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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.

I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).

The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)

The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.

All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?

It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.

I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.

How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?

We’re 50 years into the biggest asset pricing bubble ever. @jeroboam is correct, but only partially; the US saw many asset prices (especially residential property) stagnate or fall between roughly 1890 and 1965 and it was only in very major wars for a small portion of that period (17-18, 41-45).

What’s key is that expectation of asset price growth is rudely interrupted, whether by the long depression of the early 20th century or the agricultural depression in England. The US should have let the 2018 crash happen, that was the natural point where the market was moving toward a crash. We’ve now spent 5 years in a bizarre Frankenstein market.

Why is it a bad thing that asset prices are high? That seems like a good thing to me.

it is the 'stealing from the future' meme. If long term returns are X and present returns are X+x, then later investors will be worse off if returns mean-revert to X.

What assumptions would lead to this scenario and why do associate it with higher asset prices? Holding absolute returns constant, higher short-term returns should cause asset prices to fall.

I don’t know that it’s a bad thing, but 50 years of high asset price growth obviously increases inequality.

Do you want to incentivize people to make things or to buy things and hold them?

Ignoring that the prices are so high because you aeent allowed to make enough of them because those who are holding it are getting too high on their own supply to let it be any oher way.

The whole point of wealth creation is to have wealth. If we were less wealthy, we might produce more, but we'd necessarily be worse off.

Circular reasoning. Wealth is the things you have in absolute, not relative. Expensive assets is relative. We want more assets in total.

I'm not following you. The point of wealth is to be able to spend it on things. We produce things, then we have them, then we use them up. That use we get is why we worked to produce them. How is that circular reasoning?

You're saying that once we have things, we don't want to work as hard to produce more things, so we should have less stuff. But having less stuff defeats the purpose of producing it. The entire point is to have stuff we can use, not to produce it for the sake of producing.

I'm saying that wealth quite literally is having MORE things that we want. And more things implies cheaper, not more expensive.

Why is it a bad thing that asset prices are high? That seems like a good thing to me.

This is a bad thing because it implies by definition we don't have enough assets. We are asset poor. Things that we truly are wealthy in and have an abundance of are cheap.

Wealth is measured in terms of what goods and services it can buy. Higher real asset prices have more purchasing power and make society richer, controlling for the quantity of those assets.

Asset prices can be high because the quantity of assets is low or because the demand for assets is high.

We are clearly in the second situation, and that's clearly what's implied by "asset pricing bubble", which is a good situation to be in. It raises the value of existing wealth, which increases our purchasing power and causes more wealth to be created.

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