231–240 of 287 posts
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What do you think banks do with your money, exactly?
Loan it out? What is your real question? I would rather not play Plato to your Socrates in a comment thread.
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No comment on the GP, but many of the revolutions you are listing marked the end of feudalism and monarchic rule. I think it is difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless, without considering the horrors experienced daily under feudal/serf systems. Moreover, the selection of revolutions you have put together seems one-sided. It was revolution that gave people in Britain the vote, it was (a…
> difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless The Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 to 2 million (or 25%!!!!) of all Cambodians. Pretty tough to argue that the deaths of 25% of any population is anything but needless and horrific, particularly when you learn about Pol Pot's insane and homicidal policies. Imagine if every 4th person you know were dead in the next 5 years because a guy had a plan to...…
> Mao's derangements are estimated to have resulted in 45 MILLION dead Chinese.
Both of these death estimates are primarily due to starvation (not murder and not the result of violent revolution decades earlier) and are based off of differential estimates of population (ie. counting declining births as deaths, etc.).
Most importantly, they are not comparative with famine deaths prior to these revolutions under the feudal system. Integrated over time, those deaths almost certainly outnumber the deaths due to these events. Moreover, many of those who died post-revolution would never have even had the chance to be born in a feudal society given how many children died of starvation etc. during those times.
Tens of millions of people die of easily preventable deaths (no water, no food, etc.) in the status quo every year. Those numbers were even worse under feudalism. Do those not get to be counted against the non-revolutionary status quo?
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Well... the people who have a job and lose it in a recession (and many do) really don't care whether overall wealth inequality is going down. They're being destroyed financially; they don't care that the rich are also taking damage.
This. The 20% haircut to the value of the companies' equity is a paper difference to their wealthy majority shareholders. But the 10% of staff they lay off have no income at all, and the remaining staff don't exactly feel better off because their bosses are poorer either. Levelling down isn't any sort of solution to wealth inequality.
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So a monthly redistribution of, say, 10% of the money supply as public dividend would take care of that no?
> money supply Be careful this is a dangerous notion: with today's form of fiat concurrency there is net 0 money! > redistribution Likewise the "re" is sketchy. The state can pull money in, and take it out. Keeping those balanced because metal bullion skeuomorphisms is confusing. Our insistence that all money is debt is "double entry accounting fetishism" and also needlessly confusing. Distribution is good. "re" impl…
And as for redistribution, I suppose just “printing” money into peoples account would more or less have the intended effect as well. I do suspect a 10% inflation rate would lead to simple logistics costs as the nominal amounts kept changing.
But yes, if only more policy was evidence based…
[1] https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/is/pdf/2016/09/KPMG-Mon...
An important takeaway from the wealth inequality chart: every time that wealth inequality has substantially decreased in recent history was during a recession. Staving off recessions at all costs for political reasons is a horrible policy. Market cycles are natural; we don't live in a perfect world. Market forces clearing out the inefficiencies/rebalancing power in the economy is better for long term capital allocati…
Anymore questions?
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>1. If you get higher interest rate returns, how do you think that is being paid for if poor people aren't getting higher rates? Loans to business, home loans, etc. Education loans really weren't a big thing because education used to be subsidized. Also, poor people aren't the only source of ROI on loans. They're quite lucrative though because they seldom are able to pay the principal and are an endless source of int…
Not going to keep responding to someone who is skeptical of the claim that life for the average person is better in 2019 than it was in 1919. Our starting points are so off that I don't think we could have a productive conversation. Take care, believe what you want I guess.
Like I've met people who could actually give a convincing argument that cars haven't necessarily been the unambiguous tradeoff many believe them to be throw knock on effects in infrastructure and planning.
However, there is also the qualitative look at things as well. Numbers in absolute magnitude we're lower back then, so maybe there's something psychological at work with the larger numbers. There was also a smaller population, lower hanging fruit, the attraction of some level of unknown.
The thing I find most interesting in these disengagements is that they always occur right before people come to terms with "oh, I have to actually lay out my priors." Which is generally, in my experience, where the root of every fundamental misunderstanding is to be found.
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This. The 20% haircut to the value of the companies' equity is a paper difference to their wealthy majority shareholders. But the 10% of staff they lay off have no income at all, and the remaining staff don't exactly feel better off because their bosses are poorer either. Levelling down isn't any sort of solution to wealth inequality.
But during a labor shortage , that’s largely moot. Whatever staff gets fired, if they’re remotely competent, can walk down the street and get a job at a better performing company with ease.
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> Really what we need to do is run more big policy experiments at the fed. I totally disagree with this. Big social policy involves/requires taxation, and a robust debate around what kind of tax regime we want to have in order to support those social policy objectives. The Fed can't collect taxes, and it doesn't involve robust debate because it's not democratic.
> it doesn't involve robust debate because it's not democratic. Fair. Let me step back a bit, I do agree the undemocratic fed is ultimately bad. But I also wouldn't want to subsume it to congress in today's state, because FTPT, Senate, and supermajorities are not democratic, and ensure no experiments + tiny overtone window of things where are actually. I like democracy, but the problem is democracy in its current US…
I agree with you that there are some decidedly undemocratic elements to many "democratic" systems (such as the ones you've mentioned), and to be clear I wish that was not so. But these same democratic systems have historically not just expanded the overton window, but exploded it: the advent of progressive taxation in the early 20th century; the advent of high income tax rates in the 1930s-1950s; the social welfare states that most social-democratic European governments erected in the 1950s-1970s (and the skeletal welfare state the United States erected at the same time) - just to name a few.
> We can print money, and if there is inflation we can fix bottlenecks
We can't just print money to the extent that's required for the really big policy changes. You want a UBI? A universal capital endowment? Free health care? These things require significant revenue to sustain year after year after year. I don't think that's necessarily a problem, there just isn't a free lunch. And the US is the most likely to be able to get away with it: there are plenty of nations that don't entirely control their monetary policies (EU countries, for example)
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Throwing your whole bank account into call options would be an extremely risky thing to do. But that doesn’t invalidate your point that capital accumulation of wealthy people generally far outweighs any amount of money they would make from their labor. It doesn’t have to be call options though, with enough wealth even interest from T-bills would dwarf a $300k salary.
You are still missing the point. With QE, the call options are far less risky than they look. It has been this way for over a decade. People somehow cant get it into their heads, when the fed prints money, assets go up. Capitalists are having an all you can eat buffet while everyone else thinks the only thing they can do is put 3k into the SPY every month. Its a joke