If you want to learn more about the creation of the Eurodollar offshore market, highly recommend this podcast episode/video from the Odd Lots pdcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-0EN8_WuvK8
Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#32It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#33[dead]
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#34A few bones to pick: 1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1]; 2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is com…
> 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. Doubt. The economic decline of the American south was well on its way by the 19th century. That some prisoners today make license plates has no material affect on US GDP - this claim needs sources.
In 1800, the US was an agrarian backwater. By 1900 the US was an industrial superpower. Industrialization predominantly happened in the North. So you could argue that slavery was an impediment to growth but that ignores what happened in between and the secondary effects.
Specifically, the US built a massive cotton industry [1] that created an enormous amount of wealth and funded expansion of hte United States westward. Cheap labor was essential to that. Even partial mechanization (ie the cotton gin) actually just increased demand for slave labor because cotton became much cheaper as a result.
As for prison labor, the direct economic output of incarcerated persons is relatively small to overall GDP but, just like with slavery, you can't ignore the secondary effects, specifically in suppressing in wages.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/empire-...
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#35It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without makin…
>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#36> But the most revealing parallels relate to a different expansionary dynamic—that of money. The key to so much else that happened to both countries was the appearance of what seemed like unlimited wealth but was actually access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere. If you can’t tell the difference between stealing a bunch of gold in a gold based economy and the US…
“ People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. ” This may be changing. The US may have overextended its “credit line” if you will.
It isn’t changing. Look at foreign reserve holdings for the US since the 90s and you’ll see it’s decreased by a total of 2% and is still over 2/3s of all of it. What happened was that during the run-up to Covid the US dollar spiked to nearly 3/4 of all global reserves and has since dipped back down to normal levels.
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#37It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without makin…
>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism. We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical princip…
The most eye opening aspect of this issue is how many people find the all white male default to be normal and self evidently meritocratic, and a deviation from that is what they instinctively consider to be contrived.
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#38It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without makin…
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Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#39It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without makin…
>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism. We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical princip…
Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.
Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
#40It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without makin…
> intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin
I can't recommend the article either, it's just a casually-interesting premise to which the author then attaches a trailer of the usual half-wit cries of oppression by some invisible conspiracy threatening the author's narrow comfort zone.
But in doing so, the article does illustrate the characteristics of the loud and untethered lunacy of the libertarian, petroleum-inhaling populist factions that are occupying so much space in social discourse today.