Economic regression: Are we poorer?
Published: 2008-06-29
Category: Scribbles
Tags: history, world, economics
Language: [English]
page views: 465



The other day I was reading in the "El Mercurio" newspaper about the problems that young people in the Europe face with financing them selfs and the social consequence of staying at home longer and longer. It talks about jobs being forever "temporary". That the younger generation cannot find stable work that will allow them independence, while their parents at the same age were able to start their lives without much trouble.

This made me think. We are thought that income is related to productivity, if a economy is more productive, it will become more wealthy, since in the same amount of time or resources it can generate more goods or services to sell.

So, what's going on? Does this mean that in the last 30 to 40 years production has gone down? That in the '60s and '70s production was higher then it is now? That all the advances since then, all the improvements, have had a negative effect on productivity?

Sure we had the oil crisis of the '70s, but besides that, most world economies have been advancing steadily. Nothing like the 30's crisis happend. So thinking that productivity has going down, that just doesn't make sense. So if it isn't that? What's going on?

The only explanation I can think of, is that there is more wealth, it's just much less equally distributed then it was 30 years ago. That would make sense.