>The premise of this argument is false. Pre-agriculture people were food supply constrained. Nobody is audiobook or other entertainment supply constrained today.
your premise is not false, but your conclusions are. see "indifference curves" in econ 101, and Pareto optimality.
We take consumer preferences as a given, because I don't know why you choose not to spend all of your money on the best and most pure essentials for life, but instead take some amount of your money and buy alcohol or skateboards or any of a number of other downright dangerous inessential things that you enjoy. You even pay money to GP to listen to his audio books when you could read them yourself and make money selling your own recordings. We don't know why you behave the way you do, but that's your choice. Given that you pay money for GP's audiobooks, if computer generated audiobooks drove the price down to zero, that would give you more money for alcohol; and it would give the rest of the economy a worker, GP, who could now participate in creating other products you'd probably want to buy (maybe dangerous jet-suits?) with the extra money you've saved on audiobooks.
We don't need to figure out how everybody wants to spend their time or their money, people figure that out for themselves and markets emerge to accomodate them.
We do need to figure out where the negative externalities lie, which you are attempting to do but knowing what qualities mark them as externalities will help you effectuate change by working with the market instead of failing against the market.
your premise is not false, but your conclusions are. see "indifference curves" in econ 101, and Pareto optimality.
We take consumer preferences as a given, because I don't know why you choose not to spend all of your money on the best and most pure essentials for life, but instead take some amount of your money and buy alcohol or skateboards or any of a number of other downright dangerous inessential things that you enjoy. You even pay money to GP to listen to his audio books when you could read them yourself and make money selling your own recordings. We don't know why you behave the way you do, but that's your choice. Given that you pay money for GP's audiobooks, if computer generated audiobooks drove the price down to zero, that would give you more money for alcohol; and it would give the rest of the economy a worker, GP, who could now participate in creating other products you'd probably want to buy (maybe dangerous jet-suits?) with the extra money you've saved on audiobooks.
We don't need to figure out how everybody wants to spend their time or their money, people figure that out for themselves and markets emerge to accomodate them.
We do need to figure out where the negative externalities lie, which you are attempting to do but knowing what qualities mark them as externalities will help you effectuate change by working with the market instead of failing against the market.