Technology has improved, productivity has gone up, computers revolutionized the world. The world has never been more efficient
So can anyone explain to me why the economy is so much worse than it used to be? Why are houses so expensive? Why can't you raise a family of 4 with one low tier job? Why do we have people competing for burger flipping jobs?
Shouldn't everything be BETTER now?
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Welcome to the New World Order friendo. We're all basically living through a script at this point. Brave New World wasn't so much a dystopian fiction novel as a manual for the globalists.
Increasing population, and much of our technological efforts have gone into feeding apathy. Also wealth gaps
Maggie
The economy isn't worse than it used to be.
>Why are houses so expensive?
Inflation, demand, mortgages (which increases demand).
>Why can't you raise a family of 4 with one low tier job?
Because people aren't as self-sufficient as they used to be. You probably aren't a farmer using your children as slave labor to make ends meet.
>Shouldn't everything be BETTER now?
It is.
Certain things are better, others aren't.
One major issue with housing for example is that it's always based around a central location and doesn't really expand as needed. Housing gets a lot cheaper as you move away from major cities, but there's not much to do out there, and at some point development stops, so it's more an issue of housing being very centralized.
Hell you can get a house in Detroit for 1$, the property tax on it will be much higher, it will be falling apart, and it will be in murder town, but if that area ever becomes developed your 1$ plot of land with a house will become an amazing investment. It's just that to make the area not a hell hole where houses are sold for 1$ just so the city can collect taxes will require a massive effort in restructuring the whole area and then taking the time to attract normal people as opposed to methlabs. It's doable, just too much of a pain though.
i've looked into that... I kind of want to buy a 1$ house and set up deadly traps inside and put a bunch of really expensive looking stuff in the windows.
Simple. Greed. In 1976 nixon took us off the gold standard and we borrowed to fund the war. Then we got a taste of that sweet free money and much like the obama suporters we flat out just ran with it with 0 reguards to future generations. We continue to borrow to support our bullshit economy while our money (wich is now backed by nothing) continues to be worth less every second. All the way to the scene of the crash. Where we Zimbabwe ourselves.
>pic related.
A 100 trillion dollar zimbabwe note. It is real. Or, was rather until they finally just pulled the plug and made up a new currency. Wich is exactly what we will do here in burgerland. It is not a matter of if bit when...
If you dont thibk so ask zimbabwe folks if they thought it would happen to them.
Every grear civilasation that has tried this has tanked and history is doomed to repeat itself. Better start haording valuable commodities and aquiring assets user op. You will wish u did
If you do, at least buy one with windows that allow vision inside. Not being able to see inside often means someone is already trapping the place and may be in there at the time.
>Increasing population
You mean increasing immigration
>Inflation didn't exist before 1976
>Gold isn't overvalued by memes
>Zimbabwe is the future of all states
How to spot a 16-year-old libertarian
...
>skill-based technical change in the economy, particularly automation does away with jobs with less educational requirement and more demanding services become dominant (note: applies mostly to the West)
>high-skill and higher education is more valued, particularly in creative, highly technical, and/or capital-intensive industries
See:
economics.mit.edu
papers.ssrn.com
press.princeton.edu
>globalized and competitive context means industries increasingly operate under winner-take-all models, in which only a few individuals get the lion's share of the rewards (see: CEOs and corporate execs, music artists that are popular vs. the legions that aren't, popular academic professors with books that sell and online lectures that are watched vs. other professors, etc)
See:
amazon.com
hbr.org
papers.ssrn.com
>capital vs. labor, with labor losing out due to automation and population growth (the latter meaning that someone will do the same job for less). Capital owners (particularly those who own machines, assets, investments, etc) see increasing returns
See:
blogs.wsj.com
bls.gov
Then you can throw in a number of other factors: current experimental central bank policy, inflation, a carving out of manufacturing (traditional path from lower class to lower-middle class, critical to maintaining social cohesion and reducing income inequality), ubiquitous nature of tech jobs, ridiculous costs of education (raising children = more expensive, pushes local reproduction downwards, drives policy makers to encourage immigration whilst disregarding culture and race), etc etc.
We could argue this all day.
>Because people aren't as self-sufficient as they used to be. You probably aren't a farmer using your children as slave labor to make ends meet.
Children didn't work back then because it was legal to make them. They worked because people were so poor that if they didn't, the family would die.
There's a reason child labor laws were only introduced when kids basically didn't work anymore.
>Technology has improved
Only computers. Medicine, transportation, agriculture - these fields have barely changed since the 1980s.
We now have fewer than 1/3 the amount of drugs passing FDA trials per 1billion dollars compared to 1980. Concorde was decomissioned in 2001 and nothing has replaced it. We still require masses and masses of land to grow crops to feed our ever growing population.
buy a few houses at the border of the area. build a fence. pay guards for protection. find others to join your area. result is poor fags gone. more welthy people renting. profit.
AM I RIGHT?
Inflation, regulations and an over supply of "skilled" labor.
Also, forgive this tirade, but I feel a need to argue a philosophical point.
>The world has never been more efficient
That is not necessarily a good thing. The obsession with efficiency can have a dehumanizing influence on the way we conduct business, politics, and our society in general. Personally, I blame rational choice theory for sneaking in the cult of efficiency through the proverbial back door.
The example I most often deploy is a contrast seen in metro systems that use full-body turnstiles and those that don't.
The former are born out of Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) thinking, firmly believing that you can eliminate and prevent crime or such unsocial behavior (in this case, not paying metro fair) by applying certain technologies and systems. There isn't a choice, you just have to do.
The normal turnstiles though, whilst less efficient, can trigger moral and social debates. If you see someone skipping paying fare, then you can think badly about him*, feel good about yourself for actually following the law, question the morality of requiring homeless people to pay these fares, etc. The important point is that a moral environment shapes a moral society, and ideally, you want to encourage people to behave better themselves through their own choices. Its less efficient, but would have a more desirable result than simply removing choice.
Increasing population of the wrong colour
There, fixed it for you
You have literally no idea what you're talking about if you think medicine or agriculture haven't changed much.
House inflation is artificial because the banks hold onto houses.
I'm not anti-capitalist, but capitalism is your answer friendo.
The natural order of that system scales returns on technological advancement in favor of the already wealthy over the poor. Capitalism's endgame -- unrestricted capitalism, anyway -- is an elite and peasant class.
Because of Asian manufacturing combined with free trade, shitbird.
You have a piece of plastic that can pull up the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia.
Not to mention, the real price of most goods that aren't housing, medicine and education have plummeted or at least has stayed the same. And in the case of medicine the quality of goods has gotten better. Things only suck more now if you have no skills.
Yoy wat mutherfucker i will get my pilots liscense to helicopter you over the wall! Examples man. Most people dony have the slightest clue. Rome fell to coin clipping, sparta fell to not having a fuck to give. There MUST be balance. This is why my far right capitolistic ideas see holes poked. U have to fund for the beggar left or they will cost more than u soend to pay for them to live. It all boils down to greed and simple math. Comunism looks perfect on paper but how many commie countries u see worth a fuck? None. Helicopter rides for all commie scum.
As a miner i will say it is expensive. Bit in my area there is 2-3 times the area we use of workavle top soil under us. Could essentially car parking garage it. But then there is a whole other problem. In an emergency we could cornfield the streets, grow on roofs and under ground. It would be a clusterfuck. But we could find a way
The most spot-on gets no replies.
Where did you do your research at, may I ask?
A combination of my own free reading and stuff pulled from MIT Sloan Management Review. Trust the nerds to know numbers.
sloanreview.mit.edu
What is important though are two things: a personal philosophy and extensive self-education.
First, you need a personal philosophy. There is this article called "The US Strategic Paradox" in Special Operations Journal that, while off-topic, helps explains it:
>In reality, there are five levels of war that all fall under the auspices of the umbrella of this author’s preferred “theory” of war. Theory drives politics and policy, which, in turn, drives strategy, operations and tactics in descending order. The theory is universally applicable as the originating theory/ideology that drives the political level may be liberalism, fascism, communism, wahhabism, and so forth.
Business/investing is similar. You can plan for the strategic (the market you want to engage in), operational (the companies/commodities/currencies/etc you're interested in), and tactical (day-to-day news and movements) levels, but these plans all need to be driven an ideological framework. With nothing to guide you and assist you in making decision, you're just driven by greed, or worse, envy. Veeky Forums has a lot of this, with an additional tinge of desperation.
(Cont)
Second, you need to self-educate. By this I mean read *a lot*. Not just business, but history, philosophy, science fiction, and everything. You want to understand automation and its effects? Read Huxley's novel "Brave New World." You see technologically-maintained population control and thus preserved social order, a controlled level of manufacturing, specialized produced drugs to restrain violent impulses and control stress, etc etc. or Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" on how information can be a virus (applications in the communications industry, media, memetics, etc).
This is why some successful CEOs are philosophy or history majors that read at lot; they understand broader contexts (economic, historical, political, cultural, etc) in which human activity occurs. It's also why the business-education managerial class are insufferable, and sometimes bad at their jobs. Look at the recent scandals with Pepsi and United; you see reflected in them the marketing "professionals" obsessed with appearing "woke" and in touch with the youth, and the bureaucratic accounts whose job leads them to seeing people as just numbers.
This is also something Veeky Forums fails that. Too many people on this board are content with either Youtube videos (where some random individuals repackages information into an easily consumable format, if at that) and easy investment books (ignoring the fact that if its been written down and published, then the information loses the edge it once possessed).
Learning to think holistically demands more than that.
>bureaucratic accounts
*accountants
>fails that
*fails at
just raise taxes
I agree with you 100%, but biz would call me a commie
Sometimes the invisible hand fucks everyone over
Well put.
I love your type on biz- a diamond in a sea of shitposts.
Never heard of Snow Crash before. I need to read that this weekend.
It's a riveting read in a wacky hyper-libertarian future it portrays.
Little known fact: scientists and engineers derive a shit ton of ideas from Sci-fi novels. They love them. The idea for tablets like the iPad and laser-based weaponry in the military came from Star Trek, for one.
This book took it to 11.
The term "online avatar"? Snow Crash.
Google Earth? Snow Crash.
Quake? Snow Crash.
Xbox Live? Snow Crash.
Free trade. Read: labor arbitrage, regulatory arbitrage, and tax arbitrage.
I wonder what kind of insurance policy I can get on a $1 house. Then sit back and wait for it to get destroyed in a gang fight and collect the insurance.
I just bought a OneWheel recently. Kind of like a prototype to YT's millipede skateboard. I don't think I'll be grappling cars, though.
Yep. Yep. and YEP.
>We could argue this all day.
I don't think there's much to argue. Things have gotten better for the wealthy and for corporations - it's gotten worse for the bottom 98%. That's a simple, objective fact.
There has never been a better time to be rich than right now. The lower and middle classes are having their foundation dissolved from underneath them, and wealth is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the top 0.1%. We haven't seen levels of wealth inequality this high since France, before the revolution.
Three main factors are destroying low- and middle-income jobs.
1) Efficiency gains
2) Outsourcing
3) Automation
And the life cycle typically runs in that order. Workers today are many, many times more efficient than workers in the past due to computerization and human-machine cooperation. Outsourcing has never been this cheap, and continues to get cheaper as globalization takes control of politics (therefore cutting tariffs and other governmental expenses on international trade). And finally, we're beginning to enter a world of general automation. Not everything will be automated - but many things will, and many jobs already are.
If you aren't saving and investing every penny you can fucking scrape together, or building a business, right now, you are running straight toward a cliff.
Honestly I pity people who think "yeah it's all gonna be fine! We can just keep doin' what we're doin!". They are so, so fucked.
I give it 10-15 years, tops, before we start to see a massive societal shitshow. The lower classes are fucked. They're so fucked.
>Because of Asian manufacturing
Also fucking this.
I run a business (consumer electronics). We were going to source a component from the United States - the raw materials would still come from China, because that's where everyone gets their raw materials, but the machining would be done here. Total cost of that component in our final product? About $75 shipped.
Then we thought "that's fucking dumb, that's way too expensive", so we found a supplier in China. Not only were they way the fuck more responsive than our American supplier (answered emails within the hour instead of days), but they also provided identical or better quality, at a much lower cost. How much lower? That component now costs us about $17, shipped. A nearly 80% (eighty fucking percent) decrease in cost with no cut to quality and *better* service.
That's why the lower and middle wage jobs are out the god damn window. That's why the lower and middle classes are getting shoved further and further into poverty. As an American, outside of highly specialized skills and services that must happen in-person, you cannot compete with people from China and India. You just can't.
Oh, another example. Same product, but a different component. Sourcing from an American manufacturer would've cost us somewhere between $250 to $500+. We found a Chinese supplier, and now that part is getting sent to us for less than $40 each.
This is why middle and lower class America is fucked. It's just fucked. And once automated driving and automated (even partially automated) fast food starts taking hold and going mainstream, we'll start to see that societal shift. Big societal shift. And it will not be pretty, I can guarantee you that.
>mfw I saw the prices from our American suppliers vs the Chinese
Oh no, you misunderstand. I was talking about arguing what is the main driver of why the economy is so ridiculous right now.
In terms of the likely result, I agree with you completely: The lesser classes are likely doomed, especially in the first world where they now face global competition. And particularly those without any technical skill, creative instinct, or education, as dictated by current market demand. There are simply too many people on the planet, courtesy of the current capitalism paradigm of "growth at all costs." Well, that, and the result of bleeding hearts subsidizing third worlders who literally cannot feed themselves because THEY'RE STARVING WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING.
I'm openly wondering where the first major revolt will occur. If the ruling classes were smart, they'd start pushing for radical societal change to offset the fury. Unfortunately, as Trump's rise shows, the best leadership they can put forward are a bunch of weak pretenders to the throne: religious mystics, has-beens, and impotent sons of old dynasties that are out of touch. That, and their policies are unimaginative. Seriously, universal income? After pushing work values and capitalism for centuries, you want to do a 180 and propose that? Please.
I just want to secure my own fortune, put it into assets won't be easily affected by the coming storm, and bunker down in some quiet Latin American country where they serve piña coladas at reasonable prices.
>I was talking about arguing what is the main driver of why the economy is so ridiculous right now.
Ah, gotcha. If I had to pick one reason it would be "globalization" but realistically it's due to all the reasons we've listed and more.
>I'm openly wondering where the first major revolt will occur
I imagine small towns and poor communities will go to hell first. Look at what happened in all those southern cities where a single person was killed by police - now imagine what's going to happen when 1/2 of that population can't afford food anymore.
>If the ruling classes were smart, they'd start pushing for radical societal change to offset the fury
If I were a sociopath, I'd be pushing for gun control and confiscation. If I were smart, I'd be pushing for more socialized programs like healthcare and universal income. Most rich people are neither of these things; they don't give a shit because they don't have to. Regardless of what happens to the lower classes, the wealthy will be well-insulated from the bottom 90% losing their jobs and then their minds. If my family's net worth were, say, $10 million or more, we could very easily go anywhere in the world and live comfortably. A good number of families have net worths measured in billions, and an immense number are worth in the tens/hundreds of millions. These are the groups that control public policy, and these are the groups least affected by it.
My prediction is they'll just let it go to shit because what the fuck do they care? Let the poor kill each other.
>I just want to secure my own fortune, put it into assets won't be easily affected by the coming storm, and bunker down in some quiet Latin American country where they serve piña coladas at reasonable prices.
This is basically my #1 plan. I want to be far away, not just because our current culture is so toxic, but also because I don't want to be accidental collateral when Tyrone gets in a gang war with Jeff the accountant.