Quote from: deisik on March 17, 2015, 09:30:28 AM

Yes, but technology improvements still don't make producers better off per se (and it is not government that pushes forward technological innovation). You still need effective demand to get profit out of these improvements. But how can this be made possible if large amounts of people are thrown out of working force (and don't get employed somewhere else)? New manufacturing processes always shake up the labor market, but as we see that human population grew exponentially since the Industrial Revolution with the standards of living ever improving, we can only make one inference, that is, advanced production turns out to be creating more jobs in the end...

Could you explain this by just "government having an endless credit line"?

Indeed good questions. I think it is about a saturated market. Difficult to deal with

50 years ago, when people are still relatively poor and had lots of demand, you need to accelerate the production to fulfill those demands, and productivity can not increase dramatically overnight, so you need lots of people involved to speed up the production

But now when almost everything is done, existing production capacity can satisfy the demand, and it is constantly increasing in efficiency, as a result, more and more people are laid off

The demand is still there, it is even more. However, production are centralized to a few multinational enterprises, the supply is not done by millions of people collectively, but by only a few thousand people. It is this concentration of production removed many people's income, so that even they have strong demand, they can not consume due to no income

Those enterprises first made huge profit, then start to get worse, since their potential customer do not have enough income, that reduced their sale. And when they have less sale, they will fire more people, worsen the situation

So you have to find a new demand area that can absorb those excessive labor force and give them enough income to restart the economy. Unfortunately, it seems most of human's demand are just fulfilled. When I go to a super market, I'm always amazed by so many things that seems useless

So far, as part of the solution, government can borrow a lot of money to run large construction projects, could be long term and expensive projects like a bridge from Florida to Cuba Cheesy

Those projects will never generate any meaningful return, so it will just be a huge expense, created millions of jobs for a while, but since government can borrow money endlessly, this is not a big deal

Maybe in future, 90% of people will be participating this kind of government projects, like researching new robot, new medicine, new power plant, new base on Mars...