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Oct 08, 2012

Comments

1.

I guess none of you ever saw a movie or TV over the last 60 years(60,000 years)... other than building weapons to prevent the other guy from having power and using the young as war fodder, we've been nothing but a world hiding in virtuality. Religious myths or Pop culture myths, pick your delusion.

2.

I am not impressed by Robert Samuelson's argument as you summarize it. First, even in a no-growth environment, you can increase the tax base fairly painlessly without more babies or more productivity, just by adjusting how many (productive) people you allow to immigrate.

Second, why do we think technological change leading to growth has slowed? Have we got all the benefits we are going to get from IT? No. Is biotech and/or cybernetics likely to spark another mini-technological revolution? Yes.

3.

I strongly agree with the general trend towards entertainment, or let's add some flavor to it and call it decadence and escapism.

Engineers and builders were the heroes of yesteryear and today, we get Kim Kardashian.

4.

the economy sucks! /plays D3 to make my day better

5.

"Gordon sees the Internet, smartphones and tablets as tilted toward entertainment, not labor-saving."

This dichotomy is false. In the 19th century theatre, opera and music hall were much more popular forms of entertainment. A Gilbert and Sullivan opera might see dozens of entertainers working to entertain a couple of hundred people.

In the 21st century we have entertainment items produced by a number of people that is usually smaller than the cast of a G&S opera distributed to millions. And repeatable.

So the amount of work used to provide a comparable "good" is much less. This is perhaps particularly true in video games. How many man-hours did Sid Meier and his team spend on Civilization compared with the number of hours the rest of us spent playing it?

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