Comment by inquisitorG

zackmorris 10 months ago

Very true. I've noticed that wealthy people tend to suffer from a feeling of never having enough, but the rest of the world can't feed their appetite. Witness the antics of Diddy and the former president.

The biggest risk with not winning isn't poverty, but debt. My early losses set me up for a lifetime of exploitation making interest payments, which I didn't get out of until I paid my student loans off at 40. Millennials/Gen Y/Gen Z/Gen Alpha will have an even harder time, and I believe that we passed the point where debts could no longer be paid when the Housing Bubble popped in 2008. Which coincided with stuff like Peak Oil and the rise of post-Cold War authoritarianism. What we see today is theater, as the government makes no attempt to pay down the national debt, and moneyed interests stop efforts like student loan forgiveness by packing the Supreme Court. The wealthy and powerful are becoming parasites living on the working class's back. Which is incredibly tragic IMHO, as they had been stopped between WWII and 1980 before Reaganomics and the rollback of New Deal social safety nets under Clinton and GW Bush.

I had to let breaking even go as a concept. So I went through wage slavery, career death, mourning and rebirth of my own life as I stoically continued showing up with no proof that better days were coming during my healing and growth journey. But I did experience divine intervention during my destitution, as well as surrender and redemption, which I am eternally grateful for. My regrets are vastly outnumbered by the serendipitous blessings my soul received as my ego withered and died.

You're right that it's easier to live richly in poverty than it is to acquire any wealth at all or grow wealth. In fact, I think in these times it's a valid option. #vanlife and off-grid living can present more opportunities than competing with the Joneses.

A specific example of that is that I moved furniture between 2001-2003 and my income was $10/hr, about $1600/mo or $20,000/yr. My apartment's rent was $500/mo and my half was $250, so I could work about 3 days and cover rent. Which gave me time to leave work early with only 4-6 hours some days and take the winter off, but still have time to work on my startup. Dish Network and DSL were $30/mo each. Gas was $1-2. Used cars were $2000.

Contrast that with today's $1500 rent and stagnant wages. Now it takes 10 days (2 weeks!) to cover even half of rent. Food prices have tripled, Dish Network is $100-150/mo, DSL is $60-100. Car prices are in the stratosphere.

This outcome is a result of phantom tech. Stuff like innovation in entertainment and finance. Which drives costs up to maximize profit. So instead of offering the same internet speed at a lower price, we can only get faster internet at a higher price. Times everything.

Real tech is automation, economies of scale, etc. If we had real tech, the minimum wage would be perhaps $30 today. Rents and other fixed costs would decrease with inflation, not increase. So my furniture moving job would pay about $40-50/hr and I'd be able to make more than my $250 half of the rent in just 1 day.

Other countries like Finland experience this work-life balance and scratch their heads at US rugged individualism. The raw deal we receive is visceral now, it's lived. It takes a massive propaganda effort to hoodwink half the country into voting against its own self-interest to keep moneyed interests in charge.

No amount of discipline skipping Starbucks and avocado toast can counteract late-stage capitalism societal collapse.

Even though I think how bad things are is becoming apparent to most people, and I have tremendous empathy for young people entering adulthood today, it's not enough. We need a plan of action, positive outcomes that can be replicated at scale so that people have viable alternatives, and organizing for coordinated execution. The revolution is coming whether we like it or not, but it's up to us to manifest the reality where we live in a tech utopia instead of the tech dystopia that's coming if we merely survive.

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roninorder 10 months ago

Just to note, comparing existing economic systems in different countries can lead to very flawed conclusions. The solutions won't necessarily come from mimicking a particular system either.
Your example -- Finland -- is a very homogenous society with a population that grew from 4.5 to 5.5 million since 1960. The US, on the other hand, is vastly more diverse, both economically and culturally. US population grew from 180 to 345 million since 1960.
When advocating for UBI we can't also advocate for open borders. We have to pick one. Do you want a more open society that is also more economically inequitable, or do you want a more closed and homogenous society that is also more economically healthy? We can't do both unless we transform into some form of the World Government and an extremely globalized economy.
All economic systems (all systems in general) have to adapt to scale. What works for a village is unlikely to work for a country. European economic systems that seem more fair to you have not been yet tested by what we can expect the future world to look like. And when they have, they cracked and showed their flaws (e.g. the recent influx of immigrants from poor economies).
Also, a natural side-effect of more complex systems is that they become harder to manage. That's what we see in the US today. Disfunction at so many levels. China and a few other cultures are attempting to solve that by embracing a varying degree of authoritarianism - a more centralized control of, and distribution of, resources. This system has been proven to be fairly effective at scale (and the scale we can expect in the future). American society lately seems to be moving in a similar direction (both major parties). I don't have high confidence that our economic issues can be solved by anything other than a higher degree of authoritarianism than we currently have.
Lastly, we have experienced major automation breakthroughs throughout the 20th century. E.g. fields that took whole villages to plough now can be handled by a single operator of large machinery... I don't believe in automation as a singular solution for the reason described by inquisitorG above, i.e. human biology and human nature.

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- zackmorris 10 months ago
  
  You're not wrong to point this out, but here's why I disagree. I don't buy that we have to choose between equity and economic prosperity. And our prosperity doesn't depend on increased authoritarianism either.
  What you're really talking about is corruption. Specifically, that comes from wealth inequality due to financialization and letting the wealthy dodge their taxes.
  To use your farm analogy as an example, it takes about 2 acres of land to support 1 family growing gardens and livestock with subsistence farming. So a modern farmer with 40 acres should be able to support 20 families and earn about 20 times original income. In other words, if we pay $1 for a tomato at a store, that tomato would cost about $20 to grow ourselves if we divide 1 year's labor and materials over the year. At least that would be the equivalent cost in terms of time and labor if remove money from the equation.
  But we don't really do that. Farmers struggle regardless of how large their farm is. So who gets all of that extra money? Banks, middlemen, equipment manufacturers, shippers, stores, the government, etc. That's where financialization converts the real labor of earned income into the profits and leverage of unearned income.
  There are major dates when this happened in the US. Modern agriculture had progressed to the point where we could feed the whole world by about 1965. Also technology had advanced enough that everyone could have access to information and automate workflows by about 1985.
  But around those dates, we elected Nixon and Reagan to shift incomes from the working poor (us) to financial elites (the capitalist class). Backlash to progress in civil rights in the 1990s resulted in the Bush v Gore decision electing GW Bush. Obama produced the former president. We see this cycle throughout history - for every two steps forward there is almost always one step back.
  Wealthy financiers now hoard most of the wealth produced by the working poor. Studies have shown that millennials are working harder for a smaller piece of the pie than workers did during the Great Depression:
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennia...
  https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn...
  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennial...
  (there are nearly an infinite number of these articles and studies)
  That's hard to believe when we look around at all of the marvelous technology when everyone has a smartphone. What changed is tax policy. Between the New Deal in the 1930s and trickle down economics in the 1980s, the top tax rate was between 60 and 90%:
  https://www.statista.com/chart/16782/historic-marginal-incom...
  How that translates into real economic terms is, when business owners collect their profits at the end of the year, they can decide to keep it or invest it back into their business. If the tax rate is 35% like today, they'll often keep it. But if it's 90%, they put it back into their business to avoid it being taken as taxes. This is the key reason why US industrial capacity increased like it did for 50 years between about 1940 and 1990, and the Baby Boomers enjoyed the fruits of labor from previous generations. And why today, whole communities have their wealth sucked out as franchise fees to corporate chains rather than fed back into infrastructure and government services. AKA the Walmartization of small town America.
  So now that money's all gone, sunk into McMansions and luxury cars and a Wall Street that booms the more that Main Street busts.
  This election between Harris and the former president is about whether we want to pass the torch to Gen X and start addressing the rampant corruption that has saddled anyone younger than 50 with cynicism that the economy will improve in the future, or just let it slide and ignore corruption with stuff like Project 2025 cancelling the National Weather Service so that we no longer see the effects of global climate change.
  Now, we can be skeptical that the candidates are more than figureheads. It's rational to see that democrats abandoned the needs of labor since Clinton rolled back social safety nets in the 90s. And that republicans put money in people's pockets through deregulation, basically removing liability from polluters and others who profit from externalities, so that those associated costs get paid by future generations.
  But what we can't endorse is the othering of races and genders. Anyone younger than 50 knows it's off-color to comment on someone's race or gender in polite conversation. Yet we see it on the news, as politicians do it openly and set a poor example for their supporters to follow.
  If you're saying that it's hard to integrate a multicultural melting pot like the US, well, that argument can't really be allowed to stand. Because we shouldn't decide economic policy based on racism or sexism.
  Sure, democratic candidates generally support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But that's a far cry from dividing the population along ethnic lines to garner political support, as we're seeing from republican candidates. There's a difference between working to overcome the lingering effects of generational racism and actively stoking it.
  So I would say, yes, it's hard to get the US to agree on anything when half the population actively votes against its own self-interest. But that's not some law of nature, it's a result of the wealthy and powerful spreading propaganda and using regulatory capture to keep workers divided so they don't rise up and overthrow their rulers.
  TL;DR: the main lever that controls how much the economy benefits the middle class or the wealthy is tax policy. It currently benefits the wealthy to an extreme degree while the middle class has largely been replaced by the working poor. Because the top tax rate was higher when the middle class prospered (this is the academic view).
  
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  zackmorris 10 months ago
  
  Hey roninorder, after sleeping on it, I realized I got triggered. A friend said something similar to what you said years ago, and I had a lot of time to stew about it.
  Take a show like Yellowstone: highly politically charged, and the plot is around the realities of making it in the world today. I would argue that the ranch should be public land and the ranchers should pay grazing fees instead of taxes. But they are homesteaded, so the land is theirs. Which creates tension in who profits from the land. One advantage of private ownership is that it's arguably less susceptible to development, in that a selfish person can't build a cabin at the top of the mountain for all to have to see. But it can also go the other way - the Wilks brothers (billionaires) bought large tracts of land in Idaho and immediately built fences to keep hunters out of what used to be shared. People previously all for private ownership are now suffering under cognitive dissonance at the loss of what they felt was their heritage.
  I take the academic road and imagine ways to satisfy these constraints outside of the current context. But most people are trapped in a Nash equilibrium where not everyone is happy, in fact a lot of people are unhappy. I think that's what you're getting at in your comment, that these things are hard. My idealistic dreams have little effect on the situation on the ground.
  Sorry if I was too confrontational in my response.
  
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