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Not only in the history of money, but in the history of humanity. Think of all the lost prosperity that has been siphoned off since 1971 and the collective rise
by Qasaur 7y ago
Not only in the history of money, but in the history of humanity. Think of all the lost prosperity that has been siphoned off since 1971 and the collective rise in living standards people could have afforded.
We are very comfortable as technologists and other high-paying (read: inflationary) professionals, but there is a large class of people who are getting thoroughly shafted by these monetary policies and they are your Uber drivers, the people who work at the coffee store, the factory workers in the midwest, and the homeless. The exponential rise in rents in cities are not a natural consequence of the capitalist marketplace, rather its a consequence of loose monetary policy whereby money has entered real estate markets to gain returns by exploiting ridiculous rents.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Again, no coincidence that productivity and wage increases started to diverge significantly after the gold standard was abandoned.
Our modern loose monetary policy and inflation targeting is probably the greatest regressionary redistributional scheme in the history of mankind, and will go down in history as such.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoIt's not even the descent into poverty by the former middle classes - although that in itself is barbaric. The deeper problem is the opportunity cost - the small businesses that were never started, and the inventions, innovations, and other developments that never happened because financialised markets were more interested in speculation, wealth capture, scamming, and gambling than in fringe high-risk speculative R&D. In fact the financialisation and corporatisation of the research that does happen has distorted the research process and made it far less effective. Without it we might have had game-changing advances in fundamental physics, AI, medicine, aerospace, robotics, bioengineering, and even arts and culture that were decades ahead of where we are now.
- Spooky23 7y agoYou hit it. My younger cousins were a lot more well off than my side of the family, went to private or high competitive schools from kindergarten on, and are super smart. I used to hang out with them and their friends from time to time, and it struck me how uniform their aspirations all were. Investment Banking, Consulting or medicine. Maybe a few wanted to be lawyers. It struck me then and now as an incredible waste of talent.
- solotronics 7y agoEven though we might benefit in the short term if this is kept up there could be a massive uprising by those who have been disenfranchised, ie. the French revolution.