781–790 of 961 posts
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or early enough $1,000 invested in AMZN is now worth over $1M. or $10 in Bitcoin would have done the trick.
Do you understand how poor some people are?
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Great comment! Def made me think alot. Seems you can replace your entire argument with crypto. Money printer goes brrr, money gets locked in crypto, does nothing for the economy, leading to massive inequality. Crypto can be though of as "Savings" in your analogy. BTC might cause a economic meltdown if $10T gets locked in'Savings'.
Even without a money printer and everyone mass adopted bitcoin, massive inequality would still ensue. This is because Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. Both inflation and deflation are natural drivers of inequality... they just work in different directions.
Which is already happening.
Financial institutions are already extending credit (aka 'printing money') based on bitcoin and other cryptocoin collateral.
Bitcoin is not necessarily deflationary.
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> A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc. Your point isn't necessarily wrong, but it's worth pointing out how that came to be. Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale a…
> they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society. its just that only some chose to take it early on, and reaped the proportionate reward to having taken it on early (not knowing that it would lead to this end result). Now that it is known that tech is high pay, people now naively claim that it's u…
What does "everyone" mean?
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Pretty much, we just happen to be on a big (empty) island.
After having lived through the lockdown in Melbourne myself, I think it's pretty unfair to the people here to suggest that the reason the cases are so low is because it's just "a big empty island", and not the result of the fairly hard lockdown that the people here had to endure.
Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…
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What's a good hedge against the Cantillon Effect?
My own personal favorite notion of a hedge for this is wages. Boost wages to match the money supply, and most of those wages will get spent across the economy as well as providing for the wage earners. Of course, this is what many more economically-educated people than I warn against.
Increasing minimum wage would definitely increase money spent throughout the economy, but I think business owners would offset that cost by creatively reducing/stagnating pay and benefits for middle-class type roles. And the resulting extra demand (without extra supply) would prob lead to higher prices for common goods/services (even more inflation), therefore compounding the issue we are discussing now. On top of that, a big chunk of the extra minimum-wage money spent (by the employees) will end up in the pockets of the richest as they "reinvest profits back into the business". IMO this is essentially transferring wealth from the middle-class to the upper-class via extra money paid to the lower-class.
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90% of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border. Most of Canada is very cold and uninhabited. So a straight up population density comparison doesn't make much sense. The meaningful measure is something like population density in inhabited areas, and that is pretty close to Euro/US density.
Canadian cities population density don't even register compared to US cities... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... vs. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/dp-pd/hl...
This would leave Toronto at #4 in your Wikipedia list if we only count the bold cities (non-bold cities are those that are part of the metropolitan area of another city). If we count by Metropolitan Area, it would be around #11 by my quick count. Otherwise it would be #74, but for comparison Boston is #51 and Chicago is #75, so I'd say it definitely registers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto#cite_ref-13
[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/pr...
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Yet, paradoxically, the economic golden era of post-WW2 United States from 1946-1969 was entirely on a gold standard.
It might be related to the gold standard, but I'd argue that WW2 was a bigger factor. The US was already the strongest economy and the competition was devastated by war. Add on to that the development of the intermodal shipping container and it was suddenly possible for the US to transport their goods cheaply. The reason this golden age ended is that other countries had finally recovered from the devastation of war.
People read this article and love to bitch, but what is the solution? Flat tax? Raise income taxes ? Inheritance tax? The fact of the matter is poverty is really what is sad an unacceptable. People you should access to free health care and their basic needs met if they cant meet them, but I do not see what is fundamentally wrong with Bill Gates earning 100000X more than someone that is making a good living wage, with…
What is fundamentally wrong with Bill Gates earning and having that much more than others is that he has, in reality, proportionally more power. That isn't democracy in the end.
someone who is a very well versed orator and public speaker, can also have a disporportionate power, by convicing people of his point of view.
But in a democracy, everyone still only have one vote, and bill gates' vote is just as valid as yours. Compared that to the old days, where if you weren't born nobility, you do not get a say in affairs that affects you.
I think people here commenting or lamenting, does not appreciate what the _actual_ natural state of things are, and how much worse it could be.