11 ms·

Ray Dalio says the global economy is under threat

105 points by joeyespo 7y ago

anon1m0us 7y ago
>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. Why can't we let the individual find a way to make themselves productive? And, why do they need to be productive? Some of my best times in life are watching and playing games with my friends. Socializing. Loving people. I, and most people I know, can look around and see things that need to be done. If our lives aren't so focused on paying the bills all the time, we can relax a bit and be creative. I remember I used to get great school lunches. I knew the cafeteria staff by name and they knew me because I went back for seconds and thirds and fourths... skinny as a bean pole. Lunches were made fresh every day. The staff were there at 6am cooking for the kids. Fresh bread. I used to love watching that dough bounce around in the industrial mixer. It was bigger than I was. A decade after I was out of school, I saw one of the ladies and asked how the school lunches were. She said they don't get to make them anymore. The menus are decided in Washington DC now and they have very little control over what is cooked or eaten. Kids don't come back for seconds and thirds and fourths anymore. The federal government took local control away from the schools and homogenized everything and basically ruined it from what I remember. Why do we think the federal government knows better how to manage our day to day lives than we do ourselves? Get out of our kitchens and homes. The government doesn't need to find a way for me to be productive. People who need to be productive to keep their sanity will find a way. They'll clean their bedrooms, volunteer in their communities. They won't be judged by what their job is, but rather, what they do for themselves and the people around them. The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill. We need more freewill in the world.
- hectorr1 7y ago
  > And, why do they need to be productive? Because the entire global economy is premised on having enough growth to pay off the debt incurred by previous generations. If people choose to be less productive the whole edifice comes crashing down.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    Given the things GP described as being unproductive, things that almost all of us find humanly valuable at a very basic level, perhaps the edifice needs some serious refactoring if that's the case. I love life, I don't love work. Work is part of life, but I can't love life fully if I don't love my work. A system based on the idea that every member of society must be productive is so hideous and inhuman to me it makes me angry to think of someone seriously propounding this productivist dogma. Why, exactly, is society structured in such a way that most of my waking hours are spent getting ready for work, commuting and working? It's a tragedy to be born, grow up, and spend your days grinding away just to stay alive. That's the one life you have, and I'm wasting it just for the fact of staying alive? It's no surprise that young people aren't happy with this.
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      Maybe the key is to change what we consider productive. Our main measure of productivity is GDP and it has some really perverse methodology. If a defense manufacturer builds a bomb and sells it the government, that is considered positive GDP. If next year that bomb is taken and dropped on one's own country thus destroying value is it considered negative GDP? No, again it's positive production because the pilot and bombadeer sold their services to the government too! Meanwhile, if one parent in a relationship stays home to care for the couple's children thus rendering a highly valuable service to the family, it is not counted! Only academics who have furvent faith in the dogma they've been handed down can see such a contradiction and maintain their faith. Recently we have been seeing economists trying to augment gross measures like GDP. And we've seen the rise of behavioral economist who are trying to better integrate human factors into economics.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    This is true if human productivity is the only thing driving growth. The suggestion here is that automation replaces that human input as most jobs are actually more about supporting the innovation rather than innovation itself - if you remove the need for those supporting jobs many, many more people can work on the innovation bit instead. Society would benefit greatly. Some people, maybe even most, won't actually achieve much or contribute anything to the furthering of the human race, but that cost is worth paying for if enough actually do. We probably have hundreds of Einsteins, Turings, and Musks working in the roles supporting the innovators because they can't get out of those roles. That's bad for all of us.
- tarr11 7y ago
  > Despite the sharp wrangling that the National School Lunch Program often stirs up, the meals coming out of it are more nutritious — and a lot more adventurous — than they were 10 years ago. “It absolutely is a brighter day for school foods,” says Bettina Elias Siegel, a lawyer turned advocate and author of the book “Kid Food.” > A major federal study recently came to much the same conclusion, finding that school lunches have improved significantly since implementation of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. And the schools with the healthiest menus have the greatest rates of student participation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lunches-in-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lun...
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    As a french person who's been to a few schools in the US, the US has such a long way to go it's almost non funny. I would never subject my kids to the food the local super-rich-tech-company daycare gives to toddlers.
  - maxaf 7y ago
    I don’t care what anyone says; in NYC school lunches are basically inedible. Having been exposed to the public school system here for over six years, I can say with confidence that no one who has any choice will allow their kids to eat the garbage that schools put out during lunch. My kid tells me that she’d rather go hungry than eat lunch at school. I’ll be packing lunch for another six years as needed, and that’s okay by me. I just wish we weren’t wasting all this money to haul garbage to schools on a daily basis.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Lunches might be better on average, and still in some places worse than they used to be.
- hos234 7y ago
  "Productive" is code for obedience. When ever someone talks about Productivity they are measuring how many people in the population are obedient and fit into domination based hierarchies. Those that don't throughout history are unproductive. Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's[1]. Why? Because most people learnt they don't like being obedient or dominated and there are better and newly available routes to meet ones needs and values. We don't need to prop up a Mark Zuckerberg or Ray Dalio or the Queen of England to live a decent life anymore. You can even do it without exploiting someone else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...
  - icotyl 7y ago
    > "Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's" This is the exact opposite of what your chart shows. Productivity, in the economic sense, is growing since the 1980s. It's wages that have stagnated. The wealth generated by increased productivity is all flowing to top. Dalio recognizes this: "Increased productivity will also substantially increase the wealth gap." He knows this trend is not sustainable.
    - hos234 7y ago
      It is the same damn thing. Wages is proxy for WORKER productivity. Go and ask Dalio why wages/worker productivity has stagnated while sector(factory/org) productivity has increased. Listening to him is like listening to some member of British Royalty while Empire winds down having no clue why the colonies want independence. They too will say the British Empire's increased productivity will increase of the wealth gap. That's just another way of saying nobody wants to work to prop up the British Empire. People have found better things to do in life. The only thing under threat is their model of reality. And there is no point paying attention to them about what comes next, because they can only see the empire based on obedience and domination as the best model.
- trpc 7y ago
  >transferring money to people who are unproductive says the professional unproductive hedge fund manager. The parasite billionaire who spent his life capturing the profit made and value created by companies
- friedman23 7y ago
  > And, why do they need to be productive? Why do I need to give them money?
  - trianglem 7y ago
    The unfortunate answer here is because you choose to be productive.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  >He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. ¿Por qué no los dos? One of the issues with the current system is that it does not serve people who are only somewhat productive, if only for the time being. We expect that every job (more generally - every production opportunity, at the margin) will pay for itself, but there's no law of economics that says this has to happen.
- Upvoter33 7y ago
  Seems like you mixed up a bunch of stuff, like cost cutting vs. federal government overreach. Lunches are bad today at schools because no one wants to spend any money on anything in the public sector.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  This is why I support UBI over a Federal Jobs Guarantee. UBI doesnt tell individuals how to spend their money or time.
- mc32 7y ago
  >”The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill.” I’m not sure of that. Couple of things. I’ve worked with working class people. They may complain about the job or the boss, but if they didn’t do one of those jobs, they’d feel less empowered. I’ve heard people essentially say I don’t want to be on welfare but I can’t get a job. So they'd prefer a job to being on the dole. Two, people with lots of time and nothing to do tend to just while away time, either in the form of any kind of entertainment or some times in counter productive activities. Doing “make-work” actually gives people some purpose. I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    People having "nothing to do" is a self-inflicted problem of modern societies. There's plenty of stuff to do, all over the place. Just because it might not meet some wholly-arbitrary standard of a 'living', 'sustainable' level of productivity doesn't mean it's "make-work".
    - iknowalot 7y ago
      People will leave the mundane and repetitive to automation and focus on what they find truly fulfilling, utilizing "creative intelligence". Creative intelligence involves always striving for the new thoughts, fresh ideas, novel ways to solve problems....repetition makes people mentally weak and depressed. Many of the problems we discuss today about humans in the era of automation have already been addressed in ancient Indian philosophy (many millennia ago). This isn't new....
  - fierarul 7y ago
    > I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk. I like what you are saying and thought that perhaps this is why politicians seem to be so hyper-focused on jobs. They may realise better than most people jobs have other roles except producing an income.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  If everybody got to do what their freewill told them to do, pretty soon we'd have lots of artists but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers. It's so much better being artistic. I fear it wouldn't end well.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers The market takes care of that problem quite nicely. Lines of work which are less comfortable or appealing should pay more in the first place.
    - trianglem 7y ago
      Not really, it would make no sense to acquire advanced skills if menial unskilled labor that no one wants to do pays more.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        The kind of menial unskilled labor that we're discussing here is far less appealing than any work involving advanced skills - that's what the higher pay would be compensating for. It all works out.
      - croon 7y ago
        Think further a few more steps. There will be an equilibrium around a pay where there is a long enough line for unskilled labor to fill all demand. Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market.
        littlestymaar 7y ago
        > Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market. Which is basically “assuming a flat earth and atmosphere approximate to vacuum”. You can't get many useful insights from that.
  - Arbalest 7y ago
- tracer4201 7y ago
  The elites will go to great lengths to ensure you work hard so they can profit and keep the status quo. I’ve presented similar arguments and have had the VP of a FAANG (a friend of mine) argue that working is in people’s better interests, that it actually empowers them, etc etc.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    I wonder if that VP even knows a single person who would be a net recipient under a UBI-like arrangement. It just sounds like the kind of comment that reveals a severe lack of understanding wrt. what UBI would actually be like.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      To be fair, I don't think that most advocates of UBI know of such a person themselves.
- roenxi 7y ago
  > And, why do they need to be productive? Because every day a typical person needs to consume about 9kJ worth of food We need a system that produces 9kJ food x number of people reliably and accurately. Food is somewhat metaphorical here, there are a bunch of other things that are needed. Also, that system needs to be fair. The people responsible for producing the food are taking on extra hardships or risks and won't do it if they don't think they are getting a net-good deal. And there is also the issue of taxes. We need people to be productive to support the institution of government which has become large end free-spending.
- trianglem 7y ago
  Let me preface this by saying I agree with you in spirit but your first and second paragraphs have a contradiction in them. How are you going to get people to come in and cook meals for kids at 6am because that's almost certainly something people will not do unless coerced by circumstance.
philipkglass 7y ago
If machines can produce every useful good and service better than humans -- including manufacturing copies of themselves -- then the global economy (denominated in units of currency) might be under threat, but people will materially prosper. It's not dollars or euros or renminbi that people really need. People need goods and services. If the machines-do-everything technology gets invented once, copies will soon spread globally [1]. The real problem is more likely to be the transitional turbulence. If self-driving vehicles do wipe out millions of truck driver jobs in the year 2029, but automated doctors aren't ready until 2059, large groups of workers lose income without seeing deflationary relief in the prices of services they need. [1] The spread of maker machines could happen "legitimately" -- Gates Foundation or a similar organization financing freely shareable re-implementations. It could also happen "illegally" -- a government in a poorer country will just decide to tell international patent/copyright holders to pound sand in favor of their own domestic constitutents. This would be similar to South Africa's treatment of HIV drug patents in the 1990s.
- discreteevent 7y ago
  This is a bit like the arguments economists made for globalisation. Very sound theory but by experiment it is being proven wrong. The focus was too much on the demand side. There will always be some cost for things and if you are not a supplier then you are out. The machines put too many people out in any particular location. Same as globalisation.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  This will only be true in societies where the government interests of developing things like surveillance technology do not outweigh the interest of fulfilling their basic responsibilities. Look at how financially powerful a city like Hong King is compared to the issues they’ve struggled with over the last several years. If we can’t agree on some basic human rights questions, there’s just no way that technology will proliferate in a way that universally benefits everyone.
- seibelj 7y ago
  The truck drivers who lose their jobs will get new ones. Same story has been told for generations and it is never true. So-called AI won’t eliminate the need for workers, they will just shift into new jobs. No one shed a tear when the carriage drivers lost their jobs. Except maybe the carriage drivers and their families.
klaudius 7y ago
People have been saying robots will take all the jobs and kill everyone for centuries: https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-jobs-for-more-than-200-years-5c9c08a2f41d https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-...
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  And? Many jobs have disappeared. Many jobs have been simplified with software to require far fewer people, and far less mental effort.
- throwaway8291 7y ago
  There's a company in my town, hiring devs for a fully robotic kitchen setup. Ingredients are deposited, machines cook meals. A single person can take care of the joint. You can replace a $100k/month bill on personel for a mid-size fast-food outlet with $10k/month for a few guys helping the machine. No strikes, overwork, just ingredients, meals and a bit of maintenance. Imagine, you are a 50 joint franchise, that's a whopping 50 mil per year in savings (and few hundred people desperately looking for jobs).
  - telesilla 7y ago
    As long as the price of that food is lowered to reflect its mass-produced nature, it seems fair: win-win for society. Then on (those more rare) occasions when we want a superb michelin-level meal, we pay the fair price for a human to prepare it.
bognition 7y ago
What is ccn?
- enjoyyourlife 7y ago
  https://www.ccn.com/about-us/ https://www.ccn.com/about-us/
chroem- 7y ago
As someone who likes to crack jokes at the expense of goldbugs, Dalio saying to buy precious metals got my attention.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  I mean gold will likely get expensive with the amount of outstanding debt worldwide, explicit and off-the-books like underfunded pension liabilites and health care costs. I.e. it's the value of all major currencies that will go down. Japan cannot ever have anything even close to 2% interest rates because at 2% the central government will pay 100% of the tax take just to service interest payments. This, of course, cannot continue forever without pushing down the value of money, one way or another.
throwaway8291 7y ago
It seems very clear to the man on the street, the fights are getting more fierce. Assets prices increase and the bottom 80% are getting squeezed out of many things, slowly but surely: education, housing and with that also out of participation in society. There is literally nothing, that hints at progress at this point: Tech and internet will has turned into permanent surveillance, the home surveillance is rolled out, the internet of things and workspace will be next, allowing for google analytics on labor. And if workers complain too much, increase investments in software and data tools and replace a bunch of wet ware with some tool; heck, half of the "knowledge workers" today might be obsolete already. The average person won't have much to laugh for the next few decades. We live in a sad time, where the most miraculous things man can create (machines that "think") will be the prime weapons of the owners against the non-owners. I fear this will be a costly battle.
- tim333 7y ago
  These things go in cycles. Eventually the 80% will likely vote in a government that evens things out a bit.
  - throwaway8291 7y ago
    Germany had boom times and 1/3 of a few regions already voted for a right wing, borderline fascist party. Imagine what will happen (in a few years) if economy tanks and people seek to punish previous governments even more.
- tenpies 7y ago
  The hilarious part to me is the elites saying "but look at the data". No. The whole point is that we've reversed engineered the economy so that "inflation is under 2%", meanwhile an entire generation is basically condemned to never own their dwelling. Unemployment is "historically low" but that's because you have people with Masters degrees driving for Uber and in the "gig" economy. The stock market is performing tremendously, but that's because we've pumped nearly 4 Trillion dollars into it beginning with Obama's presidency. I am not sure how much longer it goes, but if there is an uprising it's going to be brutal. It's not going to be just bankers and politicians, it's going to come after the technocrats who helped engineer all this and the celebrities that pretended everything was okay.
RickJWagner 7y ago
Dalio unquestionably has had success with investing. But his ideas are often called crazy. (i.e. the bond-heavy nature of his 'All Weather Portfolio'.) He's also at odds with stalwarts like Warren Buffet, who point out that gold doesn't really have a reason to be a hedge against a crash. It doesn't do anything, it just looks pretty. Once people begin to figure that the emporer has no clothes, gold will just be cheap, pretty metal. Dalio is worth listening to, but with a large grain of salt, IMHO.
- travisoneill1 7y ago
  On gold Dalio has been right for the last 6000 years and Buffet has been wrong.
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    It's not clear what you're asserting. For raw return on investment, there is a compelling analysis: https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/news/warren-buffett-bashes-gold-2019-2-1027977003 https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/news/warren-... which demonstrates that Dalio has been wrong over time (as long as we have been around, at least). This does not preclude Dalio from being right about specific small periods of time or decidedly in the future. So far, not so much.
- thomascgalvin 7y ago
  Gold is an asset I don't want to own because it's so useless, but I feel like I should own because people are so dumb.
- tenpies 7y ago
  Why now though? Gold has been valuable for about 6,000 years. We've had plenty of industrial era and information era catastrophes where "gold is useless" , yet a gold ring would still get you smuggled out of the communist regime, a length of gold wire would still get you food, and gold jewelry would still be the best way to move value when the government puts restrictions. Gold is probably the best thing to hold in economic uncertainty - up until the point where social order breaks down and it becomes the second best thing to hold.
scottlocklin 7y ago
People taking seriously what a hedgefund manager says in a public speech... it is to laugh. If productivity were going up because of automation to the point where mass unemployment is an issue, interest rates would be higher: the end. Anyone who disagrees doesn't understand how finance works.
- lawrenceyan 7y ago
  > If productivity were going up because of automation to the point where mass unemployment is an issue, interest rates would be higher: the end. Anyone who disagrees doesn't understand how finance works. Could you better explain the process by which you arrived at this conclusion? There's a lot of hand waving and little to no rigor in the proof that you provide.
- starbugs 7y ago
  That's an interesting thesis. Could you explain why?
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    If automation were increasing producitivity, you could invest capital in it and get giant returns, making capital more rare and valuable, as it would be tied up in productive ventures. It isn't. Even freaking google is basically punting on a basket of dumb ideas, absolutely none of which has worked out, and none of which are likely to pan out, and (rationally) sitting on a huge barrel of cash from their looting of the US media system. Therefore, negative interest rates. Negative interest rates = negative productivity increases. So it is, so it has always been. That's what finance is! You loan money to people to do useful things with. If there's nothing useful to do, the money isn't worth as much. Most of it, these days, goes to dumb shit like real estate bubbles. All you need do is look at times when human power over nature was obviously increasing; capital was dear and interest rates where high because you could invest in the Bessemer Process or the Concorde or the Haber process or, like, the invention of computers and telecommunications. These days, we have ... apps for your phone. Of course we have negative interest rates; there is literally nothing to invest in.
HNLurker2 7y ago
This is the same guy that wrote worthless self-help ("principles") and claims capitalism is bad, not practicing what he preaches he also benefits the most from it.
- dbuder 7y ago
  Did you read the whole thing? Have you ever traded? It's not bad imo, didn't want to work for the guy after reading it though.
- warlog 7y ago
  Agreed. Audio book was unlistenable. I had to tap out after the first few vacuous chapters. This guy is talking his book, not reality. Buyer beware.
teekert 7y ago
If I guy that got awfully rich by shuffling money around instead of actually producing anything of value gets scared, then I feel like perhaps the economy may get a bit more fair. Bring it on.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > Bring it on I'm no economist but you getting your wish may be the last thing you want.
- adeptus 7y ago
  What you call "shuffling money around", other's call funding companies with potential so they can sustain or accelerate their business, hire more staff, develop new products, provide those products in new regions etc. Investing is how you get rich in this world. Whether it's real estate, stocks, bonds or any other non-depreciating asset classes. Investing is not without risk. America would not be what it is today without investors risking their money since at least the 1920's. If you think continuously successful investors don't work for their money, then you are simply ignorant about the complexities and time consumption that continuously successful investing requires.
  - teekert 7y ago
    You mean the country where the rich get richer and are the only one enjoying education and healthcare? The country where poor is the new "middle class"? Money makes money in our current (imho diseased) economy, but it is coming from somewhere.

105 points by joeyespo 7y ago

>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. Why can't we let the individual find a way to make themselves productive? And, why do they need to be productive? Some of my best times in life are watching and playing games with my friends. Socializing. Loving people. I, and most people I know, can look around and see things that need to be done. If our lives aren't so focused on paying the bills all the time, we can relax a bit and be creative. I remember I used to get great school lunches. I knew the cafeteria staff by name and they knew me because I went back for seconds and thirds and fourths... skinny as a bean pole. Lunches were made fresh every day. The staff were there at 6am cooking for the kids. Fresh bread. I used to love watching that dough bounce around in the industrial mixer. It was bigger than I was. A decade after I was out of school, I saw one of the ladies and asked how the school lunches were. She said they don't get to make them anymore. The menus are decided in Washington DC now and they have very little control over what is cooked or eaten. Kids don't come back for seconds and thirds and fourths anymore. The federal government took local control away from the schools and homogenized everything and basically ruined it from what I remember. Why do we think the federal government knows better how to manage our day to day lives than we do ourselves? Get out of our kitchens and homes. The government doesn't need to find a way for me to be productive. People who need to be productive to keep their sanity will find a way. They'll clean their bedrooms, volunteer in their communities. They won't be judged by what their job is, but rather, what they do for themselves and the people around them. The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill. We need more freewill in the world.

hectorr1 7y ago
> And, why do they need to be productive? Because the entire global economy is premised on having enough growth to pay off the debt incurred by previous generations. If people choose to be less productive the whole edifice comes crashing down.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  Given the things GP described as being unproductive, things that almost all of us find humanly valuable at a very basic level, perhaps the edifice needs some serious refactoring if that's the case. I love life, I don't love work. Work is part of life, but I can't love life fully if I don't love my work. A system based on the idea that every member of society must be productive is so hideous and inhuman to me it makes me angry to think of someone seriously propounding this productivist dogma. Why, exactly, is society structured in such a way that most of my waking hours are spent getting ready for work, commuting and working? It's a tragedy to be born, grow up, and spend your days grinding away just to stay alive. That's the one life you have, and I'm wasting it just for the fact of staying alive? It's no surprise that young people aren't happy with this.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    Maybe the key is to change what we consider productive. Our main measure of productivity is GDP and it has some really perverse methodology. If a defense manufacturer builds a bomb and sells it the government, that is considered positive GDP. If next year that bomb is taken and dropped on one's own country thus destroying value is it considered negative GDP? No, again it's positive production because the pilot and bombadeer sold their services to the government too! Meanwhile, if one parent in a relationship stays home to care for the couple's children thus rendering a highly valuable service to the family, it is not counted! Only academics who have furvent faith in the dogma they've been handed down can see such a contradiction and maintain their faith. Recently we have been seeing economists trying to augment gross measures like GDP. And we've seen the rise of behavioral economist who are trying to better integrate human factors into economics.
- onion2k 7y ago
  This is true if human productivity is the only thing driving growth. The suggestion here is that automation replaces that human input as most jobs are actually more about supporting the innovation rather than innovation itself - if you remove the need for those supporting jobs many, many more people can work on the innovation bit instead. Society would benefit greatly. Some people, maybe even most, won't actually achieve much or contribute anything to the furthering of the human race, but that cost is worth paying for if enough actually do. We probably have hundreds of Einsteins, Turings, and Musks working in the roles supporting the innovators because they can't get out of those roles. That's bad for all of us.
tarr11 7y ago
> Despite the sharp wrangling that the National School Lunch Program often stirs up, the meals coming out of it are more nutritious — and a lot more adventurous — than they were 10 years ago. “It absolutely is a brighter day for school foods,” says Bettina Elias Siegel, a lawyer turned advocate and author of the book “Kid Food.” > A major federal study recently came to much the same conclusion, finding that school lunches have improved significantly since implementation of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. And the schools with the healthiest menus have the greatest rates of student participation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lunches-in-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lun...
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  As a french person who's been to a few schools in the US, the US has such a long way to go it's almost non funny. I would never subject my kids to the food the local super-rich-tech-company daycare gives to toddlers.
- maxaf 7y ago
  I don’t care what anyone says; in NYC school lunches are basically inedible. Having been exposed to the public school system here for over six years, I can say with confidence that no one who has any choice will allow their kids to eat the garbage that schools put out during lunch. My kid tells me that she’d rather go hungry than eat lunch at school. I’ll be packing lunch for another six years as needed, and that’s okay by me. I just wish we weren’t wasting all this money to haul garbage to schools on a daily basis.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Lunches might be better on average, and still in some places worse than they used to be.
hos234 7y ago
"Productive" is code for obedience. When ever someone talks about Productivity they are measuring how many people in the population are obedient and fit into domination based hierarchies. Those that don't throughout history are unproductive. Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's[1]. Why? Because most people learnt they don't like being obedient or dominated and there are better and newly available routes to meet ones needs and values. We don't need to prop up a Mark Zuckerberg or Ray Dalio or the Queen of England to live a decent life anymore. You can even do it without exploiting someone else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...
- icotyl 7y ago
  > "Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's" This is the exact opposite of what your chart shows. Productivity, in the economic sense, is growing since the 1980s. It's wages that have stagnated. The wealth generated by increased productivity is all flowing to top. Dalio recognizes this: "Increased productivity will also substantially increase the wealth gap." He knows this trend is not sustainable.
  - hos234 7y ago
    It is the same damn thing. Wages is proxy for WORKER productivity. Go and ask Dalio why wages/worker productivity has stagnated while sector(factory/org) productivity has increased. Listening to him is like listening to some member of British Royalty while Empire winds down having no clue why the colonies want independence. They too will say the British Empire's increased productivity will increase of the wealth gap. That's just another way of saying nobody wants to work to prop up the British Empire. People have found better things to do in life. The only thing under threat is their model of reality. And there is no point paying attention to them about what comes next, because they can only see the empire based on obedience and domination as the best model.
trpc 7y ago
>transferring money to people who are unproductive says the professional unproductive hedge fund manager. The parasite billionaire who spent his life capturing the profit made and value created by companies
friedman23 7y ago
> And, why do they need to be productive? Why do I need to give them money?
- trianglem 7y ago
  The unfortunate answer here is because you choose to be productive.
zozbot234 7y ago
>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. ¿Por qué no los dos? One of the issues with the current system is that it does not serve people who are only somewhat productive, if only for the time being. We expect that every job (more generally - every production opportunity, at the margin) will pay for itself, but there's no law of economics that says this has to happen.
Upvoter33 7y ago
Seems like you mixed up a bunch of stuff, like cost cutting vs. federal government overreach. Lunches are bad today at schools because no one wants to spend any money on anything in the public sector.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
This is why I support UBI over a Federal Jobs Guarantee. UBI doesnt tell individuals how to spend their money or time.
mc32 7y ago
>”The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill.” I’m not sure of that. Couple of things. I’ve worked with working class people. They may complain about the job or the boss, but if they didn’t do one of those jobs, they’d feel less empowered. I’ve heard people essentially say I don’t want to be on welfare but I can’t get a job. So they'd prefer a job to being on the dole. Two, people with lots of time and nothing to do tend to just while away time, either in the form of any kind of entertainment or some times in counter productive activities. Doing “make-work” actually gives people some purpose. I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  People having "nothing to do" is a self-inflicted problem of modern societies. There's plenty of stuff to do, all over the place. Just because it might not meet some wholly-arbitrary standard of a 'living', 'sustainable' level of productivity doesn't mean it's "make-work".
  - iknowalot 7y ago
    People will leave the mundane and repetitive to automation and focus on what they find truly fulfilling, utilizing "creative intelligence". Creative intelligence involves always striving for the new thoughts, fresh ideas, novel ways to solve problems....repetition makes people mentally weak and depressed. Many of the problems we discuss today about humans in the era of automation have already been addressed in ancient Indian philosophy (many millennia ago). This isn't new....
- fierarul 7y ago
  > I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk. I like what you are saying and thought that perhaps this is why politicians seem to be so hyper-focused on jobs. They may realise better than most people jobs have other roles except producing an income.
RickJWagner 7y ago
If everybody got to do what their freewill told them to do, pretty soon we'd have lots of artists but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers. It's so much better being artistic. I fear it wouldn't end well.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers The market takes care of that problem quite nicely. Lines of work which are less comfortable or appealing should pay more in the first place.
  - trianglem 7y ago
    Not really, it would make no sense to acquire advanced skills if menial unskilled labor that no one wants to do pays more.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      The kind of menial unskilled labor that we're discussing here is far less appealing than any work involving advanced skills - that's what the higher pay would be compensating for. It all works out.
    - croon 7y ago
      Think further a few more steps. There will be an equilibrium around a pay where there is a long enough line for unskilled labor to fill all demand. Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market.
      - littlestymaar 7y ago
        > Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market. Which is basically “assuming a flat earth and atmosphere approximate to vacuum”. You can't get many useful insights from that.
- Arbalest 7y ago
tracer4201 7y ago
The elites will go to great lengths to ensure you work hard so they can profit and keep the status quo. I’ve presented similar arguments and have had the VP of a FAANG (a friend of mine) argue that working is in people’s better interests, that it actually empowers them, etc etc.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  I wonder if that VP even knows a single person who would be a net recipient under a UBI-like arrangement. It just sounds like the kind of comment that reveals a severe lack of understanding wrt. what UBI would actually be like.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    To be fair, I don't think that most advocates of UBI know of such a person themselves.
roenxi 7y ago
> And, why do they need to be productive? Because every day a typical person needs to consume about 9kJ worth of food We need a system that produces 9kJ food x number of people reliably and accurately. Food is somewhat metaphorical here, there are a bunch of other things that are needed. Also, that system needs to be fair. The people responsible for producing the food are taking on extra hardships or risks and won't do it if they don't think they are getting a net-good deal. And there is also the issue of taxes. We need people to be productive to support the institution of government which has become large end free-spending.
trianglem 7y ago
Let me preface this by saying I agree with you in spirit but your first and second paragraphs have a contradiction in them. How are you going to get people to come in and cook meals for kids at 6am because that's almost certainly something people will not do unless coerced by circumstance.

philipkglass 7y ago

If machines can produce every useful good and service better than humans -- including manufacturing copies of themselves -- then the global economy (denominated in units of currency) might be under threat, but people will materially prosper. It's not dollars or euros or renminbi that people really need. People need goods and services. If the machines-do-everything technology gets invented once, copies will soon spread globally [1]. The real problem is more likely to be the transitional turbulence. If self-driving vehicles do wipe out millions of truck driver jobs in the year 2029, but automated doctors aren't ready until 2059, large groups of workers lose income without seeing deflationary relief in the prices of services they need. [1] The spread of maker machines could happen "legitimately" -- Gates Foundation or a similar organization financing freely shareable re-implementations. It could also happen "illegally" -- a government in a poorer country will just decide to tell international patent/copyright holders to pound sand in favor of their own domestic constitutents. This would be similar to South Africa's treatment of HIV drug patents in the 1990s.

discreteevent 7y ago
This is a bit like the arguments economists made for globalisation. Very sound theory but by experiment it is being proven wrong. The focus was too much on the demand side. There will always be some cost for things and if you are not a supplier then you are out. The machines put too many people out in any particular location. Same as globalisation.
save_ferris 7y ago
This will only be true in societies where the government interests of developing things like surveillance technology do not outweigh the interest of fulfilling their basic responsibilities. Look at how financially powerful a city like Hong King is compared to the issues they’ve struggled with over the last several years. If we can’t agree on some basic human rights questions, there’s just no way that technology will proliferate in a way that universally benefits everyone.
seibelj 7y ago
The truck drivers who lose their jobs will get new ones. Same story has been told for generations and it is never true. So-called AI won’t eliminate the need for workers, they will just shift into new jobs. No one shed a tear when the carriage drivers lost their jobs. Except maybe the carriage drivers and their families.

klaudius 7y ago

People have been saying robots will take all the jobs and kill everyone for centuries: https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-jobs-for-more-than-200-years-5c9c08a2f41d https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-...

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
And? Many jobs have disappeared. Many jobs have been simplified with software to require far fewer people, and far less mental effort.
throwaway8291 7y ago
There's a company in my town, hiring devs for a fully robotic kitchen setup. Ingredients are deposited, machines cook meals. A single person can take care of the joint. You can replace a $100k/month bill on personel for a mid-size fast-food outlet with $10k/month for a few guys helping the machine. No strikes, overwork, just ingredients, meals and a bit of maintenance. Imagine, you are a 50 joint franchise, that's a whopping 50 mil per year in savings (and few hundred people desperately looking for jobs).
- telesilla 7y ago
  As long as the price of that food is lowered to reflect its mass-produced nature, it seems fair: win-win for society. Then on (those more rare) occasions when we want a superb michelin-level meal, we pay the fair price for a human to prepare it.

bognition 7y ago

What is ccn?

enjoyyourlife 7y ago
https://www.ccn.com/about-us/ https://www.ccn.com/about-us/

chroem- 7y ago

As someone who likes to crack jokes at the expense of goldbugs, Dalio saying to buy precious metals got my attention.

H8crilA 7y ago
I mean gold will likely get expensive with the amount of outstanding debt worldwide, explicit and off-the-books like underfunded pension liabilites and health care costs. I.e. it's the value of all major currencies that will go down. Japan cannot ever have anything even close to 2% interest rates because at 2% the central government will pay 100% of the tax take just to service interest payments. This, of course, cannot continue forever without pushing down the value of money, one way or another.

throwaway8291 7y ago

It seems very clear to the man on the street, the fights are getting more fierce. Assets prices increase and the bottom 80% are getting squeezed out of many things, slowly but surely: education, housing and with that also out of participation in society. There is literally nothing, that hints at progress at this point: Tech and internet will has turned into permanent surveillance, the home surveillance is rolled out, the internet of things and workspace will be next, allowing for google analytics on labor. And if workers complain too much, increase investments in software and data tools and replace a bunch of wet ware with some tool; heck, half of the "knowledge workers" today might be obsolete already. The average person won't have much to laugh for the next few decades. We live in a sad time, where the most miraculous things man can create (machines that "think") will be the prime weapons of the owners against the non-owners. I fear this will be a costly battle.

tim333 7y ago
These things go in cycles. Eventually the 80% will likely vote in a government that evens things out a bit.
- throwaway8291 7y ago
  Germany had boom times and 1/3 of a few regions already voted for a right wing, borderline fascist party. Imagine what will happen (in a few years) if economy tanks and people seek to punish previous governments even more.
tenpies 7y ago
The hilarious part to me is the elites saying "but look at the data". No. The whole point is that we've reversed engineered the economy so that "inflation is under 2%", meanwhile an entire generation is basically condemned to never own their dwelling. Unemployment is "historically low" but that's because you have people with Masters degrees driving for Uber and in the "gig" economy. The stock market is performing tremendously, but that's because we've pumped nearly 4 Trillion dollars into it beginning with Obama's presidency. I am not sure how much longer it goes, but if there is an uprising it's going to be brutal. It's not going to be just bankers and politicians, it's going to come after the technocrats who helped engineer all this and the celebrities that pretended everything was okay.

RickJWagner 7y ago

Dalio unquestionably has had success with investing. But his ideas are often called crazy. (i.e. the bond-heavy nature of his 'All Weather Portfolio'.) He's also at odds with stalwarts like Warren Buffet, who point out that gold doesn't really have a reason to be a hedge against a crash. It doesn't do anything, it just looks pretty. Once people begin to figure that the emporer has no clothes, gold will just be cheap, pretty metal. Dalio is worth listening to, but with a large grain of salt, IMHO.

travisoneill1 7y ago
On gold Dalio has been right for the last 6000 years and Buffet has been wrong.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  It's not clear what you're asserting. For raw return on investment, there is a compelling analysis: https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/news/warren-buffett-bashes-gold-2019-2-1027977003 https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/news/warren-... which demonstrates that Dalio has been wrong over time (as long as we have been around, at least). This does not preclude Dalio from being right about specific small periods of time or decidedly in the future. So far, not so much.
thomascgalvin 7y ago
Gold is an asset I don't want to own because it's so useless, but I feel like I should own because people are so dumb.
tenpies 7y ago
Why now though? Gold has been valuable for about 6,000 years. We've had plenty of industrial era and information era catastrophes where "gold is useless" , yet a gold ring would still get you smuggled out of the communist regime, a length of gold wire would still get you food, and gold jewelry would still be the best way to move value when the government puts restrictions. Gold is probably the best thing to hold in economic uncertainty - up until the point where social order breaks down and it becomes the second best thing to hold.

scottlocklin 7y ago

People taking seriously what a hedgefund manager says in a public speech... it is to laugh. If productivity were going up because of automation to the point where mass unemployment is an issue, interest rates would be higher: the end. Anyone who disagrees doesn't understand how finance works.

lawrenceyan 7y ago
> If productivity were going up because of automation to the point where mass unemployment is an issue, interest rates would be higher: the end. Anyone who disagrees doesn't understand how finance works. Could you better explain the process by which you arrived at this conclusion? There's a lot of hand waving and little to no rigor in the proof that you provide.
starbugs 7y ago
That's an interesting thesis. Could you explain why?
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  If automation were increasing producitivity, you could invest capital in it and get giant returns, making capital more rare and valuable, as it would be tied up in productive ventures. It isn't. Even freaking google is basically punting on a basket of dumb ideas, absolutely none of which has worked out, and none of which are likely to pan out, and (rationally) sitting on a huge barrel of cash from their looting of the US media system. Therefore, negative interest rates. Negative interest rates = negative productivity increases. So it is, so it has always been. That's what finance is! You loan money to people to do useful things with. If there's nothing useful to do, the money isn't worth as much. Most of it, these days, goes to dumb shit like real estate bubbles. All you need do is look at times when human power over nature was obviously increasing; capital was dear and interest rates where high because you could invest in the Bessemer Process or the Concorde or the Haber process or, like, the invention of computers and telecommunications. These days, we have ... apps for your phone. Of course we have negative interest rates; there is literally nothing to invest in.

HNLurker2 7y ago

This is the same guy that wrote worthless self-help ("principles") and claims capitalism is bad, not practicing what he preaches he also benefits the most from it.

dbuder 7y ago
Did you read the whole thing? Have you ever traded? It's not bad imo, didn't want to work for the guy after reading it though.
warlog 7y ago
Agreed. Audio book was unlistenable. I had to tap out after the first few vacuous chapters. This guy is talking his book, not reality. Buyer beware.

teekert 7y ago

If I guy that got awfully rich by shuffling money around instead of actually producing anything of value gets scared, then I feel like perhaps the economy may get a bit more fair. Bring it on.

tempguy9999 7y ago
> Bring it on I'm no economist but you getting your wish may be the last thing you want.
adeptus 7y ago
What you call "shuffling money around", other's call funding companies with potential so they can sustain or accelerate their business, hire more staff, develop new products, provide those products in new regions etc. Investing is how you get rich in this world. Whether it's real estate, stocks, bonds or any other non-depreciating asset classes. Investing is not without risk. America would not be what it is today without investors risking their money since at least the 1920's. If you think continuously successful investors don't work for their money, then you are simply ignorant about the complexities and time consumption that continuously successful investing requires.
- teekert 7y ago
  You mean the country where the rich get richer and are the only one enjoying education and healthcare? The country where poor is the new "middle class"? Money makes money in our current (imho diseased) economy, but it is coming from somewhere.