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The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

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Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#101

Post by gizmo686 »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #48
newsclues wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society. These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.

Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. There's never been a time when the oligarchs/monarchy/landed-gentry just calmly gave up their temporal power after listening to reasoned socioeconomic arguments. It's always been some sort of calamity. You might find that those idiots are indeed a…

Controlled burns are part of modern forestry, for exactly the reasons you describe.

As recent years show, the central banks are willing to cause ecenomic downturns to promote long term health. See most central banks increasing rates in response to inflation. It is worth noting that, in (oversimplified) MMT, inflation is the downside of over supporting the economy, and the signal to pull back. This past cycle has been weird because inflation has stayed stubbornly low despite massive ammounts of fiscal stimulus, which was then taken as a sign that it was not yet time for a controlled burn.

There us definantly a problem here, but it is a more subtle issue of ouf understanding the economy. Even that flawed understanding knows the importance of the business cycle.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#102

Post by makomk »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #84
revolvingocelot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. There's never been a time when the oligarchs/monarchy/landed-gentry just calmly gave up their temporal power after listening to reasoned socioeconomic arguments. It's always been some sort of calamity. You might find that those idiots are indeed a…

> Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. You're mistaking redistribution for destruction... Sure, things are technically more equal if everyone becomes homeless. But there wasn't really a redistribution...

A lot of people who think along these lines, especially younger people, don't think of wealth as something that can be created or destroyed at all. They just believe that there's some fixed amount out there, and that if ordinary people don't have enough that must be because the super-rich have stolen their fair share and need to be brought down a peg. The very idea of wealth that can be created is seen as a lie spread by the super rich to conceal their theft. (I do wonder if part of this is that a lot of people are too young to have seen their societies become substantially better of as a whole, unlike previous generations.)

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#103

Post by kneebonian »

ajmurmann wrote: post #82
glogla wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn. The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your j…

"when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything" I wonder if this one will be even worse in the US. Much of the market going up and up is because index funds have become the default retirement vehicle. So every month billions flow into the market no matter what. What will happen when the largest generation stops contributing and instead starts…

So I talk about him a lot but one of the things Petar Zeihan points out is that we are rushing head long towards the greatest contraction of capital that will be seen in our lifetimes, our parents lifetimes, and our children's lifetimes. Basically the boomers are retiring cashing out their 401ks causing that money to no longer to be available for investment and contracting the money supply at the same time the younger generation can't offset it, as you noted.

As a result capital is going to contract and if you want a loan get it right now as fast as you can.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#104

Post by kneebonian »

ajmurmann wrote: post #89
danuker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 60s you could buy a median home with 2.1x the median income. In 2019, the ratio is 3.5x. https://themreport.com/news/data/02-02-2021/pressing-housing...

I think this here is the key. Automation (not globalisation) has removed many entry level and low so jobs. At the same time we have artificial scarcity through regulations in the housing market to keep neighborhood character and see the cost of required services that cannot be automated easily like health care and education go up and up. Instead of increasing wealth redistribution to compensate for the wealth central…

I'd argue it's the other way all of the things you listed, healthcare, education, and housing are hugely subsidized by the governemnt. Healthcare through medica(r|d)e, education through pell grants and loans, and homes through the tax breaks associated. These things all together result in the massive increase in cost of these things, because the government is redistributing wealth from others to those industries.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#105

Post by tristor »

Sholmesy wrote: post #73
csomar wrote: post #10

The WallStreet Bets, NFT and Crypto ecosystem is very niche. It's also very self-reinforcing because the internet made these people find their counterpart. The reality for most people is still very much different. I'd say zero-interest rates and negative interest rates had more of an effect on people than crypto or risky stock bets. The system was kinda getting by until western politicians went over-board during the…

> The WallStreet Bets, NFT and Crypto ecosystem is very niche /r/wallstreetbets has 13.5 million subscribers.

That's true, but I think watching it and acting on it are very different things, just as in the case with other social media. For example, I subscribe to WSB, but I also don't do risky trades except with small amounts of "fun money", I have triple digit thousands invested in index funds.

Being a subscriber is not the same as being an active participant in the underlying behavior. I watch it mostly out of schadenfreude (which might mean I'm not a very nice person, but there it is).

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#106

Post by hotpotamus »

xyzelement wrote: post #67
hotpotamus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would then find this Nihilistic attitude acceptable in a non-capitalistic country?

No because it still doesn't serve you. Some people still strived for better lives, just with much lower return on investment. And then get the fuck out to the West when you can.

And how did you measure who had the best life in such a system?

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#107

Post by brutusborn »

kiliantics wrote: post #97
brutusborn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because people have wide beliefs of how climate change will affect them. I doubt rich countries will notice much difference until the end of the century. Like most issues, the poor of the world are the ones who will suffer the soonest and the greatest.

people in rich countries depend an awful lot on people in poor countries making stuff for them and keeping them rich

It’s not a true dependency because they could do it themselves - it’s just a bit more expensive. Remember we are comparing catastrophes here; while Bangladesh might starve and lose most of its land, at the same time the US will probably just need to spend a bit more on food and make their own clothes. Both are affected, but orders of magnitude difference in the affects. Rich will still be rich, just a bit less.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#108

Post by Guid_NewGuid »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #28
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anyth…

Yeah, certainly from a UK perspective that part of the GP didn't ring true. While my parent isn't one of the boomer generation that will be extremely well off and I personally worry for their retirement, across the generation in general I think they might have experienced the peak retirement experience.

I personally don't think retirement as exists today will be a thing by the time I reach the same age. I haven't really looked much into the history so I could be way off base here. My impression is pensions, state provided and private, only really came into being post WW2. While the age distribution was able to support it there was something of a golden age for the older cohort of the boomer generation with final salary pension schemes, retirement at 50, etc. As the population pyramid continues to invert the pyramid scheme begins to collapse.

Whatever the answer to old age ends up being I don't think it will be particularly recognizable relative to schemes today. Certainly there seems to be no answer to what happens when the next generation of retirees has no housing security or wealth, thanks to the growth of real estate speculation worldwide and rentier capitalism draining younger generations of all wealth.

I often joke that my retirement plan is to rob a bank, either you get the money and run away to somewhere with no extradition, or you go to jail and get bed and board.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#109

Post by college_physics »

nerdponx wrote: post #79
college_physics wrote: post #63

Financial nihilism is a subset and derives from economic nihilism. The latter is basically the entirely agnostic stance of classical economic thinking that aims to decouple from the troublesome subjectivity of morality. Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. But financial nihilism is far more potent than its parent beca…

> Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. I don't think it's a given that a lethal war adds real value when you incorporate the opportunity cost of not having the war. It's been argued that WWII is what ended the Great Depression, but I think that's partly due to the somewhat unique economic circumstances at the time, an…

Agree that when digging into the detail war is a mixed economic bag. There is the destructive aspect of war which obviously destroys economic value, then there is the "organized theft" aspect which is more like a zero-sum game of redistribution and there is the "producing the means of war" aspect which (also quite obviously) adds economic value.

The issue with economic nihilism is that it would indeed count these +/- beans as fungible quantities.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#110

Post by ajmurmann »

kneebonian wrote: post #104
ajmurmann wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this here is the key. Automation (not globalisation) has removed many entry level and low so jobs. At the same time we have artificial scarcity through regulations in the housing market to keep neighborhood character and see the cost of required services that cannot be automated easily like health care and education go up and up. Instead of increasing wealth redistribution to compensate for the wealth central…

I'd argue it's the other way all of the things you listed, healthcare, education, and housing are hugely subsidized by the governemnt. Healthcare through medica(r|d)e, education through pell grants and loans, and homes through the tax breaks associated. These things all together result in the massive increase in cost of these things, because the government is redistributing wealth from others to those industries.

It's an interesting dynamic. Because of rising cost, consumption of the services gets subsidized in ways that distort the market. In addition lots of regulations and controls are put in place which further drive up cost. Interesting paper on this: https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...
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