Posted By: SteamyTeaI was thinking more of just a single tractor unit that picks up one or two pods, rather than a single unit that picks up multiple pods. The saving being in the mass that has to be moved about between pickups. And the customisableness of them.

Personal pods would need places to live, i.e. parking spaces. Many of those would be off road, maybe even in garages (where the personal car no longer is). Wouldn't that greatly complicate the process (sometimes the transit unit might even need to temporarily decouple a unit it already had, in order the be manoeuvrable enough to pick up an additional pod from a garage or driveway)?

For on street parking, you can parallel park a motorised unit, so they are nose to tail with restively small gaps but probably not a pod (counter to that though, pods would probably be shorter)?

Don’t believe it,

Companies move most jobs into city centers so they get as large choose of workers as possible.

Lot of people like to live in “nice areas” away from the city center.

Houses are cheaper if they are a long distance from the city center.

The distance someone is willing to live form work is depending on the commuting time (and cost), so if it becomes quicker to commute some people choose to live a greater distance from work.

Therefore without “road charging” traffic jams will remain for commuting however many new roads we build, or improvements to the usage of the current roads we make.

UK productivity is not increasing - this is an established problem. So talk of 'hyper productivity' is sadly misplaced.

http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=1730

At present I think China is mostly feeling the limit to demand in the west. To give one example, as they made TVs cheaper, people upgraded their TVs more often hence creating more demand for TVs, but there is a limit to how often someone will upgrade their TVs funded on their credit card.

China has expanded its production on the bases that demand will keep growing at a fast rate, therefore they now have empty factories.

Re-shoring has hardly started yet, just wait until there is a robot that can sew better then a person with a sewing machine!

China is feeling the effects of its own success - rapid growth as the world's low wage workshop, now expectations and wages rising while China's own robots get cheaper and cleverer. Robot factories now cheaper-production than human sweatshops - and those robot factories can be anywhere, not tied to low wage regions. China is robotising as fast as possible, but unemployment set to rise and rise, robotisation's reciprocal. China no longer workshop of the world, but competing on equal footing with all other locations, both 'emerging' and old-west. Re-shoring/robotisation won't help western economies much, won't be providing employment, won't be paying wages, just propping up multinationals for a bit longer, selling cheaper and cheaper stuff, thus in the same act hastening the collapse of capitalism's profits.

Well, it's not a 'hard' empirically observed science, like Physics, or even a 'soft' one like Biology, though some (but not all) Economists would dispute that. It's a number of political belief systems - take your pick.

The mainstream one is almost un-updated from the time of its twin theory, Darwin's Evolution, despite the discovery of Ecology since then - 'The law of the jungle (ecosystem) is survival of those that fit in'.

Some say Economics is the 'science' of humans making rational self-interested choices (as if that's what humans do) but technology-aided capitalism, in pursuing its own logic, is quite rapidly eliminating humans from both the production and the consumption sides of the equation.

Looks like Economics will work even better without pesky human involvement.

Posted By: SteamyTeaBiology is a real science.

Certainly, but vastly disconnected from the simple elegant universal laws of Physics and (some say) Economics.

Posted By: SteamyTeahumans are not rational actors in the environment

How then can laws like supply and demand operate, if humans aren't rational about it? Perhaps Economics says humans may not be rational, but are predictable, en masse? I think that would depend on great special-case selectivity of evidence (actually, has anyone ever verified the laws of economics empirically, bouble-blind, repeatable etc?)

Posted By: SteamyTea

Posted By: fostertom[technology-aided capitalism] is quite rapidly eliminating humans from both the production and the consumption sides of the equation

Then that is an evolutionary dead end.

Yup, but that won't be the end of human evolution - we will just do 'something else', keyword 'collaborative' (rather than atomised competitive). Economics may either turn itself inside out, or that name will die and be replaced by someting radically different in both content and nature.

Great graphs - over what period? Starting perhaps in the depths of the 2008 recession? What account taken of the subdividing and part-timing of previous 'good' factory jobs, in the present no-rights gig economy, which enables govts to say 'more jobs than ever' (along with moving the unemployment-definition goalposts)?

So if they think Economics is a science, they don't understand it? I agree. So what is it then?

Posted By: gravelldBut taken as a whole it's a social science.

Yes, and that is still work in progress. It has shed some light on interesting human behaviour (Milgram and his envelopes, a very repeatable test).
Tom, if you start to think of 'value' as a tradeable commodity, rather than every item having a nominal price, you may start to see a different picture emerging from economic theories.
So different people can, and do, put a different value on the same product, even of the price is the same. A teenage may see a Ford Fiesta a a route to freedom, a working mother may see it as a reliable workhorse and a pensioner as something to block up country lanes with. They would all have paid the same price for it.
This becomes even more strange and less rational if you look at services. Many people use entertainment services and pay quite a bit for them. Most of those services are also available for nothing from other sources. So why do some people pay and others not. I don't have a TV, so don't have to buy a TV license, and as of today, I cannot legally watch the BBC iPlayer. But it only takes a few minutes on Youtube to find many of the programs I like, or I could hunt around the dark web and download just about anything. So I have swapped instant and easy viewing at a price, for delayed viewing for free. Why, because I don't value TV that highly (radio is different).