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[SirQuiamus]

Once upon a time there were psiocrats (can't spell due to smartphone) who insisted these elitist industrial proponents were wrong because everything came back to food and no number of craftsmen would change the amount of food and other farm products grown. And now we live in a world where 2% of the population farms and most of the food is made by a minority of that 2%.

2% of the population does/makes things, while 98% sits on the couch watching TV/YouTube? Perfect happiness and content all around?

EDIT: What's a "psiocrat," btw?

[Helgoland]

He means physiocrats, I think.

[Reelya]

The definition of post-industrial economy is that the service sector generates more GDP than the manufacturing sector, that's all it is.

The main issue are that (1) there's only so much food you can or should eat. After that, increased agricultural output can't improve your standard of living. Hence, the shift to industry making other goods that you need to live. But (2) once industry can make all the basics, is hoarding more "stuff" going to automatically improve your standard of living? You hit a point where you own so much "stuff" that getting more "stuff" is detrimental instead of beneficial. Yet would you say life literally can't be better than it is now because you have more stuff than you can use?

At this point, the limiting factor is no longer how much food you have to eat, nor how much junk you have crammed in your house, you have a good enough car, too. At this stage the limiting factor on most people's lives is time. And that's where services come in. You pay for services so that you can enjoy the free time that you have. Medical care grows as a proportion of spending as people live longer due to abundants no longer being constrained by food and goods. And medical care is part of the service/knowledge economy.

Also, the knowledge component of all production processes is continuously increasing. It's knowledge that makes productivity increases possible. Improved knowledge becomes more cost-effective than throwing extra manpower at a problem, hence resources get shifted to R&D, which is part of the service economy.

And that's what post-industrial society is all about. We hit the point where, just like excess food from agricultural productivity increases, we have excess industrial goods from industrial productivity increases. And the only way to value-add is to generated knowledge. Yet we still have growing incomes and we need to spend it on something else.

[SirQuiamus]

The definition of post-industrial economy is that the service sector generates more GDP than the manufacturing sector, that's all it is. You can test for whether that's true or not easily.

It is true in many Western societies, but obviously untrue from a global perspective. Post-industrial societies are standing on the oil-stained shoulders of industrial societies, and service economy is nothing but parasitism.

Part of the issue stems from the fact that there's only so much physical stuff you need: you only need so much food, one refrigerator, one stove etc. After you have excess stuff, hoarding more stuff doesn't magically increase your standard of living. At this stage, you need services.

My point is precisely that we shouldn't be trying to increase our standards of living beyond that baseline. We wouldn't need services if we could stop fetishizing economic growth.   

 

[Reelya]

Ok we should abolish medical care then, i guess your saying?

This idea that people only need services from other people because of some capitalist conspiracy is silly.

I guess we could lock down the entire entertainment industry and only give people rationed goods. But then we're into "Mao Suit" territory with everyone having their state-approved clothing and state-approved outlets for frustration.

I'm guessing you're thinking of "service economy" as only people mowing your lawn or something, but's it's a whole lot more than that.

100% of the population working in a factory isn't my idea of a dream world.

[Frumple]

Medical, education, entertainment, much of the civilian infrastructure system (mail, most of the internet), all those useful bits of administration that have contributed to the absolute skyrocketing of industrial efficiency... basically tear down the entirety of human civilization, more or less, except the bits that produce food and junk.

The service industry isn't a parasite, it's the economical equivalent of gut flora. An incredibly vital symbiont the rest of the system can't really work without, and certainly can't work well.

[ChairmanPoo]

EDIT: What's a "psiocrat," btw?

This

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[SirQuiamus]

Ok we should abolish medical care then, i guess your saying?

This idea that people only need services from other people because of some capitalist conspiracy is silly.

I guess we could lock down the entire entertainment industry and only give people rationed goods. But then we're into "Mao Suit" territory with everyone having their state-approved clothing and state-approved outlets for frustration.

I'm guessing you're thinking of "service economy" as only people mowing your lawn or something, but's it's a whole lot more than that.

Well, "services" is obviously a too wide umbrella term in this instance ... how about "bullshit economy," like, uh, everything else except science, manufacture, culture, and healthcare?

...I need to collect my thoughts for a moment.

EDIT: You see, when you're a boozy backwoodsman with a blazing Marxist heart and very little sense, stuff like this sounds so... dubious.

In economics, a service is an intangible commodity. That is, services are an example of intangible economic goods.

^{RAHHH COMMODITY FETISHISM CAPITALIST PLOT RANT RANT}

But, there are times when a word doesn't quite mean what I think it does, and this is probably one of them.   

[Frumple]

*shrugs* We could, I guess, but it'd leave a lot of people without anything to do, unless we turned back the clock and artificially induced massive amounts of inefficiency in our basically everything. Which would be ridiculously stupid. What you're suggesting would more or less demand either supporting a(n even more) significant unemployed population or a fairly sizable population cull.

... though I'd be curious what you mean by that everything else. Surprisingly, even if we have excesses and inefficiencies in a lot of areas, most jobs don't actually exist for bullshit reasons -- (significantly) more people may be working in them than necessary with good methodology and automation, but they're generally there for fairly solid reasons of one sort or another. There's exceptions, but those honestly makes up a damn small portion of the current economy, to the best of my knowledge.

[Reelya]

The biggest service sector is retail, which is how made things are distributed. Maybe those jobs are bullshit ... but I'm guessing that retailers hire the bare minimum number of people they can get away with, so that number wouldn't be able to be trimmed very much.

Second, is food and accomodation. Yeah, we could encourage more people to cook their own food. Which is good, but then you realize that one of the big reasons that food production becomes socialized is that it's more efficient in time and materials to cook in bulk rather than cook individually. This probably is a major reason that the food industry had grown so much. It's often a more efficient use of people's time to work in their own industry, then buy pre-prepared food from a vendor, than to shop and buy all the raw ingredients and cook themselves. You will end up throwing away more food that way too, which is a bit of a dick move give global food problems.

[Frumple]

Eh, you could conceivably trim down on that a lot, by simply enforcing monopolies (only one brand of most things) and cutting outlets down significantly. That would have obvious issues, of course (quality/practicality for the former, greater transport costs for the consumer for the latter, just as examples), but you could conceivably do it. There's a very significant amount of redundancy in retail and a fair amount of wastage.

... mind you, doing that would cut in to industrial production fairly significantly as well, since demand would just kinda' plummet. Which would further exaggerate unemployment issues, heh.

[SirQuiamus]

*shrugs* We could, I guess, but it'd leave a lot of people without anything to do, unless we turned back the clock and artificially induced massive amounts of inefficiency in our basically everything. Which would be ridiculously stupid. What you're suggesting would more or less demand either supporting a(n even more) significant unemployed population or a fairly sizable population cull.

... though I'd be curious what you mean by that everything else. Surprisingly, even if we have excesses and inefficiencies in a lot of areas, most jobs don't actually exist for bullshit reasons -- (significantly) more people may be working in them than necessary with good methodology and automation, but they're generally there for fairly solid reasons of one sort or another. There's exceptions, but those honestly makes up a damn small portion of the current economy, to the best of my knowledge.

2% of the population does/makes things, while 98% sits on the couch watching TV/YouTube? Perfect happiness and content all around?

I'll try to restate my point in clearer terms: Thinking up stuff for a thought economy is not for everyone. Some people are good at thinking or entertaining, while others are better at doing practical things with their hands. If the current trend is allowed to proceed, the latter category of people will be declared useless. I realize that the services sector also includes practical jobs, and heck, unemployed industrial workers are constantly re-educating themselves for employment in services. But I'm saying that it isn't enough: Some people are simply not happy as barbers, and a completely service-based economy is like a city of barbers who live by shaving each other.     

[penguinofhonor]

I think reducing shitty jobs would require changes in how some industries work, because a lot of them are currently built around their ability to get people to do menial labor for cheap. More online retail, for example. It still takes a decent amount of people, but shipping your products to customers is just way more labor efficient than shipping them to stores everywhere that you keep manned with people 10-12 hours a day.

I'd be willing to bet there are fucktons of unnecessary bureaucratic jobs though. And there are plenty of jobs that will become unnecessary with advances in technology but currently need a person working them (taxis, for example), but I think that's a different discussion.

[Reelya]

a completely service-based economy is like a city of barbers who live by shaving each other

You could make the same argument about the failure of an industrial economy. The whole economy is cabinet makers trying to sell each other cabinets to make a living. That's just as valid a point.

But the main flaw is that service economies are about specialization, and two specialists are much more productive in their speciality than two generalists. Say you have a professional lawn mower and a professional barber. They swap their services. Then, consider two generalists who do a bit of everything - they shave themselves and mow their own lawns. Which pair will be more efficient?

But the inherent flaw is not realizing that everything is a service, fundamentally. Growing food is a service, transporting the food is another service. Digging rocks up, turning them into "stuff" are all services. The same "it can't be done!" logic applies to "stuff" services as it does to labor services. There's nothing magical about shiny rocks that makes them a "real" economy". Paper money proves that.

[Frumple]

I'll try to restate my point in clearer terms: Thinking up stuff for a thought economy is not for everyone. Some people are good at thinking or entertaining, while others are better at doing practical things with their hands. If the current trend is allowed to proceed, the latter category of people will be declared useless.

Then they handcraft (quite a bit of art falls into this category, as well as a notable amount of production -- plenty of crazy people with money prefer handcrafted material over functionally better mass produced stuff) or add some volunteer work to industry or maintenance or somethin'. Just because folks are useless don't mean they can't still build stuff. Hell, there's quite a few farms that work like that already, just as an example -- specialty productions or subsistence work, that sort of thing.

The metaphorical 98% just do... whatever. If they want to make stuff, they make stuff. If they want to vegetate in front of a TV, they vegetate in front of a TV. If they want to produce art, or aid science, or give a hand to local efforts, or whatever, they do. We don't have full employment now (unless you count the bullshit term economics use, which builds in a fairly significant unemployment rate), we won't in the future, and we're going to eventually have to deal with the fact many people just aren't needed anymore.

Being useless ain't so bad, y'know? So long as you don't starve and whatnot.