The following subject caused me to feel like a prophet who came before his time. Some time after the upheavals in Israel started, I tried to interest several people in my economic ideas (links appear below). I even joined a promising Facebook group of people, who want to preserve the sanity of economics in Israel.
However, it turned out that the leaders of that Facebook group have their own agenda, which is incompatible with discussions of novel economic ideas. As a consequence, they asked me to stop posting there, and I left the group. So I decided to just summarize links in a blog article and just refer any comers to it.
The subject of sane economics has been interesting me for several years. Actually, it was the reason why I started to write this blog on May 2004. As time passed, I switched to writing about other topics. However, now, due to the upheavals in countries like Israel, USA, or England, it is necessary to develop a new way of thinking about economics.
I would like to solve problems like the following (in no particular order of importance):
- Environmental pollution due to over-consumerism.
- Joblessness in USA and several European countries (happily not a serious problem in Israel, at the moment).
- Cost of living for the middle and lower classes (a problem in Israel).
- Feeling of youths that no matter how much you try, you won’t be able to get ahead in life.
Following are links to relevant articles:
- Description of the problem.
- Buckminster Fuller defined the wealth of a person as the length of time he can survive without income. I looked for a citation, but didn’t find one. See Wikipedia article about Buckminster Fuller.
I think that the keyword for finding people, who think along similar lines as me, is “Buckminster Fuller”. - My thoughts about definition of wealth
- Another point of view
- Exploiting the welfare system to reorganize the economy and solve the problem of the need for makework to combat unemployment.
- Tangential to this discussion
- My proposal for another way to compete over social status, in lieu of conspicuous consumption
- Also other people complain about the problem of makework
May 13, 2018 update: I published a booklet of short stories illustrating life in an utopia which solves the problems discussed above. The booklet is currently available only in Hebrew: סיפורי עושר מדרגה שלישית (Stories about Third Level Wealth).
Another article discussing similar problems:
Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics
but robots are one of the smallest problems the future will introduce. I also wrote about the drain of natural resources.
Thank you, Ira Abramov, for not keeping me completely lonely in pointing out the problems of future economics.
In http://ira.abramov.org/blog/2011/08/24/why-capitalism-and-growth-cant-work/ Ira points out that due to introduction of robots to various kinds of jobs, in the future there’ll not remain simple work for the common people.