That optimization that makes everything fragile is why people can afford the quality of life that they do. You can't have a serious discussion about buying local at a macroeconomic level without an accompanying serious discussion about cost.
I hear about the cost rising but I guess it still doesn't compute for me. My mom paid for college by having a side-job working at the phone company back in the 70s. There's no planet on which a student would make the money required to pay for college in-full with a part-time job.
Outside of the bubble that is HN tech workers - wages have stagnated. The wealth being generated is severely concentrated at the very top. I think your average person walking down the street would gladly exchange their $2 gallon of milk for a $4 gallon of milk if they had a $40k/year salary vs. their current $7/hr.
Part of this is that before the 1970s, the US minimum wage was set so that a full-time job would keep you above the poverty line. People could raise a family, pay a mortgage, etc. on a minimum wage job.
That relationship was broken, but not the assumption that if you are poor, you are lazy.
What this is really doing is providing welfare to all the companies paying below-poverty wages - the taxpayers pay for benefits to allow the workers in those positions to live, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits.
The portion of GDP going to wages has almost never been lower than it is now [1]
It is about corporate regulatory capture redesigning the economy for corporate wealth extraction and not for the benefit of the citizens.
I really hate when people do this. Those are totally different scales, and it's not obvious how they compare.
According to this converter [0] (and ignoring specific differences between wage and salary like overtime), using the defaults of 40-hour work week and 50-week year (to account for holidays):
I think the ultimate goal is to trade efficiency (and the resulting "quality of life") for sustainability. I also believe our civilization is at a point where we have to seriously consider trading off convenience and material wealth for increased sustainability anyway, due to the increasing impact of some wicked problems such as climate change.
It would be inflationary, as less efficient local labor would also require more workers and higher wages. Food costs would go up but the money would be more contained locally as well. Net net I think it would decrease some consumptions, but perhaps leading to a more sustainable model overall.
