[whodidntante]

There used to be a very vibrant creator community, one in which most everyone earned a decent living.

However, we no longer have a community of people growing food, making clothes, building and fixing houses, making metal tools, shoeing horses, etc.

Cannot eat a blog post about food, cannot wear a photo of someone wearing expensive clothes, cannot live in a photo of a mansion.

[ebiester]

That's because of the industrialization of those creator economies.

There are still bespoke furniture designers out there, but it's very competitive in the same ways other arts are.

[manuelmoreale]

That is a lovely way to put it. Never thought about craftsmen as creators in that sense. Thank you for this comment.

[whodidntante]

Thank you. The "trades" are always underappreciated.

[simonh]

The problem with an economy like that is it doesn’t scale up to support a modern state. Things like a universal health service (even to the extent of Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP in the US); national road, rail and telecoms infrastructure; a universal education system; social services. You need a massive surplus to pay for all that stuff, that an artisanal craft based economy just can’t support.

[whodidntante]

I am not sure that an economy where everyone is creating tiktok content can support those type of services either.

It also has not been proven that we, as humans, are able to "scale up" as you say in a sustainable manner.

[simonh]

I share your doubt. As for sustainability, the key to that is efficient utilisation of resources. I don’t see how that can be possible without scale efficiencies.

Basically there are trade offs between population level, standard of living and sustainability. More of any one of those will require us to make do with less of one or both of the others. A more efficient economy can give us more to distribute between them.

That’s broad strokes. There are cases where some efficiencies compete with some standard of living concerns for example. It would be a poor world in which there were no artisanal crafts.