AI, Trade Wars, Degrowth: What's Next for the Global Economy?

You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. Hey everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. As usual, I'm your host, Michael Shermer, to introduce today's guest and topic, economics, capitalism, and so on. I'm going to read a opening page from my book, The Mind of the Market, and then I'm going to read a current uh a recent speech from Bernie Sanders. Living along the Orinoco River that borders Brazil and Venezuela are the Yanamamo people, hunter-gatherers whose average annual income has been estimated at the equivalent of about $100 per person per year.

If you walked into a Yanamamo village and counted up the stone tools, baskets, arrow points, arrow shafts, bows, cotton yarn, cotton and vine, hammocks, clay pots, assorted other tools, various medicinal remedies, pets, food products, articles of clothing, and the like, you'd end up with a figure of around three hundred. Before ten thousand years ago, this was the approximate wealth of every village on the planet. If our species is about 100,000 years old, then 90% of our history was spent in this state of relative economic simplicity. Living along the Hudson River that borders New York and New Jersey are the Manhattan people, consumer traders whose average annual income has been estimated at $40,000 per year. per person per year.

This was in 2008, I wrote that. So this is probably, I think it's about 65,000 a year now in Manhattan. If you walked into the Manhattan village and counted up all the different products available at retail stores and restaurants, factory outlets and superstores, you'd end up with a figure of about 10 billion. Something happened over the last 10,000 years to increase the average annual income of hunter gatherers by about 500 times. As remarkable as this jump in income is, it pales in comparison to the different kinds of stock stock keeping units, SKUs or SKUs, which is a retail measure of the types of products available in a store.

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