Let’s talk about those economic odds

I

Odd that at the same moment demographic decline in China is leading to the prospect of higher wages there, we witness the counter-prospect of massive unemployment via AI-automation everywhere.

Odd that just at the moment that the North’s techno-solutionism and ethics are called into question by the South, pressures mount that the North, as a matter of justice, fund massive climate adaptation in the South.

Odd that just as we better understand that economic growth is an engine of global environmental destruction, we learn that economic growth has slowed down anyway over the last half century due to the lack of growth in real production and productivity.

Odd that generative AI threatens human creativity precisely at the moment when online cultures, if you take the time to search for them, are “far more inventive and daring than the arts, both formally and in terms of the ideas it presents. Ordinary people, it turns out, are far weirder than artists and writers, and more imaginative too” (Dean Kissick in The Drift).

Odd that just as tolerance of medical error indicates hospitals are not high reliability organizations, so too the fact that the emergency operation centers in major localities are not being activated in response to global climate change indicates the latter is not the climate emergency many think it is.

Odd that the calls for breaking up Big Tech because of its monopoly power and anti-competitive practices are made by those whose goal is nothing like a competitive market society. Odd that current capitalist pathologies are said to arise because the earlier capitalism of market productivity has disappeared.

II

Odd that economists began to agree that the storied perfect competition (all price takers and constant returns to scale) would have undermined entrepreneurial capitalism as actually practiced. Odd that a major winner of always-late capitalism would not have been possible without imperfect competition (some price makers and increasing returns to scale).

Odd that, after all those stories about the rising tide of market liberalization lifting all ships, it turns out that still-liberalized capital markets are associated with rougher seas of financial instability

III

Isn’t it odd that on one hand, conventional economic growth and its national measurements are excoriated for a wide range of sins (promoting environmental destruction, rising inequalities), and yet the very same nations are excoriated for having marginalized vast portions of their populations by excluding them from that economic growth, and measurably so?

Isn’t it odd that on one hand there are more and more calls for revising macroeconomic statistics because they don’t take into account all manner of labor (e.g., care or digital work), while on the other hand we quite sensibly continue to take seriously measured declines in economic growth in developing countries, even though we all know household labor is under-accounted for there.

IV

Odder still that these economic odds are not odder, yet?