301–310 of 634 posts
What is often forgotten is the hyperdeflation of technology. All your gadges would be worth many millions in pre 2000 dollars. Your car is probably better in many ways than a million dollar car from 1980.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The result has been a pause in income growth in the western world. We've benefited from cheap imported goods, but lost out in domestic growth. Except that's not true. There's been growth; it's just all gone to the very wealthy in the West.
Well, not every western country has horrible income equality. In the US, median disposable income has been pretty flat the past few decades. In Sweden, the median household disposable income doubled in the last 20 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've read our production has more than doubled since the 90's; wages have not.
How much of that is due to automation? Profit margins are also important, especially in a global economy.
This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…
The we in this case being those who have easy access to capital. Those who have seen their wages stagnate or jobs erased could care less about what happens to the citizens in another country when they themselves struggle to put food on the table.
This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…
One big problem is GHW, Clinton, GW and Obama said we’d be able to sell into their market and we’d come up on top. That the middle class would see more and better jobs as a consequence (we’d graduate from arduous manual labor into more value add). That’s been nonsense. Perot was prescient and he was right. But we laughed him off the stage. Instead, big biz, some bankers some dealmakers, politicians and other value ad…
Which was not unexpected, globalization always has losers. But we've failed to help them out.
Virtually every problem listed in this article is solved if bitcoin continues its historic rise - and yet you mention bitcoin on hacker news and you're down-voted to oblivion, it really is unbelievable. The "Elites" are getting richer because capital is being used to accumulate more capital through dividends on stocks and revenue producing assets. The only reason money is being funneled into these assets is because t…
The story of Rome’s fall is both complicated and relatively straightforward yet it eerily resembles America: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues. If all of that sounds familiar, we…
Not to mention they were all poisoned by lead, using it for sweeteners, pipes, and for their chalices and cups.
If I recall correctly, sugar of lead was a poor man's sweetener. The rich could afford honey.
Virtually every problem listed in this article is solved if bitcoin continues its historic rise - and yet you mention bitcoin on hacker news and you're down-voted to oblivion, it really is unbelievable. The "Elites" are getting richer because capital is being used to accumulate more capital through dividends on stocks and revenue producing assets. The only reason money is being funneled into these assets is because t…
Do you really think the elite would accept any threat to the status quo without a fight? Besides, even if you were to somehow succeed, the scarcity of bitcoin would just be the new elite. Bitcoin ownership is already incredibly concentrated. Meet your new boss, same as old boss.
If they are too old and weak to fight, yes. And given the already decades-old, protracted stagnation of wages this will inevitably happen.
This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…
In a knowledge economy, the winner takes all, and that means more and more education is required to play in the big leagues, even as the big leagues become the only game in town. I believe only aggressive wealth and income redistribution like universal basic income can prevent a dystopian future of stark inequality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misinterpreted the grammar. "In the West, it's just all gone to the very wealthy" is the intent. Not "All the growth in the world has gone to the wealthy in the West."
"In the West, it's just all gone to the very wealthy" is also a claim that is broad, hard to define, and is empty without evidence. Of course those who pay attention to these sorts of things know that the reality is more complex than that, even if you limit your analysis to "The West," which isn't a unified bloc. See the differences exhibited by the change in income inequality by these nations: https://ourworldindata…
Kind of, but the trends are similar if the magnitudes are somewhat different. States with more distributive policies have less inequality, surprise surprise.
> Even if the grandparent was worded too vaguely to communicate the poster's actual point, the grandparent turned out to be making a statement that was too low resolution to actually communicate anything beyond hand-waving anti-Capital rhetorical sentiment.
I guess technically that's true, but it's also not far off. Because the West is back into relatively low growth, capital's influence is growing [2]. When you consider the only way to get capital is income or returns on capital, this is a simple recipe for inequality growing. And it indeed is the likely trend without (again surprise surprise) more redistribution policies [3].
[1]: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/14/oligarchy-on-ice.html
[2]: https://voxeu.org/article/capital-back
[3]: https://voxeu.org/article/new-globalisation-and-income-inequ...
