Thursday, September 22, 2016

Towards a sustainable economy

It should be fairly obvious that fisheries and timber industries cannot grow indefinitely.  They have a natural limit which is the renewal rate of the underling resources.  

It may be somewhat less obvious, but manufacturing on the planet as a whole also similarly has a natural limit.  About the only thing you can do here is replace lower value manufactures with higher value ones.  But the planet's ecosystem can sustain only so much manufacturing.   One could have manufacturing in space, and thus keep growing.   But that won't generate a lot of employment for humans on earth.

The obsession with manufacturing jobs is misplaced. Services - what humans do for each other - however are sustainable, can employ any number of people.  If the human touch is of value, then these can only be assisted but not replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.   The question then is - how to make human services more valuable?