Feb
27th
Fri
27th
It’s so, so easy to put off the purchase of a new car. And that makes for a steep ride down, most of all for the geographically distant producers of durable goods. Whether the steep economic plunge is worse in utility terms is debatable but maybe not because wealth buffers are better built up. On the other hand, the presence of so many wonderful free goods allows for easy substitution into activities which do not generate much economic revenue or employment.
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Marginal Revolution: A Great Depression for rich people
The last part about free goods I think is really important. It’s not about the Wired dude’s “Free is the new business blah blah blah” it’s about, there’s a lot of free, cool stuff out there these days that improves our lives in ways that used to require paying someone and that’s awesome, but traditional econ doesn’t know how to measure that (yet).
