Piezoe?
Biden to Urge Federal Reserve to Take on Racial Wealth Gap
- Thread starter Arnie
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Piezoe?
Simplification is often incredibly helpful in understanding complex issues. There are hundreds of examples of such to draw on from science and economics. In Yaron Brook's video presentation, however, we have a wonderful example of how making things more simple than is possible takes us backwards to more, rather than less, muddled thinking.
I was flabbergasted by entrepreneur, Yaron Brook's, presentation at Exeter. It was oversimplified to a fault, and at times embarrassingly wrong. He should have left economics to the economists, and chosen instead to speak about finance -- a topic he presumably knows something about. He, by self description, is an "Objectivist," just as Alan Greenspan was before his awakening. [Greenspan never dreamed bankers would act against their own best interests, until they did exactly that!] Objectivism, has not stood up well to close inspection and the test of time.
Brook deserves some applause for recognizing that the source of wealth is productivity. Good! He tells us that the wealth gap in itself is not the problem, and so attempting to reduce it willy-nilly, say, via a wealth tax, or whatever, is unlikely to benefit those unlucky souls who find themselves on the other end of the distribution. We won't get to the promised land by making the rich less rich. Fine so far, but beyond that it's mostly downhill. His brakes fail on a 15 percent grade and he heads for the cliff. This is a badly argued presentation by an arrogant American at a run of the mill British University, and it's badly rebutted by the students.
Brook might have considered the sociopolitical impact of a extremely lop-sided wealth gap, since it can endanger democracy in nominally democratic countries. He didn't do that though. Perhaps it is for the best, because if his reasoning on sociopolitical matters is anything approaching that on economics, the damage wrought on young brains might have been worse.
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Let me get back to you perhaps in a few days. You deserve a coherent response, and it seems it will take more than a sentence or two. .
I am not being disrespectful here. But you wrote long paragraphs full of text without any real substance or example of how he is wrong.
That's a valid criticism. Thank you for reading what I wrote. I realized that had I gone into more depth and given examples I would have to write much more. So I stopped without specifics. Your criticism is right on point. But if I wrote more, would you read it?
I might be inclined to take up at least the sociopolitical aspects in more detail, which Brook did not get into. And perhaps I might even give one or two specific examples of where he is unquestionable dead wrong. Let me think about it. Do I want to take the time, or will it be wasted effort? These issues are not simple black and white ones. So it takes some clear thinking to work through them.
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To quote a lady I've worked with at a premier Wall Street institution, "it's pret a manger for some, while I had to suck dicks to get this job". That's what inequality is all about. Equality of opportunity is not socialism (and it's equality of opportunity that gets killed when the central bank explicitly favors the existing asset owners; the fact that the federal government has been a crony capitalist government forever does not help either).
You're making it sound like asset owning are only for the rich. We're all here, most of us are not millionaires, yet if the fed favors asset owners, we all benefit from it. It is just wages vs asset appreciation the way I look at it. Wages haven't gone up much over the decades yet asset prices have. Wage makers preferring to stick with wages and not owning some assets is a lack of understanding on how the world works. To put it simply, the world doesn't favor wages, it never did. The fact that the left complains it, isn't going to change. If you don't own assets, you're naturally going to have an disadvantage.
What the left gets confused by is that it's not the system's job to educate you on how it works or how to benefit from it. They've been lied to in school on how to look for opportunity and when they can't find it, they call it inequality. That's like saying the train should stop at your house so you don't need to walk to the station. Formal education is there to make things worse, it doesn't help you understand the system and instead fills your head with false beliefs. But that's a completely separate discussion. And I don't disagree that they are crony capitalist. I'm a supporter of Ron Paul back when he was running, less government, less taxes more support for small business. Of course, there are things I disagreed with like "End the Fed", that's insane. No one is perfect, but Paul was the closest politically.
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If you work a regular job but have some stocks in your 401k, you are simply "a little less of a loser" when it comes to that tradeoff. Further more, if you have a business that is in a relatively early stage of development (i.e. where it's not really a Fed-supported asset), you are also a loser. I know that this place is full of aspirational wealth and achievement, but unless most of your income comes from ownership of mature asset (bonds, public or large-scale private equity), you are not really a "current asset owner" for the purposes of this discussion.
I will repeat one more time, it's about equality of opportunity. I.e. not the equality of the employers vs. employees, but about current ownership of mature assets (i.e. rent-seekers) vs. future asset owners (i.e. risk takers).
In the world where assets are supported, incumbent asset owners have no incentive to innovate, compete or literally do anything productive beyond the bare minimum (as CB will take care of them). There are no more crisis situations which create opportunities for smaller players to disrupt the business models of the bigger ones. As a result, when a current wage-maker decides to open a business, his business has a much lower chance of making it to the next level. Relatively quickly, this zombie-like ambiance permeates every level of the society. Entrepreneurs don't want to take risk because chances for success are now slimmer. The intellectual capital does not get a chance to innovate because mature businesses don't need innovation or productivity, while startups are prevented from succeeding. CB support is a form of crony capitalism and we are actually seeing the results right now.
If you read my entire post instead of the first paragraph, you'd know I supported Ron Paul back when he was running. He is against CB's and support small businesses. I don't disagree companies like amazon are too big, people think they are an online store when in reality they have their fingers everywhere. Google and FB dominates 90+% of the Ad traffic online. I'm well aware of the unfairness but at least you can still buy stock in these companies.
We have a completely different mindset. I'm passed that, I know the system is rigged and support big businesses but at least you can still buy assets and build up slowly. And I don't see how the CB lowering interest rates is bad for small business. Everyone benefits. People who complain about the rigged system(not stating you), no matter how true it is won't improve their living standards.
We have a culture problem not monetary. If Fed prints money for the poor, equality will not change much. People will just spend all of it, all prices will go up and the rich will find new schemes to get richer.
And I disagee on them not innovating. I'm pretty sure big companies try to create new products everyday. Give me an example of current asset owners not innovating.
We have a completely different mindset. I'm passed that, I know the system is rigged and support big businesses but at least you can still buy assets and build up slowly. And I don't see how the CB lowering interest rates is bad for small business. Everyone benefits. People who complain about the rigged system(not stating you), no matter how true it is won't improve their living standards.
We have a culture problem not monetary. If Fed prints money for the poor, equality will not change much. People will just spend all of it, all prices will go up and the rich will find new schemes to get richer.
And I disagee on them not innovating. I'm pretty sure big companies try to create new products everyday. Give me an example of current asset owners not innovating.
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