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American Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: American Equity

#491

Post by kgwgk »

geofft wrote: post #401
kgwgk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to forbid loans?

I don't see why this is a blanket terrible idea - a ban on loans with interest, which are the only sort of loans that are economically rational for the lender, is a moral principle of one of the world's most popular religions (Islam) and used to be a moral principle of another (Christianity) until it was corrupted by capitalism in its lands. So we must at least concede that the idea of a world where loans are forbidd…

There is a whole industry of sharia-compliant finance to work around the ban on loans. The solution for the christian dislike for money-lending back on those days was for non-christians to do it. A world where people don’t need loans might be nice, but not all the people can use your parents’ money (and depending on what you want to do and how rich is your family, even you might need additional financing).

Re: American Equity

#492

Post by chrisco255 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #406
ImSkeptical wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be an annual bonus for some Americans, and an annual tax increase for others. As someone who, I suspect, would be in the second group, I feel like we do enough of this kind of thing already.

And as someone who, I suspect, would be in the second group as well, I feel like we do the tax increase part way too much, but we don't do the annual bonus part nearly enough.

That's because any policy which gives free money unilaterally to 320 million people is going to be incredibly expensive. 14,000 * 320 million = 4,480,000,000,000...$4.5 trillion. Just...no. This is more than the Federal government takes in every year currently ($3.27 trillion).

Re: American Equity

#493

Post by chrisco255 »

dibujante wrote: post #276
tomtimtall wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't tax the GDP, it's a calculation on the state of the exonomy not a cash flow to the state.

It's an abstraction. You can tax people/things at a rate that causes a number of dollars equal to 20% of the GDP to end up in the state coffers (which brings up its whole own class of issues - what, exactly, do you tax to get that money? Income? Wealth? Stocks? Vanity license plates?).

Yeah and what adverse impact is it going to have on economic growth when incentives are taken away from long term investments and towards short term consumption that would be stimulated by welfare payments to the general population? What adverse impact would it have on the economy 1, 5, 10 years out? The U.S. economic engine is a wonderfully effective thing and among the best modern marvels. Taking 20% of that arbitrarily and twisting it into something else could have deep consequences.

Re: American Equity

#494

Post by kgwgk »

Retric wrote: post #352
kgwgk wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so we don’t let banks loan money. I guess they may still take deposits but if they are not going to pay any interest people will keep accounts as low as possible. On the other hand, all the financing needs will be covered by other means. These “non-banks” will have to obtain capital as equity and debt, maybe even loans from other non-banks, but certainly not as deposits. What was the problem that we where trying…

> What was the problem that we where trying to fix anyway? Risk of financial collapse. Banks are risky because they have a lot of leverage, people more directly loaning money may take a 20% hit after a housing collapse, but that's not such a big deal.

The banks that collapsed during the last crisis are not the kind of banks that take deposits and give out loans. They were the kind of non-banking businesses that you talk about.

And one of the reasons for the crisis was “shadow banking”, because many home loans were not really given by banks (some were directly created by other institutions, some were first created by banks but then packaged and sold). The subprime crisis would not have happened, at least to the same extent, if loans had been kept in the balance sheets of banks.

Re: American Equity

#495

Post by sheepmullet »

geofft wrote: post #463
sheepmullet wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this about working more hours, instead of working harder / more effectively? Because they are tightly linked for most people. I've managed to increase my income ~5x from what it was when I started but to do that I have had to put in 2 hours/day of side study.

Sure, and if I insisted on working exactly 40 hours I probably would not have gotten the raises or opportunities I got. But I am personally nowhere close to the amount of income we're talking about here, let alone wealth, and I've sort of maxed out my ability to be productive. Do we think that at the margin that a wealth tax would kick in - which is specifically not most people - the number of hours worked is relevan…

What kind of cutoff are we talking about?

Re: American Equity

#496

Post by Banthum »

theptip wrote: post #180

Matt Levine has been musing on some issues adjacent to this one over the last year, e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-ind... The basic observation being that if we can get the benefits of capitalism when most equity is owned by a passive investment fund like an index tracker, then what's the problem with the state owning all t…

"if we can get the benefits of capitalism when most equity is owned by a passive investment fund like an index tracker, then what's the problem with the state owning all the equity in that tracker, and redistributing the proceeds to the population?"

This is the "fixed amount of wealth" fallacy, wherein the author regards the amount of wealth in the society as an invariant, rather than a variable.

The only reason that equity exists at all is because of the efforts of people who created it (and thus own it). Without those efforts, there would be no equity for the state to own. Without a promise of owning that equity, nobody has a reason to make those efforts. Thus, any state policy to "own all the equity" also removes the reason that equity exists in the first place.

And now you're in the Soviet Union; enjoy eating your two bananas every year, because nobody has a reason to bring you any more.

Re: American Equity

#497

Post by avar »

eksu wrote: post #169
RivieraKid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basic income branded in a way that's more attractive for economically right-wing people (aka "capitalists").

If you want to brand basic income in a way for conservatives, advocate for a Negative Income Tax (Friedman's idea) as an alternative to welfare bureaucracy.

Basic income isn't like Negative Income Tax at all. The core idea of BI is that no matter how much money you make you always get the BI, it's "basic".

NIT is just moving the progressive tax system into negative values, which means you subsidize the poor but once you make enough money you won't get subsidized.

Re: American Equity

#498

Post by pg314 »

balozi wrote: post #266
thaumaturgy wrote: post #165

Corporations have been operating under the mistaken belief that they are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns for a couple of decades now, to the detriment in general of labor and the overall quality of goods and services provided. I would expect something similar to happen to here: this would incentive massive changes in attitude towards national infrastructure and services. Take NASA for example: it's…

I would really like to know which school produced the idea that maximizing shareholder returns IS NOT the primary imperative of any commercial enterprise. Note the vast majority of corporations are not public and their only shareholders are the individual owners. So, maximizing return on their capital and labor is not based on some "mistaken belief", it is a basic existential requirement. Show me someone that doesn't…

> So, maximizing return on their capital and labor is not based on some "mistaken belief", it is a basic existential requirement.

That is wrong. The existential requirement is to not lose more money over the lifetime of the corporation than the capital.

Re: American Equity

#499

Post by pg314 »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #192
thaumaturgy wrote: post #165

Corporations have been operating under the mistaken belief that they are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns for a couple of decades now, to the detriment in general of labor and the overall quality of goods and services provided. I would expect something similar to happen to here: this would incentive massive changes in attitude towards national infrastructure and services. Take NASA for example: it's…

> Corporations have been operating under the mistaken belief that they are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns for a couple of decades now Thats because its very expensive when you don't, from the shareholder lawsuits. You can try to scale up your worldview without getting sued to oblivion, but it is a parallel fantasy.

Can you point to any successful lawsuits that argue that companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits?

Re: American Equity

#500

Post by kgwgk »

avar wrote: post #497
eksu wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to brand basic income in a way for conservatives, advocate for a Negative Income Tax (Friedman's idea) as an alternative to welfare bureaucracy.

Basic income isn't like Negative Income Tax at all. The core idea of BI is that no matter how much money you make you always get the BI, it's "basic". NIT is just moving the progressive tax system into negative values, which means you subsidize the poor but once you make enough money you won't get subsidized.

Take the NIT situation, with a set of people i=1,..,N paying some amount X_i (maybe negative) of taxes. Now give all of them the same basic income BI, while changing the taxes paid [received if negative] by each of them to Y_i=X_i+BI. Do yo see the equivalence?
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