To pick an example which is both low-stakes and topical: many, probably most, of the 11,000 Facebookers who just got canned, were misallocated. Zuck was just paying them not to work for anyone else, whether that was explicit in his mind (as it was for Brin and Page), or not.
Does that layoff reduce human productivity? Rather the opposite: the majority will be hired by companies which expect them to actually deliver value (not saying FB employees are lazy, far from it, just that they mostly do useless and harmful things), which is good.
As long as we stay out of broken window territory, banning or tax-restricting harmful practices will increase productivity, especially if (as I do) you don't consider actions where the eternality outweighs the profit to be productive.
Obvious example: if California struck down the traditional water rights system and replaced it with auctions, this would do good things for water conservation.
It would also increase the productivity and market value of California's agriculture, I would bet a lot of money on this. The land currently used for alfalfa, an insultingly poor crop for the central valley, would be converted for other uses. The tragedy of alfalfa in California is that it's barely profitable, even with robbing the commons of enormous amounts of water they should have to pay for.
I don’t know where you’re based, but pigs will fly before taxpayers in the United States agree to an 80% environmental income tax.
I already knew it was a pile of dog**, like most (all?) Reality TV show is, but I clearly underestimated how low the bar was.
What socked me the most was the celebration of mindless consumption.
It's hard to believe people watching that want less consumer craps and more clean environment.
I disagree. My suspicion is that the primary driver is marketing, telling people that happiness and self-realizations comes from what you buy rather than what you give/create.
My argument is better made by Adam Curtis in "The Century of the Self" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self which documents marketing over the 20th century.
The basic thesis is that the industrial revolution was so successful at producing goods that it produced more than people were willing to buy. It took tremendous effort to convince people that they should consume more.
> If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink?
But would it? Such a transition would create a massive number of jobs producing the alternatives.
A very small portion of the economy is spent on what people need, 80% of GDP is spent on wants. And if people want a clean environment more than they want the latest consumer crap, that means the clean environment is worth more in dollars, and so cleaning the environment grows the GDP.