Top products from r/dredmorbius

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u/dredmorbius · 1 pointr/dredmorbius

There's a bit of a breakdown of goods further down my earlier comment, and to the extent I've thought of this, that's probably most of my reasoning to date.

I tend to think of goods as essential or optional. And there's some level of gradation there. In both this classification and the wages / rents / resources, etc. classification, it's probably more useful to think of goods as posessing some measure of a quality rather than being purely one or the other. A Bugatti Veyron and a Honda Fit are both, in one sense, cars. There's a strong social signalling component (and a range of potential messages in any receiver) for each as well. The Audemars Piquet presumably tells time, as does a Start Men's Watch at $2.50.

There are goods which are fundamentally sustaining -- food, clothing, shelter, security. There are goods, which are durable (at least until consumed) and services, which -- I forget if it was Smith or Mill -- are "extinguished" immediately on production, and their simultaneous consumption. There are goods which afford a productive capacity -- a laptop, hammer, saw, kitchen sink, stove. Even a chair, if that allows you to sit and work at a desk or table.

I'd argue that writ large a lot of what we consider "entertainment" is in some degree necessary. It blunts or sooths the pains of the day, provides for mental refraction periods. (Though there was a time when amusements were active rather than passive.)

On your T-shirt machine: on the one hand, clothing is essential. On the other it's an intrinsic component of social signalling. (I've written on fads and fashions as signalling.) One likely result of lower-cost t-shirts will be an increased consumption of them -- that's straight-up Jevons paradox at work. Prior to the Industrial Revolution's vastly increased textiles output, a person might own one or two changes of clothing (and perhaps more undergarments). Now we have walk-in closets larger than tenemants.

How to allocate, or assure fair pricing, for essentials, and labour ... needs thinking. I'd argue there's bidirectional feedback, and that ultimately the level of compensation which is offered, as a minimum, defines the standard of living of a nation. I'm increasingly partial to employers of last resort, with a wage / salary floor as a mechanism for addressing the compensation side.