A previous comment by me:
I'm trying to say something like: When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732
I'm trying to figure out how to write more about that and mostly failing.
Though I do like your idea of investing in infrastructure. I'm trying to figure out how to provide planning and economic development resources and services to small communities and I really appreciate your observation as food for thought for that effort.
Nevertheless, I do think we know (for the most part) what is going on. It's just that we reached feudal times again (never left them?), where decisions are made by our rulers and as long as the great ruler of america and the great ruler of china are friends, then there is no war. And everything else is waged on the backs of 'The People'. Or something.
On a more serious note, the above comment mentions a job guarantee. That is part of Kelton's MMT proposal. There are two things I don't like about it:
1. MMT is called a theory, but it's actually a descriptive model, and it has shown in the last 3 decades, that it is quite the acurate model. 2. Kelton conflates what MMT teaches us about monetary politics and fiat currencies with her own agenda, namely the job guarantee. And it's hard to argue against the latter, when you acknowledge the first. And that is only possible, because MMT is called a 'theory'.
Nevertheless, I believe you are right DoreenMichele, that we as humans should never stand still. I don't think I could 'not work'. As such a universal job guarantee or public programs are scary to me, because although I like work and won't stop anytime soon, I feel like this will be abused by politicians to cement long working hours. And while I do like work, I think less working hours per person is what we should thrive for. This is a conflict in my head.
I am a fan of UBI, because I don't see myself stopping to work anytime soon, and it would have just relieved me of a lot of stress when I grew up with basically nothing. At the same time, I can see that there are jobs people might not pick up if they had sufficient UBI. Thus these jobs need MUCH higher pay. Because the people doing them (mostly) do them out of passion.
Where does it lead us? Unfortunately where we have always been: the very classical class fight. It's not a grand conspiracy theory, there is no one controlling entity with one mind, but in general laws and law making are skewed towards "havers". Which you might as well just call our new feudal lords.
And until we put up some sorts of guards against (too much) abuse of power, dismantling of democracy, opaque deal-making and abusement of the planet's resources (especially without pay or even subsidized) I don't see it ending anytime soon.
Inflation is merely the rise in price when demand exceeds supply. Since consumer inflation is dead it follows that there is an abundance of goods, primarily because companies have access to a lot of capital but they don't have to deploy that capital in the USA or Europe and actually employ workers there. They can simply deploy it in countries with low labor costs. In principle that is perfectly fine because countries like India and China deserve to grow but in practice it means that a lot of the money printing is completely misguided. It's like taking the wrong medicine. It won't cure you but you will still suffer from side effects. The end result is a lot of overalued stocks without any of the economic performance to justify their market cap.
Instead of a UBI it would make sense to have jobs programs that invest into public infrastructure like road maintenance or into the power grid. Those jobs cannot be shipped away to another country and they are the type of "busywork" that is actually useful without directly competing with private industry.