Paul Krugman rediscovers Marxism--what's next? Fire? The wheel?

[Spike89]

63. Ah, that is where we differ

The value of "things" does shift as do the nature of jobs. Once, not really long ago, a farmer could make a living wage on a relatively small piece of land because food had a very high value relative to other things. Mechanized farming, fertilizer/pesticides, and efficient storage/shipping pretty much made food a commodity that most could easily afford. This gave rise to the whole concept of disposable income--buying things that technically were not neccessities. Cars, even dining room tables, and a host of other things, some very useful, some purely decorative/fun were in demand and factories churned them out and paid wages to workers who had money to spend on things. Things had value and people traded their labor in exchange for things.

We're already well in the service industry. We think oftentimes that we're still buying "things" but increasingly we're really buying service. Many of the biggest businesses in the world only make things as a means to sell service. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon all have business models based more on services they can deliver than products they produce.

Mowing lawns will probably never be the road to riches, but the landscaping industry is much larger than it was 50 years ago, and it is entirely possible that subscribing to a landscape service could be firmly middle class in a decade or two.

As for the entire concept of "building wealth"--well, that is a pretty abstract concept. What is valuable and counts as wealth has for most of our history had nothing to do with manufacturing. Livestock, harvest yields, land and resources were the main true measures of national wealth for millennium. Only in the past few centuries has manufacturing capacity been a factor in measuring wealth.

Ideas and processes (services) will be predominately how we measure (and create) wealth in the future.