71–80 of 317 posts
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/income-inequality-by-state-19...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/income-inequa...
The US could easily remain the world's only superpower if it was ruthlessly focused on doing that. Actually it would have been easier 40-50 years ago. The opportunity is fading away. Interestingly, the US often behaves as if it wants to control the world. So either this is a misperception, and the leaders of the US don't want to control the world (and they're spectacularly bad at public relations), or they're spectac…
I wish I was a high-profile VC. Then I too would be writing essays exhorting people to take on high amounts of risk and to spend their 20s and 30s grinding through 60 hour workweeks, so I could grow my portfolio. Because, we're losing to China! Honestly, it has never been clear to me why "growth" was the metric that we, as a society, have been optimizing for. Who stands to benefit? You? The middle class? Everyone? Or…
I think the answer to this is pretty obvious when you look around.
"95% of the gains from the [recent economic] recovery have gone to the richest 1% of people, whose share of overall income is once again close to its highest level in a century." [1]
When you optimize for "economic growth" you are optimizing for the well-being of the already well-off.
1: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21586578-americas-inco...
I wish I was a high-profile VC. Then I too would be writing essays exhorting people to take on high amounts of risk and to spend their 20s and 30s grinding through 60 hour workweeks, so I could grow my portfolio. Because, we're losing to China! Honestly, it has never been clear to me why "growth" was the metric that we, as a society, have been optimizing for. Who stands to benefit? You? The middle class? Everyone? Or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Also, most startups I'm aware of, at least in the bay area, pay large salaries at this point." ... which is all soaked up by real estate hyperinflation.
This is probably the single biggest factor that's keeping me from moving out to CA. There's a lot of great companies out there and I think I could learn a lot but I also don't want to go broke. Edit: How are people making it without a really high salary or living with three other people?
This takes pretty much all the surplus capital in a region -- among everyone but the rich -- and locks it up in an inert asset.
Think of it this way: a starter home in the Bay Area is about a million dollars. In SoCal -- not cheap by any means -- it's more like $400k. The average AngelList seed round is $400-$600k. So every single house in the Bay Area locks up the capital required to seed fund at least one new venture.
What could all those smart people in the Bay Area be doing if all their capital were not locked up by an inert asset?
What's worse is that there are idiots who cheer this on because it will supposedly exclude people they don't like (the poor, blacks, etc.) from their neighborhoods. I read a great book called Detroit: A Biography. It explained how RE hustlers used racism to fleece people: first they'd sell a neighborhood to white folks. Then they'd pay black people to walk around in it. Then they'd scare the white folks into selling below market, jack the price back up and sell it to blacks, and meanwhile sell a further-out more expensive neighborhood to those same white folks. Rinse and repeat. I suppose if you harbor these kinds of views it's kind of poetic when they're turned around and used to con you, but it harms everyone else too.
I was hoping the housing bubble crash would bring relief, but it's right back up there. Either the entire economy needs to inflate until RE is reasonable again -- which would give us $8 loaves of bread -- or real estate needs to fall over and burn. We need something like the 2008 housing crash with no recovery-- to unshackle the real economy from the rentier asset economy.
Should the goal of the US be to emulate happy, stable, wealthy, smaller economies but arguably more egalitarian northern European democracies? Or rather, should we chase China in a race to the bottom? Lower corporate taxes, longer working hours, reduced environmental protections, with the goal of creating a fabulously wealthy klepto-capitalist ruling class? How dare people criticize kids burning the candle at both en…
You can't have endless impressive growth. Once you're developed its going to hit a reasonable cap. China is still developing. You can't compare the most mature economy to one of least developed. The move from back-breaking farm labor all day to manufacturing is MASSIVE growth. The problem with Western democracies is that we moved past that stage over 100 years ago. Now we're in a service based economy. That just does…
The twist of course being the punchline to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What is better? Why optimize? Growth for what purpose?
I don't mean to eye-roll, but Sam on economics tends to be, well, meh. The thing I always remind people when they say that China will take over the world is that everyone said the same thing about Japan in the 1980s (remember the movie/novel Rising Sun?). What happened? Well, the mercantilist economic toolkit has an endgame. Neither Sam nor I knows when it's going to let them down, but building an entire economy on c…
Also let's keep in mind that we have yet to see all the effects of the unprecendented demographic experiment of the one-child policy. They will be dealing with an aging population on a scale never seen before.
Finally, the U.S. has a lot going for it when compared with its developed peers - growing population, attractive to immigrants, and a culture of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking (which Sam seems to think is in decline...not sure I see the same thing).
When China's elites stop wanting to send their children to U.S. universities and find ways to get their capital off the mainland, then I'll worry.