I’m not saying you are wrong, but everyone working less and being richer is an outcome, not a policy. How do you think we should achieve that? Making higher quality goods sounds like it would take more work, not less.
It’s all very well saying “we could just”, but how would you bring about this change? How do you persuade people to want different things and make different choices? That’s the interesting question.
Whole discussion was started because your question "how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford" seems nonsensical. How? With increased production. Increasing production is not a problem.
With automation or employing more people. We are not at a full production capacity now, we could produce more, but we don't because there is no demand currently for more.
The US had close to full employment. Two thirds of the unemployed find a job within 6 months, they’re not really unemployed just between jobs. Of course there are spots of higher unemployment due structural reasons that need addressing, but at the macro scale their just not going to to make an even fractional change. Not the mass scale global transformation your talking about. China is running out of in tapped labour too.
Production is expanding elsewhere in SE Asia but those countries are much smaller and taking time and a lot of capital to ramp up.
Where are all these new workers going to come from, and if they could work productively already why aren’t they?
> Where are all these new workers going to come from, and if they could work productively already why aren’t they?
Why would they work more productively if that is not needed? They would have to make more things, which people wouldn't buy because there is overproduction. If you have order for 1000 items every week, you make 1000 items every week, even when you could make 5000 items every week. You can slow your production line, this way workers are more relaxed and you have time for maintenance. It's not like every employee out there is used at 100% utilisation, that would not be sustainable. Many times you employ as many people as you can just because it's cheaper than using more automation. If you need to produce more and can't find employes, you can pay them more. If you can't find enough employes at all, that means price per employee is so high that you can now employ some robots. Yeah, it takes time, but global change in time of employment is also not going to happen overnight.
> Also how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford
So, we provided more products to people who now have money. And now you are asking "Who will pay". Well, the people who now have the money to pay for it? That was the reason for increased production in the first place?
It’s all very well saying “we could just”, but how would you bring about this change? How do you persuade people to want different things and make different choices? That’s the interesting question.