[javajosh]

Well, maybe there is another option. Call it "inward mobility". It is where your life becomes better, more organized, more healthy, within the bounds of, e.g. your energy expenditures or your draw on natural resources. There is an analogy with racing: in drag racing, you always want to go faster and faster, with no upper bound. But there is another form of racing, rally racing, which hinges on precision and control rather than raw speed.

My recent experience living in Germany gave me a real sense of what that's like. There is a cultural affinity for "progress means innovation aimed at ever more closely and efficiently adhering to a standard". So this means, for example, the beer in Germany is very consistent over decades, sometimes centuries, is cheaper than soda, and there isn't much variety. (a similar story for Ireland's Guiness, BTW). Or take the German knife maker Wüsthof, which unusually for a large knife maker uses entirely one steel, one style of blade, across the line (okay there are exceptions but these are rare). They've fixed the larger values of a boundary condition, but still find room to innovate within that space. I can't help but think that this is a healthier way to think about progress and growth, rather than the very American approach that progress always means more, but never just better.

[megameter]

This sentiment coincides with the problem of measuring "the economy".

The major notions we have inherited of economy derive from the rentier merchants of early modernity. They took to the idea of seeing a nation as a balance sheet, a tabulation of assets: men, ships, iron. From this idea we get the idea of putting more assets on the balance sheet through trade and colonization, rather than tribute. This lasted a few centuries, but by the point of transition to an industrial economy it had already become clear in the writings of Enlightenment philosphers that it was not quite as simple as possession and accounting of the raw assets, but their organization too. The gross product and employment figures we started using to measure organization generalized things, but also suffer from limited scope - if it's not a money transaction, if the work is unpaid, it's outside "the economy".

In the long 19th century it was very straightforward to devise ways to purpose inventions towards economic benefit: take an existing trade, buy up more raw materials through the canals and rails, run it through the factory, sell more product. With the second industrial revolution, another "wave" of products appeared that substituted common uses of labor: canned food instead of fresh, telecommunication instead of express mail, and an increasing number of mechanized devices.

It got much harder in the 20th century as more of the inventions relied on developing consumer habits and did not reflect a traditional trade. The dilemma was averted through marketing techniques: Everyone uses toothpaste and shampoo, watches the new television show, and desires a new car, a bigger house and a higher-paying job. Creative financing ideas took up the rest of the slack, allowing consumers to get their hands on the stuff and set lifestyle expectations that are higher than reasonable.

So, by the early 21st century everyone simultaneously has too much "stuff", is unhappy because of the marketing, and is in debt because of the financing. But GDP is higher, so the system persists, up until now.

That trend makes me think that "building" is at an end, and something more like the German system has to take hold. America's consumer economy is now developing a multitude of niches, marketed through various online storefronts, Kickstarters and viral video. Appreciation of the best stuff of past years has risen as more of that material surfaces online and rubs shoulders with "new" stuff. Where this emerging system struggles the most, it can usually be traced back to the old power structures and their large footprint on the economy. And to a great degree the measure of the economy is tied to those structures: growth and employment figures feed into the taxation and spending model. Change the measure and you have to realign what it means to tax or to spend, who is in debt to whom. It's not done so easily.

[javajosh]

Thanks for that very nice comment. Interestingly, I think software has huge potential for "inward mobility"! Consider the fact that the basic screen/memory/cpu/battery combo has been around for ~10 years, but I believe we've only begun to discover what these devices can do, and most of what we've discovered has been funded by precisely that old guard - and so there's been a bias toward centralization and, dare I say it, rather unscrupulous use of information asymmetry and moral hazard to produce systems that are superficially great for people, but are rotten in their cores. It's not all bad since this money has explored a lot of useful UI/UX space, but...I really believe that there remain huge improvements to people's quality of life once they take ownership of these infinitely mutable devices and start organizing that enormous data-space for their own benefit.