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Means to escape from bracket of being born in some no-name Belgium city to California, sure. Means of escaping from a savage country no one even knows the name of? Haha, no. Most people that escape from worst countries don't escape on the basis of merit, but luck.
or money/connections/asylum?
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He just lost 25% of his money.
How was it "his" money?
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The fact that something is 'not a crime' does not mean it can not be obviously wrong.
I don't agree. Why are you so sure that you know what is obviously right and obviously wrong? That is a viewpoint which is both arrogant, and also has no objective grounding to talk about.
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It does make you wonder what the inflation-adjusted figures are purported to mean even, given that they result in completely ridiculous results. By contrast, an inflation calculator tells me that $100 one hundred years ago is worth around $2,500 now (so 25X). And according to this article https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab... , a pretty typical wage back then was $0.50 per hour. 25X that is…
Inflation is usually measured as the change over time in the prices of a "representative" basket of goods (and which goods in which proportion is a pretty subjective choice). Over time, the costs of particular goods diverge a lot, especially with respect to wages, and how important those goods are to the economy also varies a lot. The purchasing power of a typical weekly wage in 1800 or 1637 looks very different depe…
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I don't agree. Why are you so sure that you know what is obviously right and obviously wrong? That is a viewpoint which is both arrogant, and also has no objective grounding to talk about.
Murder, slavery, child molestation... some things are obviously wrong. If you feel that you need a societal framework to determine whether those are wrong or not then there is an ethical issue.
The Mississippi Company was never really worth $6.5T in any meaningful sense. Unlike Dutch East India, Mississippi was purely a speculative bubble. It only hit that value for a few weeks at the end before the whole thing imploded.
South sea company too. That said, you could make a similar case about apple. If you measure by dividends, I think the VOC's lead over all those companies grows by a lot.