Well they might eventually be right! If the US dollar collapses in a couple decades due to continued irresponsible levels of fiscal stimulus then everyone will be a millionaire. Of course at that point it will take a million dollars to buy a loaf of bread.
If you could earn anything with a simple savings account, or safe assets like bonds, then the obsession with finding the Next Big Thing in finance wouldn't be anywhere near as popular. But there are no options - it's finding something to gamble on, or lose your wealth to inflation. No one wants to have their life savings inflated away.
But there are different kinds of gambling. VTI will almost certainly crush inflation over a period of decades. The weird token that my brother-in-law is buying doesn't have the same risk profile as that.
Some probably also thought they'd be Youtube stars or Spotify gods. But they won't. And they're slowly learning that.
Investing of any kind is a winner-take-all game. Crypto especially so. Those who already had money to come in early will make the bulk of the future gains.
All that the young people they really have is the community around crypto, and perhaps the ability to mutually lament their lot in life.
No, seriously, this. I'll say this, I don't know what's going to happen. No clue at all. But it feels like NOT putting SOMETHING in, at least enough to stave off future ROMO would be stupid.
Sad to see your comment greyed out. What you said makes sense.
All major banks and lots of hedge funds are investing in it for a reason. Softbank invested $92MM in a crypto video game (The Sand).... These people aren't stupid investors.
Honestly, it's just a good reminder of -- hmm, how to not be rude here: So the people here are generally smart, but sometimes otherwise smart people get these mental blocks about things, and clearly don't understand "positive risk."
So again, free advice. Put some money in crypto. Think about the largest amount that wouldn't hurt at all if you lost it and put that in. Otherwise, you're really really not being smart about this.
We don't invest or speculate with fiat money. We use it to acquire goods and services, and since most fiat currencies are (luckily) inflative there is a pressure to spend them and move the economy.
At any given social gathering among even non tech people I know, there’s always a side conversation happening about crypto. It’s the same people who go spend too much at casinos, or are only talking about the next business venture. It’s a bit of an obsession.
Another extremely frequent conversation is over the impossibility of owning a home on not-tech salaries. I think they’re related. People don’t think they can really reach goals related to life stability unless they win some sort of lottery. To me this is really worrying, not because it’s wrong but because for many it’s right. A slightly higher than median salary used to mean one is in the middle class. A whole generation doesn’t believe they have any opportunities.
> A whole generation doesn’t believe they have any opportunities.
Even those in tech believe we don't have any meaningful opportunities. Real talk: most of what we do day in day out for our employers is shit built upon bullshit built upon a house of cards, and it will come crashing down sooner than later. The European Union is finally flexing its muscles, other countries are beginning to follow suit against the digital corporations, even the US Congress is asking questions from both parties now. And where will we all be when the venture capital dries up, when entire business models are outright banned or made virtually impossible because of privacy regulations? Or when those we work for (especially in the automotive or other carbon-sensitive industries) have to cut down costs or close shop?
If you work at Facebook or Google (and to a lesser extent Microsoft and Apple), everything you do follows exactly one motive: make as much profit for the shareholders as possible by advertising people stuff they don't need. Most of what everyone else is doing is either directly related to advertising, to creating a new product that is only marginally better than the previous version or to extracting money out of someone else for services they don't need.
Bullshit jobs? We are in a bullshit economy, and the circle of capitalism forces us to ever-increasing economic growth - it's obvious that the path we are on as a species is pointing straight to our downfall, be it by climate change, by a resource-resetting war or by exhaustion of vital natural resources.
Disagree? Ask yourself when was the last time you created something at work that provides a net benefit to society's survival.
> Disagree? Ask yourself when was the last time you created something at work that provides a net benefit to society's survival.
I think you have a point, but at the same time I’m not sure it’s possible for everybody or even most people to have jobs that are crucial to society. Once you hit certain technology level and population thresholds, a lot of jobs become all about optimization and margins — even those that have more of a concrete role in society. It’s unavoidable unless we drop back to pre-1900s technology and/or population levels.
> It’s unavoidable unless we drop back to pre-1900s technology and/or population levels.
No. What we need to do is to not define our worth as humans by the work we do. Only then we can truly automate our crucial needs (i.e. food production, transportation) as far as possible without fearing massive social unrest by millions of people "without employment". A single train conductor replaces a hundred truck drivers. Many governmental services could be done by the citizens themselves based on automated processes. Most teachers (especially the ones who spend all their day droning in front of a blackboard) could be replaced by videos.
The only thing where we will definitely need humans in the future is research, care work and construction/trades. Everything else? Look at the Star Trek economy.
The rich Gulf sheikdoms are a place where the citizens do not really need to work and do not define their worth by their work.
They still struggle with various social pathologies - alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, religious extremism.
I think some people cannot handle a life that is too easy. Arguably, even modern Westerners from richer backgrounds tend to plunge into surrogate struggles or take up very distant causes.
> They still struggle with various social pathologies - alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, religious extremism.
The domestic violence / religious extremism is a result of the Western nations favoring radical Islam interpretations as a base for the regimes they bought their oil from. A kingdom/dictatorship where the ruling class has their assets (i.e. their oil money) in Western nations is more stable for oil supply than a democracy.
Since moving to the EU, I can count the number of times someone has actually cared what I do for a living. It took a few years for me not to care too. I think one of my friends works in a machine shop and another at a bike shop, but I really have no idea. We hang out, play games together, complain about people at our jobs, and all the normal stuff. Yet, not once have we actually talked about what we do for a living.
In the US, the question of what I did for a living was one of the first questions in any conversation, as if my answer was who I was and defined my worth in their eyes. I don’t miss it.
I am fully supportive of moving the economy to a “Star Trek” model, and think that from a technical perspective that doing so will be achievable within the next 1-2 decades.
It would require both political will and lack of obstruction from large employers and entities invested in residential real estate however, and I don’t see that happening in the US for the foreseeable future short of a near-total turnover of the current elected body of politicians, rooting out any who would rather be in the pockets of lobbyists than represent the people.
Note that in the Star Trek universe, the Star Trek economy only developed after WW3 destroyed basically all governments and major cities, along with killing 600M people in a nuclear holocaust.
This seems to be a common feature of world history: major changes in social systems only happen after widespread warfare destroys everything, and eventually people get sick of the death and destruction, vowing "never again" for approximately the next 80 years.
> And where will we all be when the venture capital dries up
VC capital will have to go somewhere. You seem to be arguing against ad companies, which I understand. But there are so many other tech avenues that produce tons of value. Healthcare, logistics, green energy, power distribution, retail, agriculture, security, etc. So many domains where tech can provide huge value and upside.
Sure, but all of these will use way less of us tech people no matter what happens. Once the entire advertising/selling product chain collapses, the tech world is in for a ride.
I was in tech two decades. I went to a trade school and am now a heavy equipment diesel mechanic. It is nice to help real people build real things. Though I could only leave tech to become entry level mechanic because crypto will be paying my retirement.
Though I work hard, I did get lucky. I am thankful and grateful.
Same, and I often wonder if people want to start some kind of scam. I mean the reality is probably that investing in crypto is much riskier, has probably a much lower expected yield than say trading with (covered) derivatives. But I also think it has to do with some kind of FOMO. Everybody knows someone who knows someone that got a ridiculously high return on investment because they bought the stuff 10 years ago. On the other hand it's possible to buy very well-understood derivates today with equal chances on public companies.
> It’s the same people who go spend too much at casinos
YMMV but my experience is actually the opposite. I.e. rather the gambling types actually buy derivates and everybody else considers buying crypto or has already done so.
> I mean the reality is probably that investing in crypto is much riskier, has probably a much lower expected yield than say trading with (covered) derivatives.
For now it isn't, because it has been going up and to the right for quite some time. But the music can stop at some point...
I mean, if you invest in crypto to make money, you're merely betting someone else will give you more money than you paid. And that person in turn is thinking the same. How can this work forever? It's a zero sum game. There's no value being created or dividends being paid.
> People don’t think they can really reach goals related to life stability unless they win some sort of lottery.
People think this because it's true. The median U.S. income is no longer enough to cover a year of basic expenses, or achieve reasonable goals, even if you work for the entire year[1].
"Free-market extremists" are just neoliberals and they're everywhere.
They've infected both sides of politics, reducing most elections to 'red neoliberal' or 'blue neoliberal' that decide nothing except whose gross neoliberal friends get to gouge the taxpayers this term.
This is backed by major media companies who are also all run by neoliberals. They put on a bit of theatre to pretend there is actually more than trivial differences and they'll rake in billions.
They teach their kids neoliberalism in their exclusive schools, training them up to be the next generation of greedy sociopaths. They pay sleazy neoliberal P.R companies to undermine their critics online. They take over unions and turn them into yet another avenue for personal profit.
All to the thunderous applause of the neoliberals running incredibly exploitative, near-sighted businesses that are rapidly ruining the world in search of ever greater profits.
People need to start identifying this ideology and stripping the people who spout it from power.
Money doesn't trickle down, no matter how much of it you stuff into a billionaires pocket. The 'free market' doesn't give people the power to end things like foreign-slavery.
The powerful people that push these ideas know it. The rest of us need to know it too.
Yes, because all of these expensive industries are paragons of free market economy.
The industries where the government stimulates demand (everything from mortgage rate deductions to section 8 and from creating and backing loans non-dischargable in bankruptcy to well, pretty much everything in healthcare) and restricts supply (everything from zoning and environmental regulation to excessive regulation, like in healthcare, to directly running things), are expensive, as summarized crudely in this famous chart [1].
In fact, we are now experiencing what happens when government restricts supply and stimulates demand on most things - lockdowns + stimulus (in some cases, also things like tariffs, canceling pipelines, etc.). It evidently "works" exactly the same way as e.g. healthcare "worked" for a long time; on a smaller scale due to relative size of the interference vs the interfered-with segment of the economy.
Oh and of course, price to income ratio in the USA still remains in line with OECD averages, and considerably lower than some far less "neoliberal" countries [2]
In general, size of the middle class in the free market hellscape is far larger, and the incomes are higher [3]
Moreover, the "hollowing out" of the middle class is due to the migration primarily to higher income brackets in constant dollars [4]
What really is happening in the segments where things are not going as well as they could, is not neoliberalism.
The 1st part was described by Ortega Y Gasset almost a century ago; he describes one aspect of "mass men" as being similar to spoiled children (or aristocratic heirs), who are born into the world of prosperity built by someone else, and so take it for granted and assume they are entitled to it. It's hard for me to believe that about 1920ies, but I guess I haven't lived then and he has; it's easy for me to believe that about the West in the 2020ies.
The second part was described e.g. by Thomas Sowell a decade ago - politicians force corporations to give people things. Whatever benefit the people get from that is ascribed to politicians. The negative outcomes (at the very least, someone has to pay for the benefits) is blamed on the corporation. There's historically been a name for this model of governance [5], and it flourished in 1920ies, which might not be a coincidence.
> A slightly higher than median salary used to mean one is in the middle class.
No, it didn't.
If you are salary-dependent, you are working class.
A slightly higher than non-Hispanic white median salary used to mean you were in a relatively comfortable, but still wage-labor-dependent, segment of the working class. Women entering the work force in mass and some other changes, it takes a slightly higher multiple of a single non-Hispanic White median income (but a fairly similar multiple of a non-Hispanic White household income) to do that for a household, and its been that way for most of the working life of Gen X and later.
> Seems like you are just redefining middle class.
No, the people trying to prevent working-class solidarity that sold the idea that a vague upper-income segment of the proletariat with no clear or coherent definition, and none of the type of differentiation in fundamental relation to the economy that defines an economic class, are the “middle class” in capitalism rather than the classical definition in which that is the petit bourgeoisie were the redefiners.
The petit bourgeoisie were a tiny minority of the population. Most people were peasants. Is that what you’d prefer society to be like?
If you want to redefine middle class to be small business owners and merchants that don’t depend on a salary that’s fine I guess, but that’ll be an even smaller percentage of the population than the modern middle class.
> The petit bourgeoisie were a tiny minority of the population.
And remain so, yes.
> Most people were peasants.
No, most people were working class. And remain so.
> Is that what you’d prefer society to be like?
No, that's what capitalism is like. Redefining the upper income class as “middle class” is an effort to preserve capitalism by dividing the working class against itself, which I oppose because I’d prefer society not be like that.
As others have said, you're using definitions that are very much not the normal ones. If you're talking to other people, you don't get to make up your own definitions.
But, more: I'm a "worker". I work for other people. I also make a borderline-top-10% income. I make more than many small business owners. So I'm not middle class, because I have a job? Class is about how I get the money, not how much money I get?
And in your last paragraph, you talk about "the upper income class". Is there one class hierarchy that is based on income, and another that is based on source of income? If so, why should I have solidarity with my income-source group rather than with my income-level group? And if not, then what are you trying to say in your last paragraph?
It's a historical use still common in some contexts. I agree that being clear on the definitions being used is important, including marking explicitly where definitions may be different from what the reader is familiar. But it's not a definition dragonwriter has simply invented.
You are just making up classes. In the typical low, middle and high class structure making slightly above median definitely places you in the middle class.
This is interesting/amusing because often these people who are obsessed with crypto and tech culture (seemingly a lot of GenZ - at least the ones that pop up on Twitter) aren't the computer scientists and engineers who actually understand the underlying technology. They can wax poetic about some high level decentralized utopia, but when pressed further you realize that they have no idea how computers and software work.
I bet this is why Elon invested in bitcoin - target demographic. He knows how to market to the next generation: millenials and Gen Z who felt left out - a bet they will buy Teslas
What kinds of returns and from what initial investment?
If you got into crypto in the time leading up to 2013, 2017, and 2020, you could have 10x'd your bag easily.
I suspect having a technical understanding helped appreciate the value of Ethereum, Filecoin, Avalanche, etc. before everyone else, while simultaneously knowing to avoid Tron, Litecoin, Cardano, etc. which lack technical merit. (Although even properly timing the latter would have generated lucrative returns...)
And then having enough sophistication as an investor to liquidate your holdings at peak hysteria when the layperson was asking about crypto.
Ethereum was the first cryptocurrency that does decentralized general purpose computation aka smart contracts.
Filecoin decentralizes storage.
Avalanche has the first Byzantine consensus mechanism (within a reasonable bound, read the paper) that does not rely on proof of work aka energy wasting.
If these neither excite you nor stand out from forks of other coins (Litecoin is Bitcoin with a different hashing function, Tron is just marketing, Cardano is centralized), then yes, you are right, you are at a casino.
Agreed. The crypto market will win eventually, the tech is better. Today though, there’re more bubbles in the crypto market than a roll of bubble wrap. I’m just hoping the government doesn’t bail out the losers.
I remember when it was invented, debating with friends the virtues of turing complete ethereum vs non turing complete bitcoin script - its still not clear to me why you’d want to do general purpose computation on the world’s slowest most expensive computer.
edit while i still can: no wifi, less space than a nomad.
The main problem computation on the world's slowest most expensive computer solves is lack of trust in doing it on any other computer. The increased cost and decreased speed is worth it in some use cases for the increased insurance against the pre-determined computation not being run correctly or at all (making a payout based on certain data, usually outcomes of events, like for insurance or gambling).
The advantage of the world-computer is that everybody agrees with your results.
There are some problem domains, like advertising, where giving every person their own reality increases net wealth. There are other problem domains, like money, where giving every person their own reality makes them utterly useless. Ethereum expands computation to problem domains where it's critical that everybody gets the same answer.
Monero has always been my go-to example of this. It truly does achieve something that other coins do not, but it doesn't see meteoric rise like things like Shib or whatever.
In a way the absence of a meteoric rise of Monero is good, its supposed to be fungible money. The lack of traceability and origin of the coins bring concern though.
It's not an 'investment', it's just playing 'trading cards' with invented numbers, based on nothing.
"having a technical understanding "
No, having a 'technical understanding' just enables the obfuscation of the Giant Scam even more.
"having enough sophistication as an investor "
If you think it's 'sophistication' then you're in the 'fish' category being fed to sharks. Markets crash when the leads/powerful decide to make their moves (which includes the central bank actions, regulatory apparatus).
The magic numbers may continue to trade for a long time but it's still a scam.
This. Currency speculation has been called currency speculation for decades, and yet in case for crypto (much riskier, less protected) it is somehow called investment.
About 1/3 of them want to pursue careers in Social Media as 'influences' as well.
Gen Z will be 'crypto millionaires' but those millions will be worthless.
I think finally we can say 'The Kids Are Not Alright' without being entirely old cranks, or rather, there is a kind of a problem that didn't exist before now that we are in 'the age of surplus' at least for middle->upper tier kids.
When I hear Crypto talk, all I hear are sad addicted gamblers talking about 'The Slot That's Tilted to Win' which is only marginally better than classical investors just speculating, but at the very least, investing and allocation of capital are materially important things.
The saddest thing of all is that an entire generation thinks that wealth comes out of thin air, and that they somehow deserve to be rich because of some luck entirely disconnected with the collective participation, work and input of a lot of people. 'Inequality' is a problem no doubt, and a lot of the 'rich' didn't do much to earn it either, but that's a separate question.
The citation is in the title: believing that people are going to get rich by holding/trading magic numbers, which is not a value creating activity, is believing that they're going to get rich by creating value out of thin air.
How is this different than your typical wall street trader in the 80s and 90s? The only thing that's different now is that access to these markets isn't gated behind class and privilege, anyone can participate. Maybe that's the most scary thing of all, not that this is different, but that this is how it's always been and we just told ourselves a beautiful fiction of "hard work" and "grit".
Wall Street trades assets, mostly ownership of companies, bonds and other things that have underlying value, which is also objectively measurable.
'Investing' is a key part of our financial infrastructure, it underpins everything.
Most bankers make their money off of financial services i.e. investing for others (Private Wealth, Retirement Funds), Investment Banking, providing special financing vehicles, market making etc. etc.. Some investors make their money from 'trading'.
Most trading is a financially valuable thing, it provides liquidity to investors.
Now - yes - it can get into bubble like territory, detached from underlying reality, and very speculative, in which case there is some analogy to crypto, but by and large, it's a secondary issue.
And FYI this has nothing to do with the 80's or 90's.
'Access to Markets Behind Glass Ceiling' is actually false.
You have 'access' to 100% of publicly traded stocks. You have for several generations. You even have access to private investments and hedge funds, so long as you meet a minimum criteria (i.e. 100K in the bank). While working at those banks it'll help to have an Ivy League background, even then it's still possible to work there.
The more money you have, the more access to investment opportunities, but that's rational and inherent in the system.
Other than 'any asset can be speculative' there's almost nothing to relating crypto to equity and bond markets.
I don't know where they get this nonsense. Anyone who actually talks or works with gen z would know this. Not that it matters, but I'm in my late 30s. These type of articles about the dumb/bad/ignorant the next generation are growing very tiring
The title seems to be a misquote, or at least a misleading interpretation from the survey results. Note how in the actual source[1] it's not specifically about Gen Z. It also says they believe they "could", not "will" become millionaires from crypto. It says nothing about the probability. "Could" I win the lottery tomorrow? Sure, yes. But I won't.
> 31% of U.S. Adults believe they can become millionaires off crypto investments, driven heavily by young adults. 59% of Gen Z and 46% of Millennials believe they could become millionaires from crypto investments.
112 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI'm wondering about the audience they surveyed.
It's appalling what is going on with these blatantly illegal pump and dumps as well as rug pulls right in front on the FTC.
edit: added crypto
Investing of any kind is a winner-take-all game. Crypto especially so. Those who already had money to come in early will make the bulk of the future gains.
All that the young people they really have is the community around crypto, and perhaps the ability to mutually lament their lot in life.
Isn’t this a line out of Fight Club?
edit: found it [1], I like this quote.
1: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33533-we-ve-all-been-raised...
But avoid long-term bonds and cash -- those get destroy in times of inflation.
All major banks and lots of hedge funds are investing in it for a reason. Softbank invested $92MM in a crypto video game (The Sand).... These people aren't stupid investors.
So again, free advice. Put some money in crypto. Think about the largest amount that wouldn't hurt at all if you lost it and put that in. Otherwise, you're really really not being smart about this.
When and who's going to cash out all of these people putting SOMETHING.
More than 50M people globally invested in cryptos, this means there's around 7B fools around who can still buy from them, where does it ends?
Apples and oranges.
Another extremely frequent conversation is over the impossibility of owning a home on not-tech salaries. I think they’re related. People don’t think they can really reach goals related to life stability unless they win some sort of lottery. To me this is really worrying, not because it’s wrong but because for many it’s right. A slightly higher than median salary used to mean one is in the middle class. A whole generation doesn’t believe they have any opportunities.
Even those in tech believe we don't have any meaningful opportunities. Real talk: most of what we do day in day out for our employers is shit built upon bullshit built upon a house of cards, and it will come crashing down sooner than later. The European Union is finally flexing its muscles, other countries are beginning to follow suit against the digital corporations, even the US Congress is asking questions from both parties now. And where will we all be when the venture capital dries up, when entire business models are outright banned or made virtually impossible because of privacy regulations? Or when those we work for (especially in the automotive or other carbon-sensitive industries) have to cut down costs or close shop?
If you work at Facebook or Google (and to a lesser extent Microsoft and Apple), everything you do follows exactly one motive: make as much profit for the shareholders as possible by advertising people stuff they don't need. Most of what everyone else is doing is either directly related to advertising, to creating a new product that is only marginally better than the previous version or to extracting money out of someone else for services they don't need.
Bullshit jobs? We are in a bullshit economy, and the circle of capitalism forces us to ever-increasing economic growth - it's obvious that the path we are on as a species is pointing straight to our downfall, be it by climate change, by a resource-resetting war or by exhaustion of vital natural resources.
Disagree? Ask yourself when was the last time you created something at work that provides a net benefit to society's survival.
I think you have a point, but at the same time I’m not sure it’s possible for everybody or even most people to have jobs that are crucial to society. Once you hit certain technology level and population thresholds, a lot of jobs become all about optimization and margins — even those that have more of a concrete role in society. It’s unavoidable unless we drop back to pre-1900s technology and/or population levels.
No. What we need to do is to not define our worth as humans by the work we do. Only then we can truly automate our crucial needs (i.e. food production, transportation) as far as possible without fearing massive social unrest by millions of people "without employment". A single train conductor replaces a hundred truck drivers. Many governmental services could be done by the citizens themselves based on automated processes. Most teachers (especially the ones who spend all their day droning in front of a blackboard) could be replaced by videos.
The only thing where we will definitely need humans in the future is research, care work and construction/trades. Everything else? Look at the Star Trek economy.
They still struggle with various social pathologies - alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, religious extremism.
I think some people cannot handle a life that is too easy. Arguably, even modern Westerners from richer backgrounds tend to plunge into surrogate struggles or take up very distant causes.
The domestic violence / religious extremism is a result of the Western nations favoring radical Islam interpretations as a base for the regimes they bought their oil from. A kingdom/dictatorship where the ruling class has their assets (i.e. their oil money) in Western nations is more stable for oil supply than a democracy.
In the US, the question of what I did for a living was one of the first questions in any conversation, as if my answer was who I was and defined my worth in their eyes. I don’t miss it.
It would require both political will and lack of obstruction from large employers and entities invested in residential real estate however, and I don’t see that happening in the US for the foreseeable future short of a near-total turnover of the current elected body of politicians, rooting out any who would rather be in the pockets of lobbyists than represent the people.
This seems to be a common feature of world history: major changes in social systems only happen after widespread warfare destroys everything, and eventually people get sick of the death and destruction, vowing "never again" for approximately the next 80 years.
VC capital will have to go somewhere. You seem to be arguing against ad companies, which I understand. But there are so many other tech avenues that produce tons of value. Healthcare, logistics, green energy, power distribution, retail, agriculture, security, etc. So many domains where tech can provide huge value and upside.
Though I work hard, I did get lucky. I am thankful and grateful.
> It’s the same people who go spend too much at casinos
YMMV but my experience is actually the opposite. I.e. rather the gambling types actually buy derivates and everybody else considers buying crypto or has already done so.
For now it isn't, because it has been going up and to the right for quite some time. But the music can stop at some point...
People think this because it's true. The median U.S. income is no longer enough to cover a year of basic expenses, or achieve reasonable goals, even if you work for the entire year[1].
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/24/this-char...
Free-market extremists provably ruined more lives than all terrorists combined
So did architects who designed unsafe staircases...
Or air pollution...
Or mosquitoes...
However most of the malaria deaths occur in people returning from countries where the toll is much higher.
They've infected both sides of politics, reducing most elections to 'red neoliberal' or 'blue neoliberal' that decide nothing except whose gross neoliberal friends get to gouge the taxpayers this term.
This is backed by major media companies who are also all run by neoliberals. They put on a bit of theatre to pretend there is actually more than trivial differences and they'll rake in billions.
They teach their kids neoliberalism in their exclusive schools, training them up to be the next generation of greedy sociopaths. They pay sleazy neoliberal P.R companies to undermine their critics online. They take over unions and turn them into yet another avenue for personal profit.
All to the thunderous applause of the neoliberals running incredibly exploitative, near-sighted businesses that are rapidly ruining the world in search of ever greater profits.
People need to start identifying this ideology and stripping the people who spout it from power.
Money doesn't trickle down, no matter how much of it you stuff into a billionaires pocket. The 'free market' doesn't give people the power to end things like foreign-slavery.
The powerful people that push these ideas know it. The rest of us need to know it too.
The industries where the government stimulates demand (everything from mortgage rate deductions to section 8 and from creating and backing loans non-dischargable in bankruptcy to well, pretty much everything in healthcare) and restricts supply (everything from zoning and environmental regulation to excessive regulation, like in healthcare, to directly running things), are expensive, as summarized crudely in this famous chart [1].
In fact, we are now experiencing what happens when government restricts supply and stimulates demand on most things - lockdowns + stimulus (in some cases, also things like tariffs, canceling pipelines, etc.). It evidently "works" exactly the same way as e.g. healthcare "worked" for a long time; on a smaller scale due to relative size of the interference vs the interfered-with segment of the economy.
Oh and of course, price to income ratio in the USA still remains in line with OECD averages, and considerably lower than some far less "neoliberal" countries [2]
In general, size of the middle class in the free market hellscape is far larger, and the incomes are higher [3] Moreover, the "hollowing out" of the middle class is due to the migration primarily to higher income brackets in constant dollars [4]
What really is happening in the segments where things are not going as well as they could, is not neoliberalism.
The 1st part was described by Ortega Y Gasset almost a century ago; he describes one aspect of "mass men" as being similar to spoiled children (or aristocratic heirs), who are born into the world of prosperity built by someone else, and so take it for granted and assume they are entitled to it. It's hard for me to believe that about 1920ies, but I guess I haven't lived then and he has; it's easy for me to believe that about the West in the 2020ies.
The second part was described e.g. by Thomas Sowell a decade ago - politicians force corporations to give people things. Whatever benefit the people get from that is ascribed to politicians. The negative outcomes (at the very least, someone has to pay for the benefits) is blamed on the corporation. There's historically been a name for this model of governance [5], and it flourished in 1920ies, which might not be a coincidence.
[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019....
[2] https://data.oecd.org/chart/6xsL
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-ame...
[5] https://www.ocregister.com/2012/06/12/thomas-sowell-obamas-n...
No, it didn't.
If you are salary-dependent, you are working class.
A slightly higher than non-Hispanic white median salary used to mean you were in a relatively comfortable, but still wage-labor-dependent, segment of the working class. Women entering the work force in mass and some other changes, it takes a slightly higher multiple of a single non-Hispanic White median income (but a fairly similar multiple of a non-Hispanic White household income) to do that for a household, and its been that way for most of the working life of Gen X and later.
No, the people trying to prevent working-class solidarity that sold the idea that a vague upper-income segment of the proletariat with no clear or coherent definition, and none of the type of differentiation in fundamental relation to the economy that defines an economic class, are the “middle class” in capitalism rather than the classical definition in which that is the petit bourgeoisie were the redefiners.
If you want to redefine middle class to be small business owners and merchants that don’t depend on a salary that’s fine I guess, but that’ll be an even smaller percentage of the population than the modern middle class.
And remain so, yes.
> Most people were peasants.
No, most people were working class. And remain so.
> Is that what you’d prefer society to be like?
No, that's what capitalism is like. Redefining the upper income class as “middle class” is an effort to preserve capitalism by dividing the working class against itself, which I oppose because I’d prefer society not be like that.
But, more: I'm a "worker". I work for other people. I also make a borderline-top-10% income. I make more than many small business owners. So I'm not middle class, because I have a job? Class is about how I get the money, not how much money I get?
And in your last paragraph, you talk about "the upper income class". Is there one class hierarchy that is based on income, and another that is based on source of income? If so, why should I have solidarity with my income-source group rather than with my income-level group? And if not, then what are you trying to say in your last paragraph?
It's a historical use still common in some contexts. I agree that being clear on the definitions being used is important, including marking explicitly where definitions may be different from what the reader is familiar. But it's not a definition dragonwriter has simply invented.
The Wikipedia page on middle class has more info.
In the USA, an alternative definition has become popular, where middle-class is like the middle section of a bell curve.
If you got into crypto in the time leading up to 2013, 2017, and 2020, you could have 10x'd your bag easily.
I suspect having a technical understanding helped appreciate the value of Ethereum, Filecoin, Avalanche, etc. before everyone else, while simultaneously knowing to avoid Tron, Litecoin, Cardano, etc. which lack technical merit. (Although even properly timing the latter would have generated lucrative returns...)
And then having enough sophistication as an investor to liquidate your holdings at peak hysteria when the layperson was asking about crypto.
I'd ask why you think the "good" coins are good and the bad ones are bad, but I feel like that would just lead to cherry-picked data...
Filecoin decentralizes storage.
Avalanche has the first Byzantine consensus mechanism (within a reasonable bound, read the paper) that does not rely on proof of work aka energy wasting.
If these neither excite you nor stand out from forks of other coins (Litecoin is Bitcoin with a different hashing function, Tron is just marketing, Cardano is centralized), then yes, you are right, you are at a casino.
edit while i still can: no wifi, less space than a nomad.
This is an invented problem. "lack of trust" is an meaningless abstract; there is no specific concrete benefit to "solving" it.
There are some problem domains, like advertising, where giving every person their own reality increases net wealth. There are other problem domains, like money, where giving every person their own reality makes them utterly useless. Ethereum expands computation to problem domains where it's critical that everybody gets the same answer.
It's not an 'investment', it's just playing 'trading cards' with invented numbers, based on nothing.
"having a technical understanding "
No, having a 'technical understanding' just enables the obfuscation of the Giant Scam even more.
"having enough sophistication as an investor "
If you think it's 'sophistication' then you're in the 'fish' category being fed to sharks. Markets crash when the leads/powerful decide to make their moves (which includes the central bank actions, regulatory apparatus).
The magic numbers may continue to trade for a long time but it's still a scam.
I mean... Putting $100 into crypto today and being set for life really sounds nice but I highly doubt any market could support that kind of growth....
You wouldn't be set for life in that case, though, because everything else would cost 3x as much each year.
It's baseball card speculation, without the baseball card.
Gen Z will be 'crypto millionaires' but those millions will be worthless.
I think finally we can say 'The Kids Are Not Alright' without being entirely old cranks, or rather, there is a kind of a problem that didn't exist before now that we are in 'the age of surplus' at least for middle->upper tier kids.
When I hear Crypto talk, all I hear are sad addicted gamblers talking about 'The Slot That's Tilted to Win' which is only marginally better than classical investors just speculating, but at the very least, investing and allocation of capital are materially important things.
The saddest thing of all is that an entire generation thinks that wealth comes out of thin air, and that they somehow deserve to be rich because of some luck entirely disconnected with the collective participation, work and input of a lot of people. 'Inequality' is a problem no doubt, and a lot of the 'rich' didn't do much to earn it either, but that's a separate question.
We have created a harsh economic climate, surely we are more responsible than the next generation.
Tech has built a brand of meteoric magic, it's not surprising snake oil can be sold in such an environment.
Citation needed
Wall Street trades assets, mostly ownership of companies, bonds and other things that have underlying value, which is also objectively measurable.
'Investing' is a key part of our financial infrastructure, it underpins everything.
Most bankers make their money off of financial services i.e. investing for others (Private Wealth, Retirement Funds), Investment Banking, providing special financing vehicles, market making etc. etc.. Some investors make their money from 'trading'.
Most trading is a financially valuable thing, it provides liquidity to investors.
Now - yes - it can get into bubble like territory, detached from underlying reality, and very speculative, in which case there is some analogy to crypto, but by and large, it's a secondary issue.
And FYI this has nothing to do with the 80's or 90's.
'Access to Markets Behind Glass Ceiling' is actually false.
You have 'access' to 100% of publicly traded stocks. You have for several generations. You even have access to private investments and hedge funds, so long as you meet a minimum criteria (i.e. 100K in the bank). While working at those banks it'll help to have an Ivy League background, even then it's still possible to work there.
The more money you have, the more access to investment opportunities, but that's rational and inherent in the system.
Other than 'any asset can be speculative' there's almost nothing to relating crypto to equity and bond markets.
Seriously, it’s hard being a parent of this generation and trying to get them to understand how much of what they are consuming is an illusion.
Are you saying it's nonsense, or it's obvious?
> 31% of U.S. Adults believe they can become millionaires off crypto investments, driven heavily by young adults. 59% of Gen Z and 46% of Millennials believe they could become millionaires from crypto investments.
[1] https://engine-insights.com/blog/the-pulse-of-the-american-c...