The Happy Commonwealth and the Big Black Rocks
Once upon a time, a happy Commonwealth worried that its prosperity would decline if it could not keep increasing the amount of stuff produced per hour worked. This summertime fable is no fairytale.
Once upon a time there was a happy Commonwealth. The people there were prosperous and enjoyed an enviable lifestyle. But deep down, they worried that their prosperity was a matter of luck. They knew that their prosperity would only continue to rise if each year they produced more stuff in every hour they worked. The great and good of this happy Commonwealth were so worried about its ability to keep increasing prosperity that they even founded a special priesthood called the “Stuff Divided by Time Commission”, which would periodically give sermons and write massive tomes on how to keep producing more stuff per hour worked.
The other priesthoods that helped run the happy Commonwealth were very concerned about Stuff Divided by Time as well. The especially powerful and diligent Order of the Interest Rates had noticed that, since the recent plague, the people of the happy Commonwealth were not producing as much per hour as historical experience suggested. Demand, it intoned from its marble-clad tower, was therefore outstripping Supply and must slow.
Some of the other commonwealths, kingdoms and republics were seeing a similar issue. Stuff Divided by Time was growing only slowly. But the Biggest Republic seemed to be unaffected by the slowdown. It was something of a puzzle.
Fortunately, the Order of the Interest Rates was not the only priesthood concerned with this question. With many eyes on the problem, surely the happy Commonwealth would work out what was going wrong with Stuff Divided by Time? A smaller order, notable for its red robes, had been examining the entrails of the Stuff Divided by Time beast, too. Led by a priestess who had recently left the Order of the Interest Rates, they noticed that every country had seen a surge in Stuff Divided by Time during the peak of the plague, and then a slump as things recovered and everyone went back to work. This was because the jobs that were shut down during the plague time were things like baristas and waiters. These were jobs that produced less Stuff per hour than the jobs that continued, because they didn’t tend to involve robots and other machines to the same extent as other jobs did.
When the baristas started working again, it dragged down the average amount of Stuff Divided by Time. The slump was later in the happy Commonwealth because it had opened up after the plague later than the other countries that they compared themselves with most often.
‘That’s true’, replied the Order of the Interest Rates, ‘but surely that effect should have washed through by now. Why was growth in Stuff Divided by Time so weak in the most recent year?’
The Red-robed Order examined the entrails further and noticed some other things.
First, looking through the surge and slump during the plague, things did not look too bad for most of the industries in the happy Commonwealth. In the ‘non-mining market sector’, which accounted for about 70% of all the hours worked, Stuff Divided by Time had risen at an annual rate of 1.4%, the same as the average over the decade to 2017. Since this was the bit that the Order of the Interest Rates should be focusing on, what was the problem?
There was a further wrinkle, the Red-robed Order realised. Over the past year or so, the government of the happy Commonwealth had decided that the most vulnerable citizens needed to be cared for better. This was a good thing on its own terms, and it helped other citizens go out and work as well. As a result, most of the new jobs were caring jobs. The share of hours worked in the ‘non-market’ sector had increased from 24% of the total in 2020 to more than 27% in 2024.
Because these are jobs that involve helping people rather than operating big machines, Stuff Divided by Time was lower for these jobs than most others. It was also hard to measure the amount of Stuff produced in this ‘non-market’ sector, so the Measurement Priesthoods of the world, including in the happy Commonwealth, used a method that assumed that Stuff Divided by Time in these sectors did not grow at all.
This shift in the mix of jobs could only explain a little of the decline in Total Stuff Divided by Time since the peak of the plague. Even more important was that in the past few years, Stuff Divided by Time within the non-market sector had risen and then fallen. This was unusual: normally it didn’t change much at all, because that is how the Measurement Priesthood measured it. The Red-robed Order suspected that there was a ‘barista phenomenon’ going on within the non-market sector, too. The decline in the non-market sector’s Stuff Divided by Time had meant that Total Stuff Divided by Time was about 1.2 percentage points lower since the start of the plague than it otherwise would have been, even allowing for the increase in that sector’s share of the economy.
There was something else going on that the Red-robed Order couldn’t help noticing. Much of the happy Commonwealth’s prosperity came from digging big red rocks and black rocks out of the ground. Mining was dirty, dangerous work, so the workers in those industries used robots and other big machines to do much of it. As a result, the amount of Stuff dug up per hour for these jobs was very high compared with all the other jobs in the happy Commonwealth – around ten times as much!
Recently, though, Stuff Divided by Time in the mining industry had fallen a lot. This was not the first time this had happened. Sometimes the industry spends a few years building new mines. That means that a lot of workers are building the new mines rather than digging up rocks, which lowers Stuff Divided by Time. More recently, though, the mining industry was simply producing less Stuff. In particular, the amount of black rocks being dug up had fallen more than 16% since the start of the plague. This was to be expected – the world had decided that in future it should not use the black rocks as much as it used to, because doing so affected the weather.
This was especially important to the calculation of Total Stuff Divided by Time in the happy Commonwealth, because the part of the industry digging up the black rocks had the highest Stuff Divided by Time of almost every other industry other than oil & gas. Using detailed data from the Measurement Priesthood’s Data Exploration tool, the Red-robed priesthood estimated that if mining sector Stuff Divided by Time had stayed at $900 instead of falling to $750, total Stuff Divided by Time would have increased by 3 percentage points more since the start of the plague than it actually did.
Of course, the happy Commonwealth would still need to pivot to do something other than dig up black rocks if it was to maintain its prosperity. But the mystery of what was happening to Stuff Divided by Time now seemed to be largely solved.
None of that explained why the Biggest Republic was seeing faster growth in Stuff Divided by Time than the rest, though. The Red-robed Order had noticed that many countries, including the happy Commonwealth, had seen surges in population growth following the opening up after the plague. The increase in the Biggest Republic was not as large as elsewhere, even though people there complained about it. Perhaps, the priestess wondered, population – and so hours worked – is being underestimated there because more of the immigration is illegal and so not properly counted. But the Stuff those undercounted workers produced would still turn up somewhere. If that were true, Stuff Divided by Time in the Biggest Republic would be overestimated.
But that was a tale for another day.
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