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Yeah that's my first reaction to. 1.2% doesn't sound much. It's just people making headlines out of thin air. If it lists the water and energy consumption I mig
by raincole 1y ago
Yeah that's my first reaction to. 1.2% doesn't sound much. It's just people making headlines out of thin air. If it lists the water and energy consumption I might be more concerned.
Slightly off-topic, but ~9% of GDP is generated by "financial services" in the US. Personally I think it's a more alarming data point.
- linotype 1y agohttps://youtu.be/HA1YKg_OLBw https://youtu.be/HA1YKg_OLBw Financial services makes the unrealistic consumption of rich countries possible. That’s worth 9%.
- UltraSane 1y agoHow do they do that?
- anticorporate 1y agoWait, so we could end unrealistic consumption in rich countries and get 9% of our economy back to doing something useful? Sounds like a win-win.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoYes, and you could go back to agrarian life too! Win-win-win! The finance industry's ability to teleport value across time and space is a massive boon for quality of life across the world.
- goda90 1y agoI can't help but wonder if there's a middle ground between people not being able to obtain credit to pursue new enterprises, and entire productive enterprises being swallowed up in the pursuit of short-term rent seeking.
- Ntrails 1y agoCould such a middle ground exist? Sure. Could someone design a system where that middle ground was a natural equilibrium? Unsure. I don't see how you incentivise the goldilocks behaviour (but I am not the smartest bear so maybe someone else can)
- wizzwizz4 1y agoThere's a good book on this topic by a Scottish philosopher: An Inquiry into the Nature and Cauſes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, LL. D. and F. R. S, formerly Profeſſor of Moral Philoſophy in the Univerſity of Glasgow.
- lukas099 1y agoThe economy is not a fixed pie that you can just take slices from one sector and give them to another. Financial services provide liquidity that supports every other sector; getting rid of them would cause contraction in every other sector.
- puchatek 1y agoThat's true to a degree. But giving them free reign inventivizes the kind of behavior that gave us the 2008 financial crisis. So the commenter can be forgiven for wanting to limit that sector.
- airstrike 1y agoThey don't have "free reign". And who's to say whether 9% is better or worse for society as a whole. The comment is an uninformed take.
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoIt feels like a fairly hefty tax for the benefits it provides.
- airstrike 1y agoPolicy is generally decided on more than what "feels" right. You'd have to quantify "hefty" and "benefits it provides"
- tjwebbnorfolk 1y agoYes it's like magic! Let's "JUST STOP OIL" while we're at it. Oh and end world hunger too.
- kldg 1y agoI'm banking on Space Emperor Elon. If he can form a Musk Sphere around Mars, he should be able to generate enough energy to push Deimos into Earth reasonably fast. Of course, he doesn't have to actually do it. Instead, he could extract tribute and demand we push 50M people into a volcano each year in exchange for not extincting us. In just a few decades, most all our issues resolve.
- afiodorov 1y agoNice clip yet it does not make it clear why 9% is the good value of GDP. Why not 7%?
- airstrike 1y agoWhy not 50%?
- miki123211 1y agoUltimately, "financial services" is what's downstream of insurance, banking (deposits / money transfers), loans and retirement savings. Also efficient capital allocation and the provision of government services to some extend. Those are things we want, and we want those things to work well.
- fspeech 1y agoYes but it is the overhead. Higher overhead doesn't suggest efficiency.
- giantg2 1y agoWhy is 9% for financial services bad? This should cover fees/interest from everything like loans, transactions, mortgages, advice, investing, etc. It doesn't seem that surprising to me that the systems that are the backbone for all the money operations that power the rest of the economy make up about 10%.
- anon7000 1y agoI get your point, but the flip side is that private companies like visa and Mastercard get to skip 2.5%+ off the entire economy. Visa has more than 50% profit margin, and it’s not like these companies are innovating with all that extra cash either. It’s just money from my pocket to some rich investor somewhere
- rogerrogerr 1y agoVisa and Mastercard aren’t skimming 2.5% off the economy; the majority of the interchange fees go to banks (which Visa is not; their actual product is VisaNet which provides payment infrastructure, broadly.) Trivially verifiable by Visa’s revenue being $35B, which is not even close to 1% of just US GDP (about $30T).
- giantg2 1y agoAnd Visa is international, so some of that $35B is ex-US.
- bluGill 1y agoCash costs more nearly that much when you count all the time spent counting and recounting it - at least 8 times for every transaction. (the buyer finds and counts, then the cashier counts, then count change. Then the manager counts and recounts the till, finally the bank counts and recounts it - several of the above will come up with a miscount and recount additional times to verify). Then we add crime loss on top of that. visa is saving the country a lot of time/money.
- sneak 1y agoNot the entire economy, just retail and some b2b. OpenAI isn’t putting two billion in GPUs on their corporate credit card.
- wnc3141 1y agoNearly 20% for healthcare causes some reservations -- considering how little we get for our money in America.
- jgalt212 1y agoYes, that stat is spirit crushing.
- pesus 1y agoWe spend about twice as much on average as other developed countries and get far far less in return.
- KiwiJohnno 1y agoI have read, but not verified the figures myself that if the United States had Australia's healthcare system - universal, government funded healthcare (excluding dental) then all US citizens would have near free healthcare, would not need costly insurance, and the government would spend a similar amount to what it does now
- ckw 1y agoAccording to O3 US public health spending (state + federal) is 8.6% of gdp. For perspective, here's a list of countries with universal systems which spend less (these numbers include private spending), and life expectancy (US is 78.4 for reference): Singapore: 5.6%, 82.9 Israel: 7.2%, 83.2 Estonia: 6.9%, 78.5 Poland: 6.7, 78.5 Luxembourg: 5.7%, 83.4 Czech Republic: 8.1%, 79.9 and a couple which spend a bit more, though again, this includes private spending: France: 11.9%, 82.9 Japan: 11.5%, 84 Portugal: 10.5%, 82.3 Spain: 10.7%, 83.9 So it seems like we could have universal coverage and higher life expectancy if the US government simply spent exactly what it is currently spending, but on everyone, rather than just the old, poor, and veterans.
- shafyy 1y agoI think this is also a great chart showing health care expenditures per capita with life expectancy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-healthcare-expenditure https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health... Interesting to see countries like Spain and Italy, where the spend is one third of the US but the life expectancy is significantly higher.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agosome years back I was talking to an acquaintance through my daughter's kindergarten and complaining about this point and he said it was because financial services was where all the innovation was happening (he was an investment consultant of some sort) He was convicted of fraud a few years later.