The new Cato eBook on understanding the growth slowdown

You are not listed as one of the contributors on the Cato page, or in the table of contents on the Amazon page. Are you in there in terms of someone else citing your work?

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Having gone back to first principles, economies are closed systems that must sum to zero, I see the problem being the four decades of relentless effort to cut labor costs as the problem.

Cut labor costs, and you cut gdp (growth).

The growth that has occurred has been by time shifting labor costs forward in time by way of debt. While in earlier eras, labor cost has equalled consumption, with one person’s savings paying the labor cost of consumption for another that is repaid in later years, say a middle age worker with a house paying off the mortgage to support the older generation in old age and increasingly saving money that pays for the labor costs of a younger worker’s home, or potentially the shifting of stored labor cost, the house, from one generation to another by selling the older house at real labor cost.

But what I’ve seen is an increasing number of people going deeper in debt as they go through life, depending on assets inflating to far above their real labor costs to fund more debt to fund consumption in excess of their labor cost, which is of course their income.

In the 21st century, workers of all ages were in the aggregate drained of all savings, with many owing payment of past consumed labor costs, meaning they need to be a labor cost to someone for possibly decades, into their 70s. But lots of economists declare them to be labor costs to be eliminated, but that means they default on debt, plus are forced to cut consumption.

Without consumption, there can be no gdp, unless production is exported with labor costs being paid from other nations.

I know that labor value economics is disliked, but where else does the money for consuming gdp, for savings to fund capital investment, etc come from if not from labor costs. It’s zero sum. TANSTAAFL

I haven’t done more than read the intro which outlines the sections, but I see no hint that any reference is made to the growth killing efforts to cut labor costs. Productivity growth is generally code for cutting labor costs.

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