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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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If feels almost like a truism, when it comes to 'free market' economies, that assets/wealth and money will tend to flow to those who are best suited to manage them productively, and away from those who aren't.

The guy who takes out a mortgage on his house to go to the Casino and bet it all on black might win some % of the time, but on average, over the long run, he'll lose his money, the house gets foreclosed and sold, and thus both his money and his house get shuffled off to somebody who will be better at managing them productively.

So it isn't inherently surprising that families with the discipline and patience to accumulate wealth over time will generally maintain that wealth whilst others that don't have such time preference will probably bleed wealth and never have a point in time where their accumulated wealth outstrips their overall consumption.

But if your wealth is all dependent on holding assets and earning 'passive' income that is downstream of some other productive activity, you are actually absorbing quite a bit of risk that those assets/income sources could unexpectedly go to zero. Or possibly worse, go negative. This is what happens to banks that make too many bad loans. ON PAPER they've got thousands of income streams and 'assets' worth millions. But too many of those go into default, the books become unbalanced, and people get antsy and you can see a bank run happen real quick.

There are obvious steps you can take to mitigate risk. Own homes that are geographically dispersed so they won't all be impacted by the same natural disaster. But what do you do about black swans that cause the entire real estate market to come crashing down at once? There's never a 'foolproof' investment that doesn't present some downside risk, even if unseen.

The risk of living solely off your accumulated wealth is that said wealth is subject to fluctuations in economic conditions entirely beyond your control. And there's always a chance that you take a hit that you can't easily recover from.

Even if you have a doomsday bunker filled with gold bars, ammo, and stockpiled food, you still risk some other event happening that cuts off your access to it, rendering it valueless to you.

If you work for a living, you will always be able to earn money via your particular trade, unless that entire trade gets obsoleted, and even then you can retrain and keep rolling.

If you think you've accumulated enough wealth to immunize yourself from the need to work... perhaps you should think long and hard about what sort of events or series of events could wipe out that wealth hoard all at once.

Unless the financial managerial class all gets together and decides to create an asset bubble through legal and financial trickery, so they never have to pay the piper. Which is essentially what has been happening the last couple decades.

Right, and that would be a departure from "free market" economies, in my mind.

So very valid to identify it as an issue, but the deeper question of "why do some people have to work for a living and other people manage to accumulate enough wealth to escape the rat race" is pretty well answered by

"some people are more patient, disciplined, and better at identifying financial opportunities/avoiding financial traps, wealth will tend to flow to these people."

I have no issue with people retiring after truly contributing to society. That being said, the market economy we have set up absolutely does not reward virtue or truly giving back to society. In many cases I think that most of the rich nowadays make their fortunes by dumping massive negative externalities on the rest of society.

That is one aspect of why it is unjust.

That being said, the market economy we have set up absolutely does not reward virtue or truly giving back to society.

I would like you to give a specific example of somebody who has gotten rich in such a way that they have dumped 'externalizes' on the rest of society that weren't made up for by the immense value that was also provided by their activities.

I don't know about rewarding 'virtue' but as a broad, general rule, anyone who made billions of dollars in the U.S. did so by creating a business which convinced millions of people to hand over money voluntarily.

And if you convince millions of people to hand over money... then almost by definition there is a HUGE societal benefit being accrued.

Just because your preferences aren't necessarily maximized doesn't mean that the preferences of society aren't well reflected by the economy they live in.

Sure. Steve Jobs is an excellent example. Often hailed as a hero of the technocratic class, I’m firmly of the belief that the smartphone is the single most disastrous invention of the last 50 years.

I can be sympathetic to that view, although I'd say social media is the real problem there.

But I don't see how you can suggest that smartphones, and the ability to have a computer with access to the near-sum of total human knowledge, hasn't been a boon for mankind in general, creating tons of value across the planet.

I might prefer to live in a world where Social Media was banned or never invented, wouldn't say the same for smartphones in general.

Smart phones are super stimuli that destroy physical, real time human connection. Which has been shown time and time again to be one of the most important predictors of human health and happiness.

The smart phones didn't destroy the physical, real time connection, though. Not by mere dint of existing, that is.

I think a lot of factors contributed to that, and smart phones provided an alternative to such physical connections that managed to capture the masses as those physical connections deteriorated.

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