More Info than Brains

The first thing I ever learned about economics was that no one (and I mean no one), has any idea what’s going on. Thinking back to my first Macro Econ class in college, the first six weeks was spent learning an economic model, and then we showed up for week seven and the professor said, “okay, so that’s one theory … now we’re going to learn the exact opposite … um, it might work this way instead, we’re not really sure.”

To which I replied, “Okay, you go home, figure this whole thing out, and then come back and teach it to me. I’m going across the hall to learn how to read minds – they have that pretty well nailed.”

So, since apparently the requirement for developing a new economic model is simply literacy, and in light of the financial “experts” loaning a metric ass-ton of money to people who they knew couldn’t afford to pay them back, and are now acting all surprised and are now borrowing our money … I think I have the right to publish my own macro economic model.

Poo Poo Economics
by Anonymous Literate Dude on the Internet

The basis of the Poo Poo Economic model is, you guessed it, poop. The concept is, that unlike matter, energy, or Carrot Top, value can be created or destroyed. Marx liked to say that the addition of labor was where the value came from, and that’s fairly true, except that his definition of labor was all crapped up, and his plan on how to manage it was lacking.

The idea is that humans take in X amount of stuff (food, beer, condoms) and remove the value from them through digestion and butt-sexing, and produce the considerably less valuable bi-products of poop, pee, and baby food. Under capitalism (of which I am a fan), the idea is that for every 10 units of stuff that goes into a human, that human can add value to raw materials (soil, hopps, latex) through labor to create more units of value than they consumed. Through technology we’ve been able to increase that yield … cool.

So now we have a surplus of valuable stuff as compared with how much poop we’re making. This is a good place to be. We like that, because we can up consumption, drink more beer, make more butt-sexing, and poop all we want. Good times.

Since this is More Info Than Brains, I’m going to place blame on idiots wasting their money on the Internet for the current collapse. See, when someone blows a few hundred million of their surplus stuff on an Internet Startup, those units of stuff are converted into poop by laborers who, in most startups cases, aren’t adding any value. So, where we once had considerably more valuable stuff than poop, we now have the crap piling up like crazy, and we’re still eating more valuable stuff than we’re collectively producing.

Eventually, we drown in shit.

To solve this, the United States has to start making things. Real things, that are more valuable than whatever it was before we added our labor to them. That’s not to say that computers, and some information services aren’t value-added items, and pursuing some number of them is important. However, the amount of assumption, and careless spending on improbable value needs to be well below the more sure-value industries.

We need to get production back above consumption, and the good news is that we don’t have to consume less … we just need to produce more stuff that someone actually wants to consume.

*note: I realize this is a poop-based description of GDP, but the jackasses calculating the US GDP are the same people who loaned money sub-prime and thought it was a decent idea. I bet they also count programming a website as value added.