Tag Archives: wealth
Population and Wealth
A magazine article cited, as one reason for improving safety in the home and reducing deaths and injuries to children, the argument that the deaths and injuries were a cost to the nation because of the loss of “production” of goods and services which those children, had they become healthy adults, would have accomplished in their lifetime. … Read more
More Dollars for Conservation?
So, environmental conservation must be the primary goal, and economic well-being depends on it – not the other way round.
That last phrase refers to the spurious argument that economic “progress” as currently understood, i.e., increasing throughput of wealth, provides money which can be spent on conserving the environment. … Read more
Living Standard and Quality of Life
Another indirect adverse effect of environmental degradation on economic well-being arises from the effect of the degradation on people’s perception of their economic condition.
A further illustration of the erroneously perceived conflict between environmental conservation and economic well-being lies in this frequent reaction to some piece of environmental devastation: “Oh, well, at least it creates jobs for some people who wouldn’t have one otherwise.”
Certainly the degradation will keep some people busy for a while, but because of the depletion of the resource on which their jobs depend, there will be a net loss of jobs. … Read more
Value Inflation – the Trigger, not the Bullet
The direct addition of value inflation to the rate of price increases is quite small. The larger effect arises from secondary influences, in whose shaping human psychology plays an important part. These influences are triggered by the small value inflation component and its corollary, a slowing of the rate of net throughput increase relative to gross throughput increase. … Read more
Borrowing to Invest to Get Rich
Governments in many less perfluent countries have borrowed thousands of millions of dollars in attempting to achieve permanent increases in the level of national economic activity and living standards.
The belief was that by borrowing “wealth” from the “rich” nations, they would be able to use it to generate more “wealth” of their own, enough to pay back the original “wealth” with interest and still leave enough to make their own country permanently wealthier. … Read more
Misconceptions in Practice
The inadequate or wrong concepts of current economics lead to a number of misconceptions, some examples of which will be given.
“Soak the Rich”
The “soak the rich” taxation policy sometimes advocated or practiced by the political left is based on a confusion about the nature of wealth. … Read more
Economic Growth Redefined
A more accurate definition of economic growth would be any change in the relation between the throughput and renewal rates, for a given resource for which throughput exceeds renewal, in which change the ratio of the throughput rate to the renewal rate falls, or conversely the ratio of renewal to throughput increases. … Read more
The Derivatives of Wealth
The terms derivative and differential are used here in their mathematical sense, denoting rates of change.
Gross national product and living standard are treated as measures of quantity of wealth. In fact, they are not the quantity but its first derivative or first differential, the rate of wealth-throughput. … Read more
Production?
Structuring, or realising, wealth into goods and services is currently called production or output, as though wealth were being created. In fact, this structuring or realisation is part of the process of throughput of wealth.
The use of goods and services, now called consumption in the sense of being opposite to “production”, is really a subsequent process in the throughput chain whereby wealth is degraded into waste matter and heat whence it may be renewed. … Read more
When the Boom comes
During the 1970′s and 1980′s governments and people generally in the more perfluent nations were waiting for an economic “upturn” or “recovery” to reduce what had become chronic high unemployment. The underlying assumption was that the high throughput-increase rates, the so-called “economic growth” rates of the 1950′s and 1960′s, were normal and that the more sluggish throughput-increase (TI) rates of latter years were an abnormal phenomenon that could be expected to speed up in time through this or that brilliant policy initiative or going back to the early economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; or by eliminating (depending on your point of view) businessmen, unions, migrants, taxes, civil servants, or computers; or just by waiting. … Read more