're nowhere near as productive as we are in the United States, pert capita or even in aggregate. China isn't even a third as productive as the US.The US is overwhelmingly where electronics are designed and innovations are created; China is overwhelmingly where they're manufactured in the sort of high-competition sweatshops you seem to think create a robust, adaptable society. Their society is certainly undergoing incredible change, at least parts of it are; but ours is not stagnant and, for the most part, our innovations often extend to our poorest. It's more common now for Americans in the bottom fifth to own a smartphone (and therefore have internet access) than a computer; the bottom fifth Chinese are extremely lucky to have ever even seen such a device.I'm not saying that we can't do more for our poorest, of course. But the poorest Americans still, generally, have access to electricity, sewage disposal, and potable, disease-free water. Not so, in China. And given the dependence of their economy, now, on manufacturing goods for Western consumers and the importation of cheap oil, I would say their economy is in a far more precarious place than ours.

Maybe under a definition that nobody other than you employs. And it is only your definition that I am criticizing. I'm not suggesting that bagging groceries can be off shored.Do medical doctors provide a service? If so why is it considered a service to give someone an opinion on a disease prognosis, but manufacturing to provide an opinion on whether a law suit against you might succeed? I think you are confusing the legal papers that any scribe can generate given the actual legal service that lawyers are licensed to perform.If all of the records in a jurisdiction were on line, couldn't a title clearance search for a commercial property be performed online by anyone in the world with the knowledge to do so?Why is cooking a hamburger not considered to be manufacturing.In short have you seem to be defining service jobs to be those kinds of things that are either impossible or impractical to perform remotely. I don't think that's what people refer to as service sector jobs. Using a bunch of sensors, video camera, and transducers to detect body position and neural activity, and to administer tactile, visual, and/or audio feedback. Surely you could imagine more than one way to do this using off the shelf technology. My guess is that it would be far more feasible to provide remote Yoga lessons than to give someone a haircut from 1000 miles away.But besides all of that, Americans sometimes find it cheaper to go abroad to have medical procedures done. If foreign yoga lessons and transportation are cheap enough, maybe it would be feasable to go to China once a month for Yoga lessons.

Some parts of medicine are manufacturing and some parts are service.I don't understand the issue you're having. Clearly some jobs are offshorable and some are not, and the specific difference is that if you can put it in a box and ship it in from China, it's likely that your job making it in the US is not long for this world. On the other hand, if you have to do your job right where your customers are, it's likely that your job is offshoring-proof. And clearly, over time our economy will shift to un-offshorable jobs because those will be the only ones left. If you can stand in China and defend a client inside a courtroom in the United States, then probably your job as a lawyer can be offshored to Chinese lawyers. Of course, the question is whether Chinese lawyers will charge any less to practice American law. Why would they? In that case they're competing with American lawyers, not with Chinese lawyers practicing law or Indian lawyers practicing Indian law. Who said it wasn't? I certainly consider it manufacturing, that was the entire point of my post to Phat. There's no reason to consider manufacturing a hamburger to be "temporary" or "service employment", with all the negative connotations "service jobs" carry with people over 50, and it's likely that such a job has quite a bit of stability to it given that you're not competing with the zero marginal cost of Chinese labor. Ok, I'm sorry that I overlooked non-existent telepresence robot systems.

The desire for education and technological advancement represents a consumable want/need andall needs and wants being satisfied under the hypothetical scenario I providedwould already be accounted for.I can't think of a single business that will tell you its goal is to produce things that people don't buy. Why not? How many clay jars do you have in your kitchen for cooking and storing leftovers? How big is the fire pit in your living room?Or was there, perhaps, a point in time when people stopped making clay jars and started making steel pots and plastic storage containers? Or stopped designing homes around a central heating source and started installing furnaces with ductwork to carry heat to the whole house? Very true. But how does a system that chooses to consume leftover labor hours as leisure instead of turning them into more labor hours not allow the dynamic nature of the world to be taken into consideration?There is nothing in what I proposed that prevents people from putting in a few extra hours of work to, say, sandbag a flooding river, or produce more bottles and cribs for a rising population.The only point I am making is that at some point, somewhere in the equation, it is entirely conceivable (and, indeed, possible and often necessary) to reach a maximum in terms of demand, and which point, increased efficiency can either be used to produce more goods and services or be consumed in the form of extra leisure hours. No sane business owner would ever choose the former in light of stagnate demand.That's why when people stop buying super-sized Ford trucks, the factories that make those super-sized Ford trucks get shutdown and the employees laid off. In the ideal systemwhich is what my hypothetical representsthey wouldn't be laid off, but would be put to work producing other goods or services, presumably the goods or services that people are now choosing in favor of super-sized Ford trucks. I've never seen the Jetsons, so I really cannot be sure what you are talking about with your repeated references to this show.Jon

In the US, while there may be people who are not productive, we don't encourage non-productivity, or require it as policy. A society of the type Jon suggests is a different animal entirely. It is not simply a more efficient version of US society.

True, of course. But Jon didn't provide any examples of productive things.But perhaps lazing about is an unfair characterization. I'm suggesting that some endeavors are hard and require years of preparation. Preparing for the unknown requires education, experience, and hard work. I don't think a push button society in which everybody has everything they want effortlessly provides an incentive to do the hard things.

Of course it is. It is a society that values community, family, and social interactions over the endless production and acquisition of stuff.The U.S., and a lot of the developed world, is an example of just the kind of sickness that results from unrestrained capitalism: the putting of things before people, GDP over quality of life and happiness.There's a reason Coca Cola advertises its products. The advertising convinces people to consume beyond what they need or would otherwise want of Coca Cola products. Long ago, demand for Coca Cola reached a peak, and the company had a choice to continue production at the then current level and return increased efficiency back to its employees in the form of increased leisure or to increase production and spend increased efficiency by using it to produce even more. The company chose the latter option, because more units sold means more profit; and then they set about finding a way to convince people they actually wanted something that, according to a market not tainted with advertising, they didn't really want.This, is, of course one way to run an economy; continuous increases in demand and production viewed as 'economic growth'. But this way, as I've argued here already, is not sustainable as we live on a planet of finite size capable of supporting a finite level of production.Continuing on the current path gets us here.What I've proposed gets us here.Which world do you like?Jon

I was lucky over the years to work with a whole bunch of folk in a whole bunch of different industries in a whole bunch of states here in the US. These were all folk that just couldn't imagine not working, not doing something new that had never been done.We are reaching a point where we need to ask if we really want folk working that would rather be doing something else?Should we be planning for a day when only those that really, really want to work do, and the rest of the population can just get a monthly check and health care and shelter and then just stay the hell outta the way?

What we need is a path that gets us here: and here: