Stephen Monrad

The majority of the goods and services the economy delivers aren’t hard to produce. Well established technologies are responsible for the bulk of production. If you want to grow wheat, you can find equipment and techniques that will get the job done. If you want to smelt iron ore, there are lots of people who can design and build a smelter for you. Building a car takes a lot of steps. However, each step is easy.

Once you set your mind to producing a particular good or service, your chances of being successful are high. Sure, things can go wrong. They always do. However, a little bit of trouble shooting can usually sort things out.

If it isn’t hard to produce things, why is it that economies have a hard time producing the things people need? The answer, I think, is that it is too difficult to figure out what it is that people actually want. Figuring out what people want to buy is harder than making them. If we could somehow find easier ways to figure out what it is that people want to buy, our productivity could increase dramatically.

We wouldn’t need to spend so much time and energy selling and marketing products. We wouldn’t waste our time making things that aren’t needed. What we need is clearer signals for what is going to sell well.

I don’t care about prices so much. If the price of something is high, I can still easily lose money if I decide to produce it. I may not be able to break into the market. I would rather know that what I make will sell at ordinary prices than gamble producing something for potentially high profits. Modern free market economies don’t give clear signals on what will sell. That’s the problem that prevents us from being as productive as we could be.