Well, except for the unemployed people who're the starting point of this whole discussion.
Fundamentally, even if we can keep finding more jobs for people to do, is that what we want? We keep buying ever more frivolous and unnecessary trinkets, egged on by expensive marketing ('The perfect gift!'). Then when money is tighter, we remember that we can actually be quite happy without all that, and jobs that were sustained by producing cheap tat dry up.
At some point, the sum of human happiness must be increased by having more leisure time, not by inventing yet more economic activity. But our society is structured so that, if we reduce labour needs by 10%, 10% of the workforce are left with nothing to do, and the other 90% resent the 'scroungers'. You can see this in the 'makers vs. takers' rhetoric of some politicians.
What if we could, instead, share the available work out so that everyone did 10% less work? Obviously that would be very difficult, but it's something to aim for, as an alternative to the constant hunt for jobs.
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say the current rise in unemployment might have something to do with the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. One triggered by a giant real estate bubble and financial "engineering" that was, at best, criminally negligent. And a current incomprehensible fashion for "austerity".
You've also created a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between massive unemployment and a spiral of consumerism. People can do other things with their time.
What's happening in food is a fine example. People are intentionally spending more money on slow food, on organic food, on local growth and production. That's creating a lot of jobs. And even better, a lot of entrepreneurs.
We aren't out of growth opportunities until we're out of problems. Education, the environment, entertainment, the arts, parks, public safety: all have problems that people want to fix. The solution to increasing wealth isn't to force people to work less; it's to find valuable things for everybody to do.
Food is an interesting case. People are, in a way, turning industrialism backwards - making a conscious choice to support economic 'inefficiency', in part because of the social problems we feel it has brought about. I'll have to think more about that kind of 'slow capitalism'.
I was of course playing devil's advocate to an extent. I agree with you that there's still plenty of important things to be done. I note, though, that most of the problems you list aren't going to be solved by cutting back and hoping to stimulate for-profit corporations. Market forces aren't going to fix the environment, for example.
Some people have proposed a 'green new deal', a major increase in government spending to tackle those kinds of problems and provide jobs. I'm not qualified to say whether that would work, and at the moment it seems to be politically impossible to even discuss.
I agree with you that many problems aren't currently fixable by existing markets, which is often why the problems are still problems. But a lot of environmental problems go away when you stop allowing negative externalities and treat them as market problems. Overfishing, for example, has a bunch of great examples of improvement. The same is true for pollution markets.
Positive externalities are harder to fix with markets. Improving society's level of education, for example, benefits everybody; it's not clear who to charge.
But I certainly agree that existing politics in the US makes it hard to solve any of these things. Or even admit that there are problems. I look forward to the pendulum swinging back toward sanity.
Well, except for the unemployed people who're the starting point of this whole discussion.
Fundamentally, even if we can keep finding more jobs for people to do, is that what we want? We keep buying ever more frivolous and unnecessary trinkets, egged on by expensive marketing ('The perfect gift!'). Then when money is tighter, we remember that we can actually be quite happy without all that, and jobs that were sustained by producing cheap tat dry up.
At some point, the sum of human happiness must be increased by having more leisure time, not by inventing yet more economic activity. But our society is structured so that, if we reduce labour needs by 10%, 10% of the workforce are left with nothing to do, and the other 90% resent the 'scroungers'. You can see this in the 'makers vs. takers' rhetoric of some politicians.
What if we could, instead, share the available work out so that everyone did 10% less work? Obviously that would be very difficult, but it's something to aim for, as an alternative to the constant hunt for jobs.