Pollyanna on LSD - part the third

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

Well... as asserted in the past, this is just a tautology, rather some deep insight into the macroeconomic sphere. OTOH, in 1951, The United States of Alabama was closer to being a self-sustaining closed economy than it is today. Whatever. From a macro point of view, it's all just arithmetic. So long as The Rest of Us have most of the moolah and buy up the output, then the equation balances. We experience neither runaway inflation with output limited nor depression when demand collapses due to The Rest of Us not having most of the moolah.

And, as usual, it does matter what that output is and who might buy it up. When we used to make shirts and shoes and other stuff that the proletariat needed, the equation balancing implied that The Rest of Us were doing OK. But... how does the equation work when output is skewed ever more to financial services relevant only to the 1% and 5%? Not so much balance.

One might recall that, until FDR, Uncle Sugar did nothing to cushion the destruction of jobs and aggregate demand when some creative destruction ruled the economy. Check out, once again, the graph of recessions and depressions throughout the 19^th century. Not a pretty sight. But... back then, even with some mechanization of production, it was still times when the mass of the proletariat was husbanded to produce the Good Stuff for the 1% of the times. Humans as disposable parts. My Grand Pappy well remembered that very effective job retraining he got from the Department of Labor when the horseless carriage killed his job making buggy whips in 1901. Those were so much better days.

So, now we face the specter of AI going primal nuculur on labor. Makes the 19^th century experience look benign. And, of course, the bankers to the !% pooh pooh all the angst of the proletariat. Of course they do. Here's among the latest. From the mind and pen of the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, no less. He must be smart. He's so rich.

Will A.I. disrupt the labor market? Absolutely. This transition, like other significant moments in our history, will entail new challenges, especially as A.I. separates labor from productivity in magnitudes we haven't seen before.

That's a no shit Sherlock tautology, as well. But recall the Great Migration. The movement of the proletariat from the rural South to the assembly lines of the North. What made that successful, for some definition of successful? Simply that Southern farmers were smart enough and able enough to do the repetitive tasks of the assembly line.

Let's see what Solomon has to say

But the United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption, from the electrification of the 1900s to the digital revolution of the 1990s; I don't see any reason to think this dynamic will stop now.

Much of that "digital revolution" was merely converting from manual to automation of the same tasks! A bit of retraining in how to use word processing and spreadsheets was about as hard as it got. Not a requirement to drop steno work and learn medicinal chemistry. Get real.

But when you look at jobs or sectors less relevant to automation, the picture changes. Our economists estimate that the growing demand for data centers has created more than 200,000 construction jobs since 2022.

Once again, with feeling - construction is not an ongoing job type. Not unless we want to keep building data centers for the next 50 years at the current pace. Dwell on that for a second or two. We'll need nuculur fusion electric plants to run 'em.

Let me get this strait - the educated, smart Blue People will be shitcanned in favor of Dumb as a Sack of Hair MAGAnauts? Yikes.

Now, this one is gobsmacking

In 1900, global life expectancy at birth was 32 years old; today, it's over 70.

So... mass unemployment is the reason for this increase in lifetimes? Really??? How about drugs, vaccines, and public health mandates. Or, in other words, smart Blue people figuring the tough stuff out.

Now... Pollyanna on steroids

[T]he health care industry now employs more than 18 million workers. The U.S. economy is still the most innovative, dynamic and entrepreneurial in the world.

And most of those are engaged in either high eductation demands or menial bed pan changing. The K-shaped economy, also on steroids.

Have a nice day.