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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Apparently the UK's entire net worth was £10.7 trillions in 2020 according to the ONS, their chief statistic agency. What's remarkable is that a whopping 60% of that is "non-produced, non-financial assets".

That's a fancy way of saying land. Why isn't this fact more well known? Should we expect it to be different for other countries? And why aren't more people talking about Georgism?

In 2011, Discovery Network, aired an episode of "Curiosity", "America: What Is It Worth?" which performed the same calculation, but for the US. The presenter may be familiar to those that follow US politics.

I don't remember the number, but the most valuable asset of the US was claimed to be the people.

Labor income has been consistently been higher than capital income for at least as long as the industrial revolution if not earlier in western countries and has been remarkably stable. They teach you this is in intermediate macroeconomics as part of the Solow model. So, the discounted present value of that labor income is going to be greater than the discounted value of all capital and land income assuming no difference in average risk.

Interesting in the abstract, but it's also not really very interesting for someone deep in debt to learn that the discounted value of their future labor income is more than their debt, sure they can pay it off, but what kind of living standards are they gonna have.