Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Ownership and Output in Excess Nominal Claims

Excess nominal income claims are too common in local service markets which are not discretionary. Governments and special interests alike tend to limit these options, thereby reducing effective management for both our personal obligations and physical environments. If this unfortunate circumstance weren't enough, excess claims in these areas are starting to impact monetary policy as well.

Our potential for ownership and personal responsibility are sorely compromised, when too many markets for basic life needs are narrowly defined. The markets most affected are those involving human capital, skill potential and housing. Alas, these are now mostly intended for the use of higher income groups. What's left for ownership potential, includes traditional housing (with its legal benefits of family inheritance), financial markets for the traditional capital of wealth building, and the formal institutions which now link human capital to status and monetary gain. All of these are associated with equilibrium imbalance and excess nominal claims. 

How might one think about this? What's most affected includes the framing of artificial scarcity. Recently a gap has opened between aggregate nominal income and the output of GDP. Might this gap have been induced by purposeful reduced output (artificial scarcity), while maintaining similar levels of income expectations? And how does artificial scarcity contrast with natural scarcity for such correlations? After all, when income is derived from production via natural scarcities, existing output is more likely close to what is feasible and consistent with equilibrium or GDP potential. Perhaps due in part to the contributions of production via natural scarcities, nominal income has closely mirrored aggregate output for quite some time.

I'd like to think that production reform for non traditional housing and applied human capital, could help diminish the unexpected gap between aggregate income and GDP output. Non traditional housing options and horizontal alignment for services coordination, could lead to good deflation. Eventually such reform could lead to better equilibrium balance with other sources of wealth.

Indeed we've been fortunate that equilibrium imbalance can take centuries to become a macroeconomic problem. It's interesting how Adam Smith worried about equilibrium imbalance in his framing of"productive" and "unproductive" workers (Wealth of Nations), before the closely related Baumol effect became a legitimate concern. Perhaps the fact this process took so long to evolve, is what makes it difficult to relate to in the present.

Just the same, much is at stake. We need to recognize and respond to the burdens imposed by the expectations of our domestic services markets. Should we instead elect not to change anything, even the best NGDP monetary policy scenario would eventually lead to less applied knowledge for societies in the decades to come. Excess nominal claims with no other market options, would mean a gradual loss of our capacity to fulfill the challenges of a modern economy. It's time to consider building a future on more viable and sustainable terms.

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