I just received a review copy of her new book. I’ve enjoyed her work in the past, and I am optimistic about this one.
Given my recent interest, I looked in the index for “consumer surplus.” There is one entry, which leads to a discussion of consumer surplus in the context of the Internet, where we know that there is a lot of free (non-material) stuff available.
My point is that even without the Internet, there is a lot of consumer surplus. Think about anesthetic for surgery, antibiotics for infections, indoor plumbing, heating and air conditioning, automobile driving, washing machines, electric lighting, and so on.
Ok, all those things happened well before the 80s which is when the secstags started. Consumers and producers got a surplus, likely well balanced.
Can we rephrase the consumer surplus question to: “What would you pay to avoid having to only use tech from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s?”
Is it similar to ask: “Given an optimal set of goods purchased, how much would you pay to keep $100,000 of goods instead of $50K’s worth?”
And from a quality of life perspective, how often does the consumer surplus maximizing set of purchases drastically change as one’s purchasing power increases from $50K to $100K?
It would be cool to have a map of the sets per purchasing power level, as I’m probably suboptimally allocated. I guess this is where Bryan would say “Have more kids!” 😉