Fast Financial Food

I had to steal this shitty graph from a site, because it doesn't come directly from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, but is interesting nonetheless. What it shows is the spending on "out of home" food over the last 40 years against percentage of GDP and the change is stark, where there is essentially a 4x growth.

To put this into perspective, the Australian GDP in 2020 was 1.33 trillion - at the 0.6 percent in the early 80s, it would be around 8 billion spent on takeaway. At the current rate of around 2.3%, it is 30.5 billion. And, to put this further into perspective, the difference would be the same as 22,500 million dollar houses.

Now of course, there is the fact that this is spending, so it is going back into the economy because that is what a consumer market is, but it should be noted that this spending is not generative for the person spending. What I mean by this is that while money is being made by workers for example, the majority of the wealth is generated for owners.

Again, this is a good thing if the owners are invested locally, but that is not the case, especially over the last few decades, where creative accounting practices are taking increasing amounts offshore. Then, factor into it things like advertising revenue, where for example Facebook took in 1.1 billion in Australia, but paid just 24 million in tax, and Google took in 7.2 billion, but paid just 85 million in tax - and you start to recognize the scope of what is actually happening. Google employs less than 1900 people in Australia, which means each employee is generating 3.8 million in revenue, but suffice to say, that isn't close to what they are earning on average.

This is the "problem" with the consumer economy, especially when what is being consumed is *very cheap to generate, like ad revenue. The entire economy is based on "fast food" where there is no economic nutrition involved for those consuming, just the filling of the consumer belly. This means that rather than getting the energy needed to grow financially stronger, it is a degradation into a unhealthy finances and once sitting on the metaphorical couch, completely out of financial shape and energy, it is very, very hard to come back from it.

What would also be interesting to see, is a cross-reference of what percentage of this type of fast food expenditure is made across different income brackets, and what amounts are being spent by age group and other factors, because this will indicate how much "wastage" or potential energy is being shifted from the lower brackets to the higher, reducing the opportunity for the lower, increasing the wealth gap to the higher.

An economy is created by economic behaviors, which are the decisions made by the consumers - demand drives supply - and the culture is to demand "fast food" services in all industries, rather than build up generative businesses that create sustainable economic models. While few seem to understand or believe this, it is our own behaviors that have allowed for this shitshow of an economy to be built, because we have chosen to be renters, rather than owners in every thing that matters. This includes the government structures that we choose as our proxies for decision making.

Things can change, but they aren't going to change through relying on authorities to make decisions that benefit us, because their incentive is firmly in the court of benefiting themselves and the higher end. What this means, is that if we want to have better economic conditions, we have to build a better economy, and that includes the structure that works as the governance layer of the economy. This obviously affects other factors too, like the tax laws that allow for the likes of Facebook and Google to dodge their tax obligations locally.

Essentially, an entire rebuild is required from the ground up, but the challenge is very few are really interested in taking part in that rebuild and instead, they will proxy their power out in the same way that they eat out, rather than utilize their own kitchen. As a result, there will be continued slide into economic illness and dysfunction, making the possibility to change the system even harder, because people have less financial literacy to cook for themselves.

Perhaps it is time, we all got into the kitchen and learned to cook for ourselves.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]