Absolutely none of society's problems can be solved through power and wealth concentration.
In the metaphor of an economic system being a living thing, money is blood. Blood circulates, and keeps the organism alive. Blood pooling in one spot and not circulating well can be fatal.
this. I repeat it often and get chanllenged because im not an economist but I don't care. Its obvious in the way it works. Money only has value when exchanged. A dollar sitting has just the value of the paper like material its made of, but a dollar when used to purchase it has its economic value. Its like potential and kinetic energy.
Pretty much. Put the following hypothetical scenario to your detractors. Let's suppose for the sake of arguement that the way that wealth is concentrated now/status quo is justified and required:
If a bunch of AIs can mimic the wealth concentration behaviors of the top one percent, could you fire the one percent? The AIs would keep the wealth, as no actual human would be required to be the hoarder. The top one percent can then have their economic outlook capped like the rest of us, while the AIs keep the wealth as per usual.
Would there be anything fundamentally wrong with that arrangement, given that the wealth concentration is a requirement?
interesting but the detractors are really just doing the bs you can't say anything because your not a recognized expert. As if economics were physics and even then einstein was not a physicist till he was (I am in no way suggesting im einstein or einstein like. Just point out he had things right (albeit not completely worked out) before he was a recognized expert).
A dollar sitting has just the value of the paper like material its made of, but a dollar when used to purchase it has its economic value.
But doesn’t this logic only work if people are physically stashing benjies under their mattress? Because let’s say some fat cat keeps a large bank account balance. The bank doesn’t just take the fat cat’s money and put it in a drawer. That money gets re-circulated back into the economy in the form of customer withdrawals, loans, etc.
What am I missing?
maybe but it kinda skews everything and what we see now. The wealth disparity has this own knock on where yeah the wealthy realize the valuelessness of the currency itself so they try to put their money in anything they can. this inflates the value of things (stocks, homes, etc) such that they have no real basis in reality. People invest just to invest and not because they have researched a particular thing and see value. It has value because everyone thinks it has value. bitcoin is like the ultimate embodiment of this as it should be a currency (not really it uses to much energy) but instead its treated like an investment but it has less value than fiat currency (which is backed by taxation)
We should unrich them
When hasn't this been the case?
Hasn't that always been the case? People with the most wealth always own the most assets.
Aside from when they sell at the top before economic downturns anyhow
By record share they mean that there has not been a time prior to now in which they've owned a percentage as high as they currently do.
The graph in the article makes that pretty easy to understand.
I really wish it went back to 1900 though.
Yeah agreed I would like to see back to the robber baron era and particularly around the run up to the crash in 29 and the aftermath of that. It seems like every time there's a big crash you see a huge movement of capital siphoned up into the upper % in the aftermath.
yeah I feel like roaring twenties are the closest thing to recent times.
Yeah I see a lot of parallels for sure, which is concerning because the 30s and 40s were pretty fucked up.
I wonder what might cause the trend to turn in one direction or another. For example, if 8% of equities are owned by one group while the other 92% are owned by another, then I suppose I’d expect both “shares” to grow proportionally to one another. In other words, if the market as a whole gains 50%, then I’d expect the ratio of shares owned by each group to remain stable… the only thing I can think of that might explain the difference in outcomes is perhaps a difference in portfolio composition, which could reflect a gap in investment preferences, or perhaps some opportunities are available to one group while excluding the other. Seems likely to be a mix of the two.
most ordinary folks investments are in retirement and older generations have been able to fund their retirement better than newer ones. older generations have to sell (or die and its sold usually because the kids need like a house or such). Rich folks never really have to sell, even if they are not working they get more than enough in dividends even if they are not paying a lot atm due to their massive stock amounts to begin with. Further they are more likely to buy more stock with dividends than regular folks.
The rich get interest while the poor get debt. Tale as old as time tbh
The non-owning classes need a different tool for tracking debts than the fiat currency we're used to.
If there is a way to cooperatively track value created by working within your neighborhood, say fixing a neighbors deck, delivering food, etc, outside of macroeconomic trade, we could figure out how to live without the hoarding pigs.
The difficult part is accountability. Commodities and fiat currencies are what they are, but trying to implement some other fungible measure of value created before the representation of that value already exists is what has me scratching my head. If there are 100 people capable of doing work within their community but only $10 to go around them, it doesn't make sense to exchange work for money that doesn't exist. But if those 100 people can agree to compensate one another by exchanging work without using the currency, they would all be unblocked and industrious.
There were lots of economies that worked this way. One recent example was the Irish Bankers Strike. Most of the banks in Ireland closed because they wanted concessions. The banks gave up on their strike because the overall economy wasn't affected much because people just paid with what cash they had, and if they needed credit they'd go visit their local pub where the owner would vouch for them.
There's more examples in David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." Early economies didn't have money, but they still made it work.
you're better off ditching the strict accounting and foraging durable social relations instead. I recomend reading Bolo'Bolo
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