[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.