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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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It seems to me a lot of the issues the US is going through stem from the fact the US hasn't had a proper crisis since the Great Depression. A good crisis that wipes the slate clean by destroying existing debts and wealth would fix a lot of things:

  • property prices and the appreciation assumption

  • student loans

  • intergenerational wealth gaps

  • social security spending

All of these things can be fixed if the stock market takes a nosedive and the dollar loses 90% of its value. In addition, it will make American exports extremely competitive, so the recovery should be relatively quick; also, this will hurt the PRC more than it hurts the US.

  • -12

My parents both didn't have money and didn't have sense to save/invest much. Despite this they've earned a life wage from the asset inflation alone by merely living in Stockholm and not renting during my lifetime.

Looking at the future it doesn't really seem to matter all that much how much me and my wife earn because that is going to be dwarfed by our real estate inheritences. We're in some kind of weird permanent middle class now whose life circumstances aren't really affected by income and employment.

I look at some of my friends that come from the countryside (or from abroad) and it's pretty grim, except for the spectacularly succuesful. This is made even worse by the compressed salary pyramid in Sweden, making catching up by wage labour practically impossible.

Are things looking to be better going forward? Of course not, it looks like it's getting worse. Skyrocketing interest rates crush the highly indebted but barely affects me, so I can invest more. It also halts almost all construction while at the same time the housing crisis gets worse.

We're in some kind of weird permanent middle class now whose life circumstances aren't really affected by income and employment.

Yeah. It's insane how common this trend is, where having somebody who decided to buy a decent property sometime in the last 50 years essentially guarantees a certain baseline of salubrity.

Even more insane in Australia where the house you live in isn't factored into your means-testing for the pension, which results in myriad cases of pensioners running their cash balances to 0 and then living on beans in a several million dollar house they bought for pennies 50 years ago solely for the sake of being able to pass said house onto their children when they die.

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