Besides the pure cost savings of public services, I'd love to know about the second-order economics effects: the growth of the tax base, the founding of more small businesses and the increase in economic activity due to people (rightly or wrongly) feeling safer on the streets. One can imagine startups run by former homeless who have a unique perspective due to their experiences, or who have discovered inexpensive solutions to problems, or who simply would be the type to start a company if they hadn't hit some bad luck at some point.
Agree. Macroeconomic effects are things that are often ignored by the public as a whole, but are so essential to understanding what's happening, both historically / politically and on our scale, where we're trying to build a startup that matters.
Is the well-being a result of a strong economy or vice versa? You seem to assume directionality that might be the opposite. Perhaps workers not fearful of losing their healthcare if they leave their jobs are more productive, or do more broad schooling because there is less pressure to immediately start making money to avoid poverty, and this leads to more productivity or innovation.
It might change who gets to be an industrial economy versus who gets to be a services economy, but start-ups can sprout up just as well in one as in the other - although they're obviously going to be different start-ups focusing on different sets of opportunities.
Basic economists' definition: opportunity cost. If the government spends a dollar and gets a worse result than the dollar would have gotten if it stayed in the private sector, then the economy is worse off. (That includes what the dollar would have bought, and any damage to incentives to work/save/innovate/invest/buy capital/take risks/etc that came from collecting that dollar from its previous owner.)
Of course, if you want to reinvigorate the economy, you'd do better to do something about the bureaucracy first - you know, the bureaucracy that requested stool samples from the guy who wanted to run a (bottled-)olive-oil export website.
In an economy where money fell in bags from helicopters from the sky, wouldn't you expect net makers and street sweeping trucks to experience drastic growth?
The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.
A transfer from luxuries might correct a social imbalance, but a transfer from investments to basic goods and services might have a negative impact on the overall health of the economy.
Also, many 'luxuries' are things that eventually become things we need (Tesla Motors?).
Having said that, I Am Not An Economist, so it's possible I Know Nothing.
Beyond the product side of the economy, which is fascinating to me in it's own right (for some of the reasons you mentioned), the service economy around room rental, sales positions for goods and modeling services are just as interesting as well (let alone the complications of exchange rate, credit inflation, and other economic concerns).
I understand the economics concept. I'm not sure WeWork was a great example it had significant other challenges such as a self-dealing founder and, frankly, a poor long term model.
I would wager that the concept needs a bit of a refresh as historically it has referred to high capital costs for the production of a hard good though in this case there is more than just a good produced theres a fair bit of influence and power associated with the good and a ton of downstream businesses that are reliant upon it if it goes according to plan.
"Economic upsides" are directly related to the values assigned. If no value is assigned to death and trauma, it's quite possible that a net positive is recorded by knocking down a bunch of old building and highways and rebuilding them.
However, if we decide to jump-start economic development by knocking down infrastructure and rebuilding it, I'd suggest we make sure buildings and freeways are empty of human beings first.
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