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People say with the recent unemployment payments that's there's no incentive to "work" anymore. But in my personal life I'm seeing more and more people quit the

People say with the recent unemployment payments that's there's no incentive to "work" anymore. But in my personal life I'm seeing more and more people quit their jobs to do things like live off Bitcoin fluctuation trading, living off stock market returns, renting out their properties. etc. There seems to be almost no incentive to preform actual labor when just sitting back and watching Coinbase 24/7 is objectively more profitable.

sschueller 5y ago
When taxes favor making money with money than labor why would anyone want to work? Labor should be tax free or low and capital gain should be taxed high. Time is more valuable than money and taxes should reflect that.
- chacham15 5y ago
  > Time is more valuable than money and taxes should reflect that. I understand the sentiment, but it literally isnt true. If it were, then noone would accept a job since they'd rather have the time instead. At the very least, there is more nuance to be observed here.
  - bigyikes 5y ago
    I would gladly take a pay cut if my job let me work less time.
    - the_lonely_road 5y ago
      Seconded. If I could keep my career security (I will still be employed here 10 years from now unless black swan) and healthcare (no spouse) while cutting pay and hours in half I would take it in a HEARTBEAT. No one is offering that.
      - misterremote 5y ago
        But shouldn’t that be totally doable? What’s the argument against that by the employer? Because pay is also 50%
        malloreon 5y ago
        there are costs to employing someone that don't vary with number of hours worked. The person you're responding to wants 100% of their current healthcare plan but only half the salary/expected hours, for example.
        WJW 5y ago
        Many of the overhead costs scale as a function of headcount irrespective of how many hours each employee works. For example, let's say you work in a regulated industry where each employee needs to follow a certain training every year. Having twice as many employees each working 20 hrs will double the training costs. Management overhead will also go up since there will be more one-on-ones etc.
        sfotm 5y ago
        There are some issues that I think would make this difficult to do: - Two employees at 50% salary and time are not equivalent to a single employee at 100% of salary. They're strictly worse if always run in series, all else being equal. Alice starts project X on Monday and Tuesday, and hands it off to Bob on Wednesday because it's urgent. There's some inefficiency there. Good management could help avoid it, but would be hard-pressed to prevent it in all cases. At best, it's one more thing to worry about. - There are benefits outside of your salary that are more difficult to cut in half. Health plans, headcount taxes, etc. That being said, there are some experiments being done (not at 50%): https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/part-time-tech https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/part-time-tech
        misterremote 5y ago
        Ok, I see. I guess if company feels that the talent is very valuable to them, it's possible to negotiate special terms like this, but I guess in general companies are not then interested in part-time roles yeah. I'm actually planning to cut my time in half, but keep the same pay. My story was discussed here on HN yesterday/today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133376 Long story short: As the startup I'm working at doesn't have enough money to raise my hourly price, I'm now proposing to cut my hours in half, but keep the pay. So I'm working half the time, but keep the pay. It's summer now, so I'm happy to spend more time with friends and family. And while we're talking about working less, another thing that's interesting I think is "4-day work weeks". There are remote companies who work 32h per week. I even made a list of the ones I know, but I'm sure there are more: https://remotehunt.com/remote-companies-with-4-day-work-weeks https://remotehunt.com/remote-companies-with-4-day-work-week...
    - pixelpoet 5y ago
      Come to Germany, where companies over a certain size (# of employees) literally cannot deny your request to work part-time: https://www.globaladvocaten.com/blog/labour-law-parttime-work-in-germany https://www.globaladvocaten.com/blog/labour-law-parttime-wor... Be warned though, you won't make the same batshit insane US salary here.
    - langitbiru 5y ago
      Maybe you can find one here: https://parttime.careers https://parttime.careers
  - kissickas 5y ago
    Neither of those things have units on them, so that's obviously not the comparison they were trying to draw. The way I see the comment, labor is more valuable to society than putting up capital is, so the government should incentivize labor by raising the capital gains tax.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    > then no one would accept a job since they'd rather have the time instead So, if we value air more than food, should we stop eating so we can breathe more?
    - refurb 5y ago
      So we can breath enough? Hell yeah. I’d give up food to make sure I can breath.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      You literally make this tradeoff each time you have a meal — what?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    People would take time over a job if Maslows hierachy of needs are taken care of by some grant like Universal Basic Income. I would conjecture people don't always work for rational reasons -> Billionaires going to the office must piss off everyone like dude, you've won the game, go buy an island or something. So work is a useful habit. Useful in that it's a source of revenue for the government. Which is good and I agree with. But that makes unemployment a wholly irrational thing. Can our economic models even include unemployment as a variable? Surely government must hear those unemployment stats like a cat scratching a board. Should people have to lie, cheat, beg so that they can become tax paying citizens?
- bko 5y ago
  Replace "capital" with "investment" Or imagine the extreme, where capital gains was taxed 100%. No one would invest, we would all be essentially hunter gatherers. There would be no capital appreciation allowed so you would not be able to invest in anything in hopes of making a profit. Capital is how you build a better future
  - ilikecakeandpie 5y ago
    "Or imagine the extreme, where capital gains was taxed 100%." This will likely never happen unless we have a true existential/societal collapse so why entertain this thought?
    - bko 5y ago
      Looking at extremes is a useful mechanism to understanding the underlying factors affecting something. If you accept the fact that 100% capital gains tax would result in no investment and a 0% capital gains tax would mean a lot of investment, surely there is a link between cap gains and someone's willingness to investment. Especially considering that capital holders tend to be sophisticated and highly sensitive to incentives. So increasing the capital gains tax would lead to less investment.
      - BGthaOG 5y ago
        I agree that it is helpful but I also think it is more nuanced than that. What if there is a Goldilocks phenomenon? Someone with knowldege on the "life on Earth goldilocks with the Sun" could share their thoughts on such a comparison :)
      - qqqwerty 5y ago
        Capital gains tax is rarely if ever a major consideration in investment decisions. The vast majority of professional investors are interested in cash flows, not capital gains. It is just the speculators that live and die by capital gains, and they treat our markets like a casino. Disincentivizing their behavior would be a good thing.
      - 5y ago
- jbay808 5y ago
  At least, this should be how it's done in a low interest rate environment when investors are already desperate to invest in whatever they can get an above-inflation return on.
- bhupy 5y ago
  > Time is more valuable than money This is one of those "does not compute" statements that's sort of like dividing by zero. Money buys time, and time has value (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp), which is measured in money. It's why we try to incentivize long term investment, because without such an incentive, consumption now is better than consumption 5-10 years from now. We saw this happen before "long term" carve outs began proliferating in various states' tax codes.
  - grecy 5y ago
    > Money buys time, and time has value Only when you look at it from the business owner perspective, who can simply buy more labor (time) to make more money. For individuals, the only thing we have in this world is time, and it's finite. When it's all gone, it's all over for us. That means time is the most valuable thing possible to individuals. If and when we choose we can sell some of that time for money. But money in not what we want, and it doesn't give us direct value. Time is what we all want, because sooner or later it runs out.
    - bhupy 5y ago
      > For individuals, the only thing we have in this world is time, and it's finite. When it's all gone, it's all over for us. That means time is the most valuable thing possible to individuals. But this is a difference in degree, not kind. When the average individual buys something online, some individuals may choose to pay a little more for expedited shipping. It's the same principle. More abstractly, if I were to pose an individual looking to purchase Nike shoes 2 options: $100 to get the shoes today, or $1 to get the same shoes a year from now, the majority of individuals would choose the former, rather than the latter. Again, that's because of the time-value of money. Now, you're correct that not everybody has the means to be able to buy time like this, but one can't conclude from this reality that time is "more valuable than" money. > Time is what we all want, because sooner or later it runs out. Yes, this is correct, and it reinforces the argument that time and money are just two currencies that are interchangeable. Money is just a proxy for value, and time is undeniably valuable. Not everybody has enough money to buy 70+ years of "free time", which is why the median person typically trades labor instead of money for future "free time" (retirement). In most countries that offer social security, that's the underlying mechanism: convert mass labor into money (taxes/contribution) which can then be converted into long term investment (sovereign wealth funds, SS trust funds), which is then converted to equally distributed "future free time" for everyone involved.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Andy_G11 5y ago
  This perspective is strongly endorsed by Pikkety's work, which shows that returns on capital outperform returns on labor. Further, there is a trend for higher levels of capital to not just produce proportionately higher returns, but also higher percentage returns. E.g. Harvard's endowment fund earns a higher percentage return than the smaller endowment funds of other universities. This disparity may be because higher amounts of capital allow owners to not only employ more skilled financial resources, but also to cherry-pick investments and negotiate superior returns to an extent that is not possible for owners with less capital. The disparity in returns on capital vs labor result in a concentration of capital in fewer hands (inequality) and this is linked to reduced overall productivity. Piketty proposes a tax on capital (not just on a capital gain, but on the balance) to reverse this. This is undermined by the fact that it is regarded as an impossibility (politically), kind of like proposing that we all just learn to levitate to do away with polluting aircraft.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  There's probably more governing cost to labour than to virtual jobs. In NZ builders pay more towards healthcare than coders do.
- zamfi 5y ago
  What taxes favor day trading commodities over labor?
astrowilliam 5y ago
Would be nice to have enough money to invest enough to make a nice living wage off of the market right now. Most people don't have that $$. Early adopters are WAY ahead of everyone else in this regard. Luckily I got in early.
the_local_host 5y ago
A fundamental difference between trading and working for pay is that you're not risking your principal when you take a job.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  No, you are instead explicitly forfeiting substantial portions of the only life you’re ever going to get.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    It doesn't have to be this way! You're on HN, a lot of us are actually doing what we enjoy, or at least are pursuing that goal. I recognize that's the result of a whole heap of privilege, but I don't have to work and still do because it fulfills my desire to build things and... well honestly, make money.
  - kabes 5y ago
    Is watching coinbase 24/7 more fun? Trading is also a job you have to put effort in and one that does not appeal to me at all. I'd rather be programming.
    - elif 5y ago
      Absolutely not in any single way is it more fun. I miss programming, I miss team members, I miss gut-wrenching production issue debugging. Sometimes the stress and anxiety of crypto is physically debilitating. But you're wrong that it's something you have to put effort into. The absolute BEST decisions i've made in crypto were inaction. The biggest regrets I have were all caving to anxiety.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      That's when you pay someone to watch Coinbase 24/7. It will show the same to everyone, so there's no need for everyone to keep watch.
  - marcusverus 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
Those are not the same people. You need a decent amount of capital to pull off the trading and renting. Unemployment isn't pocket change to those people, but it is not a lot.
rvba 5y ago
Central banks printed billions to "save" the stockmarket. Leading to gigantic hidden inflation. Poor are poor. Middle class are screwed (money on bank account basically has negative interest due to inflation). So you can be a pseudo rich by just holding stock/bitcoin/peoperty - since they increase in value purely due to money print. If you are a middle class person the central bank basically screws you to save the stock market. Unpopular opinion but the central banks are the main source of inflation. Now the economy is completely unglued from any fundamentals.
- tachyonbeam 5y ago
  > Unpopular opinion but the central banks are the main source of inflation. I mean, that seems obvious, there can't really be inflation if the money supply doesn't increase, can there? If the money supply stays fixed, then some people will save/hoard money. Some people will also be more able than others to acquiring money (possibly because they already owned assets/rental property), maybe they were born rich. The amount of money that is circulating will automatically decrease. That tends to produce deflation. The problem is that if you have deflation in your economy, it also increases the incentive for people to save/hoard money even more. Why would you spend your money today when it will be worth more later? You have a feedback loop where the amount of money circulating just keeps decreasing, and so prices automatically have to go down.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    > I mean, that seems obvious, there can't really be inflation if the money supply doesn't increase, can there? Depending on your definition, sure there can be. Private lending is the primary driver of inflation. Most wealth is on paper anyway, so long as people don't try to get actual cash, then an economy can experience significant inflation with a fixed supply of money. You don't even need lending to drive inflation without a money supply increase. There are lots of bitcoin millionaires out there who can't actually liquidate their holdings for cash, but could, in theory, actually buy other physical goods with it at roughly face value. Central banks don't have a monopoly on inflation, despite everyone's apparent belief that they do. They are a major influencer, yes, but at USD-scale, they don't have all that much control. You can see this in how the Fed almost always misses their inflation targets.
ModernMech 5y ago
This is the result of decades of policy favoring capital over labor. Tax rates on capital gains are lower than taxes on income earned through labor. The Supreme Court tells us that corporations are people too. Congress passes tax reform with permanent tax cuts for corporations but individual tax cuts that expire. Corporations run multi million dollar ad campaigns lauding “essential workers” as “heroes” yet they continue to pay a minimum wage that verges on poverty wages. Capital owners multiply their wealth every time a disaster hits while labor is still reeling from the last one. What message is labor supposed to take from all of this? We are not valued at all, so why even bother? If society is set up to be a system where we all just trade paper and bits back and forth, then why do any productive work at all if you’re going to end up getting shit on?
- akomtu 5y ago
  Imagine filing a tax report where all your housing, food, car and clothing expenses are listed as operating expenses and are thus not taxed. In addition to that, most of your income went to an Irish subsidiary and your total taxable income this year is $150, taxes at 20% because "I identify as a C-corp".
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I'm literally in the process of registering an LLC for myself to do consulting work, because our laws have been set up in such a way that it's more beneficial to treat myself as a corporation rather than a human being.
amelius 5y ago
Similarly, in my professional life I'm seeing more people working on silly apps that run a filter over a selfie than people working on e.g. medical image processing or you know, stuff that is actually useful. I see businesses who write a CRUD website/app to connect contractors (read: employers) to businesses. And they are hugely successful. I don't know but something seems wrong in the way work is incentivized. Is the market broken?
- misterremote 5y ago
  I’m often thinking about the same thing, but not only in tech. Like why this photo filter app boy/girl is super rich + has a lot of free time, and my friend nurse has very little money and works all the time?
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    Because being a nurse doesn’t scale. It’s better to provide a small amount of value to 100 million people than immense value to 10 people.
    - misterremote 5y ago
      Yeah. And I'm also thinking about the value you give to the world, you know. Like these photo filter apps. How do they improve our life here on Earth. They rather have negative effects I would say: like a bad impact on teenager's self esteem or something like that. But yeah, it's our society and it's values :)
      - ryanlol 5y ago
        That filter app probably makes people laugh or at least smile, that’s value right there.
    - c22 5y ago
      It's kind of subjective to say this is better. If 100 million people had a bunch of cool image filter apps on their phone but no access to medical care the outcome is pretty clearly not better. Perhaps it's more reasonable to say that providing a small amount of value to a larger amount of people is more profitable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brobdingnagians 5y ago
It is hard to run a society off of derivatives, fiat money, and bitcoin production instead of steel and lumber production.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  Lack of labor should accelerate automation.
robjan 5y ago
Many people are making tons of money in crypto but even more are losing out. But people only post online when they are winning. It's the same as Instagram - everyone seems to have incredibly interesting lives but really most of us work 9-5 and spend most of our free time watching Netflix or performing mundane tasks. Social media focuses and amplifies the good parts of other people's lives.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  There's a whole "loss prn" subset on wsb and some crypto subreddits where people proudly show their losses, the bigger the better. And lots of suicidal kind of messages when the whole market crashes. So I'd say losses are as vocal as wins depending on which forums you go to.
  - robjan 5y ago
    Loss porn gets boring after a while and it's more of a subculture than mainstream. It's more interesting to report on a janitor who became a billionaire trading Dogecoin on their daily commute than reporting on the same person blowing their meagre salary buying derivatives, which they didn't understand, on a sketchy exchange.
misiti3780 5y ago
That can't continue forever though.
fallingknife 5y ago
This is your bubble. Only a fraction of a percent of the population are able to do any of those things.
muttantt 5y ago
True, crypto is the new UBI
lumost 5y ago
Almost all wage earning activities have had downward wage pressure on real wages for the last 5 decades. The only exception to this sees to be highly defensible businesses/monopolies and the talent pool these businesses draw from. I wouldn't be surprised for more daytraders to emerge playing games like GME/TSLA/BTC. With infinite printed money there never needs to be a greater fool. Shorts who go bust get bailed out, banks who bet long can pump the stock on near negative interest, Individuals can drive momentum to the point that other players leverage the money spigot. After all as long as the money doesn't get withdrawn it doesn't impact the real economy right?
rawtxapp 5y ago
Endless money printing distorts value in weird ways in my opinion. But I think what you're seeing is lots of fomo and people who had savings because they were forced to save (couldn't spend it), they should be back to their jobs when the market inevitably crashes.
Grustaf 5y ago
To make more money from investing than working you need a whole lot of savings. If by some miracle you can make 10% a year long term (and you haven't been poached by a hedge fund yet), and you need 100 k to live, that means you need to have more than a million in the bank ("more", because you want to compensate for inflation as well).
msgilligan 5y ago
Current monetary policy is the equivalent of unemployment payments for the wealthy. It distorts markets and discourages productive investment.
tim333 5y ago
We seem near the top of an epic bull run. I'm not sure the ability for everyone to get rich by trading virtual things between each other will continue indefinitely.
andrepd 5y ago
> sitting back and watching Coinbase 24/7 is objectively more profitable Is it? I find that highly improbable.
senectus1 5y ago
you're talking about the same groups of people. the people that say shit like "unemployment payments encourage laziness" are talking about poor people, minorities and people of color. The people you're referring to doing crypto trading are typically affluent already, or people in social structures and communities where they have places and people to fall back on.
DougN7 5y ago
Now imagine the whole country gets UBI. I don’t see how it can ever work out with this tiny example we’re seeing.

sschueller 5y ago

When taxes favor making money with money than labor why would anyone want to work? Labor should be tax free or low and capital gain should be taxed high. Time is more valuable than money and taxes should reflect that.

chacham15 5y ago
> Time is more valuable than money and taxes should reflect that. I understand the sentiment, but it literally isnt true. If it were, then noone would accept a job since they'd rather have the time instead. At the very least, there is more nuance to be observed here.
- bigyikes 5y ago
  I would gladly take a pay cut if my job let me work less time.
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    Seconded. If I could keep my career security (I will still be employed here 10 years from now unless black swan) and healthcare (no spouse) while cutting pay and hours in half I would take it in a HEARTBEAT. No one is offering that.
    - misterremote 5y ago
      But shouldn’t that be totally doable? What’s the argument against that by the employer? Because pay is also 50%
      - malloreon 5y ago
        there are costs to employing someone that don't vary with number of hours worked. The person you're responding to wants 100% of their current healthcare plan but only half the salary/expected hours, for example.
      - WJW 5y ago
        Many of the overhead costs scale as a function of headcount irrespective of how many hours each employee works. For example, let's say you work in a regulated industry where each employee needs to follow a certain training every year. Having twice as many employees each working 20 hrs will double the training costs. Management overhead will also go up since there will be more one-on-ones etc.
      - sfotm 5y ago
        There are some issues that I think would make this difficult to do: - Two employees at 50% salary and time are not equivalent to a single employee at 100% of salary. They're strictly worse if always run in series, all else being equal. Alice starts project X on Monday and Tuesday, and hands it off to Bob on Wednesday because it's urgent. There's some inefficiency there. Good management could help avoid it, but would be hard-pressed to prevent it in all cases. At best, it's one more thing to worry about. - There are benefits outside of your salary that are more difficult to cut in half. Health plans, headcount taxes, etc. That being said, there are some experiments being done (not at 50%): https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/part-time-tech https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/part-time-tech
        misterremote 5y ago
        Ok, I see. I guess if company feels that the talent is very valuable to them, it's possible to negotiate special terms like this, but I guess in general companies are not then interested in part-time roles yeah. I'm actually planning to cut my time in half, but keep the same pay. My story was discussed here on HN yesterday/today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133376 Long story short: As the startup I'm working at doesn't have enough money to raise my hourly price, I'm now proposing to cut my hours in half, but keep the pay. So I'm working half the time, but keep the pay. It's summer now, so I'm happy to spend more time with friends and family. And while we're talking about working less, another thing that's interesting I think is "4-day work weeks". There are remote companies who work 32h per week. I even made a list of the ones I know, but I'm sure there are more: https://remotehunt.com/remote-companies-with-4-day-work-weeks https://remotehunt.com/remote-companies-with-4-day-work-week...
  - pixelpoet 5y ago
    Come to Germany, where companies over a certain size (# of employees) literally cannot deny your request to work part-time: https://www.globaladvocaten.com/blog/labour-law-parttime-work-in-germany https://www.globaladvocaten.com/blog/labour-law-parttime-wor... Be warned though, you won't make the same batshit insane US salary here.
  - langitbiru 5y ago
    Maybe you can find one here: https://parttime.careers https://parttime.careers
- kissickas 5y ago
  Neither of those things have units on them, so that's obviously not the comparison they were trying to draw. The way I see the comment, labor is more valuable to society than putting up capital is, so the government should incentivize labor by raising the capital gains tax.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  > then no one would accept a job since they'd rather have the time instead So, if we value air more than food, should we stop eating so we can breathe more?
  - refurb 5y ago
    So we can breath enough? Hell yeah. I’d give up food to make sure I can breath.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    You literally make this tradeoff each time you have a meal — what?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  People would take time over a job if Maslows hierachy of needs are taken care of by some grant like Universal Basic Income. I would conjecture people don't always work for rational reasons -> Billionaires going to the office must piss off everyone like dude, you've won the game, go buy an island or something. So work is a useful habit. Useful in that it's a source of revenue for the government. Which is good and I agree with. But that makes unemployment a wholly irrational thing. Can our economic models even include unemployment as a variable? Surely government must hear those unemployment stats like a cat scratching a board. Should people have to lie, cheat, beg so that they can become tax paying citizens?
bko 5y ago
Replace "capital" with "investment" Or imagine the extreme, where capital gains was taxed 100%. No one would invest, we would all be essentially hunter gatherers. There would be no capital appreciation allowed so you would not be able to invest in anything in hopes of making a profit. Capital is how you build a better future
- ilikecakeandpie 5y ago
  "Or imagine the extreme, where capital gains was taxed 100%." This will likely never happen unless we have a true existential/societal collapse so why entertain this thought?
  - bko 5y ago
    Looking at extremes is a useful mechanism to understanding the underlying factors affecting something. If you accept the fact that 100% capital gains tax would result in no investment and a 0% capital gains tax would mean a lot of investment, surely there is a link between cap gains and someone's willingness to investment. Especially considering that capital holders tend to be sophisticated and highly sensitive to incentives. So increasing the capital gains tax would lead to less investment.
    - BGthaOG 5y ago
      I agree that it is helpful but I also think it is more nuanced than that. What if there is a Goldilocks phenomenon? Someone with knowldege on the "life on Earth goldilocks with the Sun" could share their thoughts on such a comparison :)
    - qqqwerty 5y ago
      Capital gains tax is rarely if ever a major consideration in investment decisions. The vast majority of professional investors are interested in cash flows, not capital gains. It is just the speculators that live and die by capital gains, and they treat our markets like a casino. Disincentivizing their behavior would be a good thing.
    - 5y ago
jbay808 5y ago
At least, this should be how it's done in a low interest rate environment when investors are already desperate to invest in whatever they can get an above-inflation return on.
bhupy 5y ago
> Time is more valuable than money This is one of those "does not compute" statements that's sort of like dividing by zero. Money buys time, and time has value (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp), which is measured in money. It's why we try to incentivize long term investment, because without such an incentive, consumption now is better than consumption 5-10 years from now. We saw this happen before "long term" carve outs began proliferating in various states' tax codes.
- grecy 5y ago
  > Money buys time, and time has value Only when you look at it from the business owner perspective, who can simply buy more labor (time) to make more money. For individuals, the only thing we have in this world is time, and it's finite. When it's all gone, it's all over for us. That means time is the most valuable thing possible to individuals. If and when we choose we can sell some of that time for money. But money in not what we want, and it doesn't give us direct value. Time is what we all want, because sooner or later it runs out.
  - bhupy 5y ago
    > For individuals, the only thing we have in this world is time, and it's finite. When it's all gone, it's all over for us. That means time is the most valuable thing possible to individuals. But this is a difference in degree, not kind. When the average individual buys something online, some individuals may choose to pay a little more for expedited shipping. It's the same principle. More abstractly, if I were to pose an individual looking to purchase Nike shoes 2 options: $100 to get the shoes today, or $1 to get the same shoes a year from now, the majority of individuals would choose the former, rather than the latter. Again, that's because of the time-value of money. Now, you're correct that not everybody has the means to be able to buy time like this, but one can't conclude from this reality that time is "more valuable than" money. > Time is what we all want, because sooner or later it runs out. Yes, this is correct, and it reinforces the argument that time and money are just two currencies that are interchangeable. Money is just a proxy for value, and time is undeniably valuable. Not everybody has enough money to buy 70+ years of "free time", which is why the median person typically trades labor instead of money for future "free time" (retirement). In most countries that offer social security, that's the underlying mechanism: convert mass labor into money (taxes/contribution) which can then be converted into long term investment (sovereign wealth funds, SS trust funds), which is then converted to equally distributed "future free time" for everyone involved.
deleted 5y ago
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Andy_G11 5y ago
This perspective is strongly endorsed by Pikkety's work, which shows that returns on capital outperform returns on labor. Further, there is a trend for higher levels of capital to not just produce proportionately higher returns, but also higher percentage returns. E.g. Harvard's endowment fund earns a higher percentage return than the smaller endowment funds of other universities. This disparity may be because higher amounts of capital allow owners to not only employ more skilled financial resources, but also to cherry-pick investments and negotiate superior returns to an extent that is not possible for owners with less capital. The disparity in returns on capital vs labor result in a concentration of capital in fewer hands (inequality) and this is linked to reduced overall productivity. Piketty proposes a tax on capital (not just on a capital gain, but on the balance) to reverse this. This is undermined by the fact that it is regarded as an impossibility (politically), kind of like proposing that we all just learn to levitate to do away with polluting aircraft.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
There's probably more governing cost to labour than to virtual jobs. In NZ builders pay more towards healthcare than coders do.
zamfi 5y ago
What taxes favor day trading commodities over labor?

astrowilliam 5y ago

Would be nice to have enough money to invest enough to make a nice living wage off of the market right now. Most people don't have that $$. Early adopters are WAY ahead of everyone else in this regard. Luckily I got in early.

the_local_host 5y ago

A fundamental difference between trading and working for pay is that you're not risking your principal when you take a job.

thepasswordis 5y ago
No, you are instead explicitly forfeiting substantial portions of the only life you’re ever going to get.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  It doesn't have to be this way! You're on HN, a lot of us are actually doing what we enjoy, or at least are pursuing that goal. I recognize that's the result of a whole heap of privilege, but I don't have to work and still do because it fulfills my desire to build things and... well honestly, make money.
- kabes 5y ago
  Is watching coinbase 24/7 more fun? Trading is also a job you have to put effort in and one that does not appeal to me at all. I'd rather be programming.
  - elif 5y ago
    Absolutely not in any single way is it more fun. I miss programming, I miss team members, I miss gut-wrenching production issue debugging. Sometimes the stress and anxiety of crypto is physically debilitating. But you're wrong that it's something you have to put effort into. The absolute BEST decisions i've made in crypto were inaction. The biggest regrets I have were all caving to anxiety.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    That's when you pay someone to watch Coinbase 24/7. It will show the same to everyone, so there's no need for everyone to keep watch.
- marcusverus 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

Those are not the same people. You need a decent amount of capital to pull off the trading and renting. Unemployment isn't pocket change to those people, but it is not a lot.

rvba 5y ago

Central banks printed billions to "save" the stockmarket. Leading to gigantic hidden inflation. Poor are poor. Middle class are screwed (money on bank account basically has negative interest due to inflation). So you can be a pseudo rich by just holding stock/bitcoin/peoperty - since they increase in value purely due to money print. If you are a middle class person the central bank basically screws you to save the stock market. Unpopular opinion but the central banks are the main source of inflation. Now the economy is completely unglued from any fundamentals.

tachyonbeam 5y ago
> Unpopular opinion but the central banks are the main source of inflation. I mean, that seems obvious, there can't really be inflation if the money supply doesn't increase, can there? If the money supply stays fixed, then some people will save/hoard money. Some people will also be more able than others to acquiring money (possibly because they already owned assets/rental property), maybe they were born rich. The amount of money that is circulating will automatically decrease. That tends to produce deflation. The problem is that if you have deflation in your economy, it also increases the incentive for people to save/hoard money even more. Why would you spend your money today when it will be worth more later? You have a feedback loop where the amount of money circulating just keeps decreasing, and so prices automatically have to go down.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  > I mean, that seems obvious, there can't really be inflation if the money supply doesn't increase, can there? Depending on your definition, sure there can be. Private lending is the primary driver of inflation. Most wealth is on paper anyway, so long as people don't try to get actual cash, then an economy can experience significant inflation with a fixed supply of money. You don't even need lending to drive inflation without a money supply increase. There are lots of bitcoin millionaires out there who can't actually liquidate their holdings for cash, but could, in theory, actually buy other physical goods with it at roughly face value. Central banks don't have a monopoly on inflation, despite everyone's apparent belief that they do. They are a major influencer, yes, but at USD-scale, they don't have all that much control. You can see this in how the Fed almost always misses their inflation targets.

ModernMech 5y ago

This is the result of decades of policy favoring capital over labor. Tax rates on capital gains are lower than taxes on income earned through labor. The Supreme Court tells us that corporations are people too. Congress passes tax reform with permanent tax cuts for corporations but individual tax cuts that expire. Corporations run multi million dollar ad campaigns lauding “essential workers” as “heroes” yet they continue to pay a minimum wage that verges on poverty wages. Capital owners multiply their wealth every time a disaster hits while labor is still reeling from the last one. What message is labor supposed to take from all of this? We are not valued at all, so why even bother? If society is set up to be a system where we all just trade paper and bits back and forth, then why do any productive work at all if you’re going to end up getting shit on?

akomtu 5y ago
Imagine filing a tax report where all your housing, food, car and clothing expenses are listed as operating expenses and are thus not taxed. In addition to that, most of your income went to an Irish subsidiary and your total taxable income this year is $150, taxes at 20% because "I identify as a C-corp".
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I'm literally in the process of registering an LLC for myself to do consulting work, because our laws have been set up in such a way that it's more beneficial to treat myself as a corporation rather than a human being.

amelius 5y ago

Similarly, in my professional life I'm seeing more people working on silly apps that run a filter over a selfie than people working on e.g. medical image processing or you know, stuff that is actually useful. I see businesses who write a CRUD website/app to connect contractors (read: employers) to businesses. And they are hugely successful. I don't know but something seems wrong in the way work is incentivized. Is the market broken?

misterremote 5y ago
I’m often thinking about the same thing, but not only in tech. Like why this photo filter app boy/girl is super rich + has a lot of free time, and my friend nurse has very little money and works all the time?
- ryanlol 5y ago
  Because being a nurse doesn’t scale. It’s better to provide a small amount of value to 100 million people than immense value to 10 people.
  - misterremote 5y ago
    Yeah. And I'm also thinking about the value you give to the world, you know. Like these photo filter apps. How do they improve our life here on Earth. They rather have negative effects I would say: like a bad impact on teenager's self esteem or something like that. But yeah, it's our society and it's values :)
    - ryanlol 5y ago
      That filter app probably makes people laugh or at least smile, that’s value right there.
  - c22 5y ago
    It's kind of subjective to say this is better. If 100 million people had a bunch of cool image filter apps on their phone but no access to medical care the outcome is pretty clearly not better. Perhaps it's more reasonable to say that providing a small amount of value to a larger amount of people is more profitable.

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brobdingnagians 5y ago

It is hard to run a society off of derivatives, fiat money, and bitcoin production instead of steel and lumber production.

rawtxapp 5y ago
Lack of labor should accelerate automation.

robjan 5y ago

Many people are making tons of money in crypto but even more are losing out. But people only post online when they are winning. It's the same as Instagram - everyone seems to have incredibly interesting lives but really most of us work 9-5 and spend most of our free time watching Netflix or performing mundane tasks. Social media focuses and amplifies the good parts of other people's lives.

rawtxapp 5y ago
There's a whole "loss prn" subset on wsb and some crypto subreddits where people proudly show their losses, the bigger the better. And lots of suicidal kind of messages when the whole market crashes. So I'd say losses are as vocal as wins depending on which forums you go to.
- robjan 5y ago
  Loss porn gets boring after a while and it's more of a subculture than mainstream. It's more interesting to report on a janitor who became a billionaire trading Dogecoin on their daily commute than reporting on the same person blowing their meagre salary buying derivatives, which they didn't understand, on a sketchy exchange.

misiti3780 5y ago

That can't continue forever though.

fallingknife 5y ago

This is your bubble. Only a fraction of a percent of the population are able to do any of those things.

muttantt 5y ago

True, crypto is the new UBI

lumost 5y ago

Almost all wage earning activities have had downward wage pressure on real wages for the last 5 decades. The only exception to this sees to be highly defensible businesses/monopolies and the talent pool these businesses draw from. I wouldn't be surprised for more daytraders to emerge playing games like GME/TSLA/BTC. With infinite printed money there never needs to be a greater fool. Shorts who go bust get bailed out, banks who bet long can pump the stock on near negative interest, Individuals can drive momentum to the point that other players leverage the money spigot. After all as long as the money doesn't get withdrawn it doesn't impact the real economy right?

rawtxapp 5y ago

Endless money printing distorts value in weird ways in my opinion. But I think what you're seeing is lots of fomo and people who had savings because they were forced to save (couldn't spend it), they should be back to their jobs when the market inevitably crashes.

Grustaf 5y ago

To make more money from investing than working you need a whole lot of savings. If by some miracle you can make 10% a year long term (and you haven't been poached by a hedge fund yet), and you need 100 k to live, that means you need to have more than a million in the bank ("more", because you want to compensate for inflation as well).

msgilligan 5y ago

Current monetary policy is the equivalent of unemployment payments for the wealthy. It distorts markets and discourages productive investment.

tim333 5y ago

We seem near the top of an epic bull run. I'm not sure the ability for everyone to get rich by trading virtual things between each other will continue indefinitely.

andrepd 5y ago

> sitting back and watching Coinbase 24/7 is objectively more profitable Is it? I find that highly improbable.

senectus1 5y ago

you're talking about the same groups of people. the people that say shit like "unemployment payments encourage laziness" are talking about poor people, minorities and people of color. The people you're referring to doing crypto trading are typically affluent already, or people in social structures and communities where they have places and people to fall back on.

DougN7 5y ago

Now imagine the whole country gets UBI. I don’t see how it can ever work out with this tiny example we’re seeing.