It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid

NewHope33
Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:05:17 +0000

^ A good friend and I argue constantly about this. He argues that Americans are better off currently because “relative wealth is stable, being neither created nor destroyed, and prices are lower (so the wealth buys more stuff)”. He uses the example of gold in the ground in 1847. A lot of time and money were used to mine it, refine it, market it, transport it, and store it. According to his calculation the value of all that exceeded the value of the gold, the difference being made up in consumer/investor confidence (to embrace new, untested ventures … most of which fail).

Perhaps another way to examine this issue is to calculate how many careers were destroyed by the advent of personal computing.