411–420 of 812 posts
So, to put it in terms of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they want to drain the rest of the world of everybody but hairdressers and marketing experts?
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That when you drain every smart/productive person away from every other country This is a ridiculous premise.
I edited that sentence to be less absolutist, but still, isn't this essentially what this article and many people are advocating? Attracting all the smartest and most productive people in the world to move to the US? How is that a mischaracterisation of the argument?
See https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2024/11/03/high-...
>Oh and in the IRL mean time, it’s very nice to be physically in a high trust society. Still working on opening an office in Hong Kong for those who want, salaries higher in person.
Personally, I hope he'd flesh out more of that Bretton-Woods vs inflation argument (instead of fixating on gold, build an argument on that energy graph in the middle of it all (blackgold? stargold? hydrogold? datagold? Transmuted silicon ingots?))
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> The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities Some EU countries offer scholarships to attract good foreign undergrads and grad students to their universities. The whole point is that they stay afterwards, and they try really hard to keep them. It's been proven to be quite economically profitable, see e.g. [1]. I've never understood what's the point of a…
Japan is very good at this. They’re essentially like “You got someone willing to pay you? Cool, come on in.” Then after 5 years you can (if you want) naturalize, and after 10 you can get permanent residency. No random nation based limits like the US somehow has.
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I think this comment is a little bit reductive and conspiratorial, even if it gets first-order correlations correct. You don’t need a conspiracy, you just need a philosophy of small government and low regulation to let grifts expand through the financial parts of the economy. The history of financial regulation in the US is the banking industry finding new ways to evade regulation, which lead to moral hazards and pri…
To add to this point: We can look to China to see that the financialization of the economy, like it happened in the US, is not a natural law but can instead be restricted. China has explicitly said that they see the development of financial markets in the US as a problem for the US economy they decidedly aim to avoid. Stories like what happened to Jack Ma have to be interpreted in that context, I think. In my reading…
I still remember my wife casually mentioning, back in 2019 or something (well before Evergrande), that China was restricting property speculation. Prohibiting folks from taking out loans on third properties etc. As an Australian this was mind blowing to me, property speculation is a sacred religion there.
I far from agree with their politics on social matters, but their financial regulators aren't asleep at the wheel and haven't been regulatory captured.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_red_lines
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2020/11/16/why-ch...
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This is basically an argument that China should become more like North Korea rather than the other way around. Reality is that remittances and the skills that emigrants eventually bring back to their home country far exceeds any negative effects. Policymakers know this which is why they don't deter this from happening. In many countries they actively encourage it, such as is Philippines. When economists talk about "n…
> This is basically an argument that China should become more like North Korea rather than the other way around. How exactly? I’m no pro-China advocate (I’m Australian and live with the mixed outcomes of our ties with China, and I have no strong feelings about what Australia or the US should do with respect to China or anyone else). But (leaving aside arguments about their “true” motives and assuming good faith), Chi…
Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing. A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stic…
>It kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism Ah yes, the US, famously under a socialist regime currently.
It looks to me like the countries in the pie charts are ones with protectionism (e.g., China), while you are seem to be implicitly advocating for the opposite...
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> That takes planning, money vision and time. And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans, unless you either make huge efforts to ensure everyone gets their fair share (see Scandinavia) or you have a good plan for people being rich with not too much effort (see Switzerland and other tax havens). Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too la…
income inequality today is about the same as it was 100 years ago. https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-...
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> That takes planning, money vision and time. And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans, unless you either make huge efforts to ensure everyone gets their fair share (see Scandinavia) or you have a good plan for people being rich with not too much effort (see Switzerland and other tax havens). Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too la…
>And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans Say again? If we're talking strictly about the United States as per the article that inspired this post, the U.S. is a case study of a prosperous, remarkably stable democracy steadily increasing its prosperity, wealth, influence and power while also for the vast majority of its history investing for the long term and in vital infrastructure. T…