It's a good idea, but you're taking an industry in isolation and suggesting the employees displaced from it cannot be re-deployed.
You make the point that agriculture will expand to take up some of the slack - but agriculture is mostly "resource" and food mostly "goods", to a first approximation (though in our current mode of production, "agriculture" seems to be "goods", too, fuelled by fossil carbon as "resource" like everything else).
Others make the point that the service sector can be expanded and that is true. in fact, I see the expansion of the service sector and, more generally, of white-collar work, as an indicator of the extent to which the economy is already (and has been for decades) trying to cope with chronic unemployment in the agricultural and blue-collar (industrial) sectors. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Not really. This is in the same ballpark as the classic "guns or butter" examples. In this case, "gasoline" is a stand-in for "resources" and "automobiles" is a stand-in for "manufactured goods".
Almost, but not quite. "Oil in the barrel" is a manufactured good. The underlying raw materials are "oil in the ground," "man-hours," "iron ore in the ground," etc.
In fact, everything that shows up in our national accounting as economic activity is manufactured goods or services. Because the production of raw materials (the replenishment of fish stock in the sea, the growth of trees in the forest) are, by definition, not counted as an economic activity. And raw materials are not counted as assets in the national balance sheet (just as public infrastructure is usually not counted as an asset in the national balance sheet).
But the argument still generalises trivially to an arbitrary number of dimensions.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
