- But it will take a massive shift to introduce self-awareness to an industry that has always assumed it was changing the world for the better.
mk b_b: As far as I can tell, you guys are the exception to the quote above. But I do think that generic Valley startups are well past their glory days and that that's starting to show.
Related discussion, for posterity:
Yeah. I really wanted to dodge that whole Sam Altman thing. Both mk and thenewgreen think he's the shit. I think he's a shit. I think Y Combinator is an entitled pot of rich kids most of whom need to be euthanized. I think tech culture is tone deaf to the point of criminality and I not only long for them to be broke-ass fucks like most of my '99er friends, I want them to feel physical pain as a result. I long for those fuckers - to a man - to develop Lyme disease or colorectal cancer and have no healthcare. And I'll bet every one of those fuckers - to a man - think they're making the world a better place. A better place for me, the guy who wants them to die of leprosy. Sam Altman's argument isn't "San Francisco is intolerant" his argument is "San Francisco is intolerant OF ME. And they probably are - Seattle is similar, although I'll bet not as bad. And I'll tell you why. The fundamental goal of the tech industry is wealth concentration, and the fundamental effect of wealth concentration is inequality. More than that, the goal is wealth concentration through societal damage and that is something new on this green earth. Take Uber. It's fundamentally changing the way people get around, but it's doing so by destroying a viable lower-middle-class profession (taxi driving) and replacing it with pocket change for the masses. Uber isn't even getting rich off the idea - they're losing money hand over fist. But the business climate is such that investors trip over each other to lose money first so they can sell their shares to a greater fool. I use Lyft, which is like Uber but not quite as bad. It helps that I hate the fuck out of taxi drivers in general and the livery industry in particular. I acknowledge and understand that Lyft provides a hard-luck, zombie-like existence to the people who rely on it for their livings and I allow those venture capitalists to lose money giving me rides to and from the airport. I further understand that with the proliferation of personal technology the taxi industry was doomed eventually anyway. Uber, however, made their money by not waiting around for the laws to change. By not investing time or money in shaping legislation. Uber just up and broke the law nationwide and figured they could get away with it for long enough to change the landscape. We're all used to that landscape. We make our way within it. And Uber decided to gut a part of it ("taxi drivers") so they could roll up everyone else's pennies. Amazon is the same way - if they can make .01 cents on everyone's transactions, they make more money than the guy who makes $10 on everyone in town. And then they can take away his $10. Google is the same way - you think MovieFan90210 has no business uploading your movie to their website? Well, it's your job to police their content, not theirs. Russian trolls and white supremacists coordinating torch rallies on your website? Well, they deserve free speech, too. Never mind that everyone else has closed commenting because they feel a fundamental responsibility to keep the internet from devolving into a downward spiral of hate and racism. I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that the tech industry's current business model is to get rich off of the suffering of everyone else. Gamergate? Sam Altman made money off the company that made that possible. The_Donald? Sam Altman made money off the company that made that possible. Fucking Palmer Luckey? Worth $730m. Notch Persson? $1.4 billion. And they're fucking hateful people who use their money to spread hate. And are they innovating? No, they're making apps. Parasitic software that cannot exist without someone else's hardware. Coding choices that are either viciously opportunistic of human failings or utterly deaf to the greater ecosystem in which they operate. The tech industry feels no compunctions about venturing into the social space despite the fact that they neither have nor want any training or knowledge into social effects. FirebrandRoaring, I'm not watching a half-hour video on why someone else's Youtube channel sucks. ALL Youtube channels suck. Youtube sucks. Google sucks. Google actually thought all books should be free and figured eventually the courts would tell them just how hard they could crush authors. And in the meantime, they'd crush authors. Fundamentally? This is a giant corporation with limitless resources arguing that individuals who wish to protect their livelihood should go toe-to-toe with them and if they lose, well that's capitalism. And I don't mean "google books." I mean the tech industry, Silicon Valley, Sam Altman and everyone he knows and loves.
KB, I'd say you don't know the half of it, but you consume enough media that I imagine you probably do. You'll have to forgive, this has been stewing for a couple of days and was exacerbated last night when my group of friends were harassed in a restaurant by a group of guys, two of whom were making MAGA hats. In Canada. Unironically (not that that is the sort of thing one should do ironically). I will point out that anyone whom I have ever personally heard utter the phrases "open debate", or "marketplace of ideas" has consciously or subconsciously believed that they have nothing to lose in that situation. It makes for an easy position to hold, when you believe that the "none too dangerous" things you debate can't hurt you. It's a lot harder of a sell when people are debating your existence, or debating whether you should be allowed to exist, or debating whether or not you're a person, or debating what bathroom you should be "allowed" to use. Honestly, the LGBT community figured out that reasoned debate was going to get them exactly nowhere sometime around the beginning of the postwar period, at the very least by the time the Compton's Cafeteria Riots took place. Any time "reasoned debate" has gotten the community anywhere, it has been a public face that was veneered overtop of rioting, civil disobedience, or die-ins. I am not a person of colour, but I imagine black people who lived through the civil rights era would tell you much the same. Indeed, I have heard them say it, but it is not my story to tell. This is not the first time that people more interested in debating ideas than bearing responsibility for their actions have tried to go up against bad people in "free and Honest" debate. Putting a mirror up between the "debate" around LGBT people in the Weimar Republic and the current political situation should give people reason to pause. These people that they want to debate? They're not interested in "free" or "honest". fuck, the vast majority of people in positions of power aren't really interested in "free" or "honest" if it means they lose out. At this point, I'm just trying to figure out if these people are actively malicious or passively malicious, or i guess if it really matters.I think tech culture is tone deaf to the point of criminality
Going from here to a whole bunch of problems we know jack shit about,are totally unqualified to solve, and which can only be explained to us in language that makes no sense to us are now, somehow, our problems and, worse, often they're our fault to where did all these nazis come from we thought global communication would give us enlightened cosmopolitans not nazis has been a rough ride for everyone. You're not looking at malice, you're looking at something somewhere between denial and confusion.
Global communication isn't the problem. Allowing the people on that global communication platform to place nazi doctrines on an even footing with more peaceful doctrines and expecting them to play nice is the problem. It is a global scale version of what happened in Europe during the interwar period, and the only people who didn't see it were the people who didn't know their history, and the people who thought it would somehow be different this time. Unfortunately, in this case, those who don't know their history are currently in the process of repeating it, and people like me are in the crossfire. Fuck, I'm lucky. At least I'm not a trans woman of colour - talk about an ugly death rate. I know Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice what could equally be attributed to stupidity. In this case, it's both a willful stupidity and a latent malice, and honestly the only reasonable response to "We didn't know" is "Only because you ignored us trying to tell you."where did all these nazis come from we thought global communication would give us enlightened cosmopolitans not nazis
As a white kid hated by the Hispanic majority in New Mexico I thought I understood prejudice. Then I befriended black people in Los Angeles. I think it's fair to say that I'm aware of some minor percentage of it but I sure don't know it. I mean, just this morning I was explaining that Trump's tax cuts were basically written for me. Yeah there have been times I couldn't get a coffee 'cuz I was too gringo but there have also been times the cops have said "sorry for pulling you over, sir, we thought you were hispanic." Actively malicious or passively malicious is the wrong focus. Your mention of the Weimar Republic and LGBTs is right, I think. If I'm looking for an "honest debate" about whether a group of people should be treated as fellow humans, what I'm really looking for is a forum in which I can assert they aren't human. And if I can assert it convincingly enough, they aren't. "Teach the controversy" is shorthand for "we're wrong but also loud and aggressive."
If you think all the trees in the park suck because the park does, you're factually incorrect. There are some badass channels on YouTube. Every Frame a Painting. Veritasium (and Veritasium2). CGP Grey. Even SovietWomble — all off my own list. You don't have to watch the video. I was just looking for your opinion as an experienced film industry guy. You also don't have to empty a bucketload on others just because it rained on you. For one thing, Google literally connects the world, in ways nothing else does. But, sure, you can suddenly reduce your argument to one side and stick with the rightousness; as if someone can command you otherwise. Just... shit, man: aim.ALL Youtube channels suck.
I hate the shit out of Every Frame a Painting. Google connects the world. Before Google, it was Alta Vista, Yahoo, Metacrawler, AOL. Google's contribution was a better algorithm which they then slammed advertising on top of and now they "connect the world" because their search results are better than Bing. The world is actually connected by a bunch of shit put together by Global Crossing, Liberty and L3 but sure, fight me.
You're not a bowl of candy today. I never intend to fight you. I only want to point out that, no matter how much you might hate something — and boy, do you — taking cheap shots at it is not helping the conversation along, or your state of mind.
A glass of pinot noir has leavened my mood somewhat. What can I say, hectoring someone in full dudgeon rarely goes well. I want to draw attention, however, to your conviction that "Google literally connects the world." It says a lot about what we accept and what we've forgotten. They don't. They really don't. At best, they reduce friction by a marginal amount. Let's be honest - Bing isn't radically worse than Google, DuckDuckGo isn't radically worse than Bing. Everything Google does, someone else does it almost as well; Google just happens to be the least-expensive, most-polished slightly-more-ubiquitous solution in every space they thrive in and any space they don't thrive, they abandon (along with everyone that signed onto their technology). More than that, they make it up on volume. Vimeo is a demonstrably better platform than Youtube. It's also a lot stickier. They made a whopping $81m revenue last year (after giving 90% of incoming sales to creators) but that's more than Youtube, an outfit that still loses money. But then, Youtube can afford to lose money because Google makes $28b in ad revenue and eventually nobody will even remember Vimeo. All they'll remember is click-overlay, loud-shout-out, 2-second-cut useless-facts-you-already-know cheap-graphics think-you-learned-something-but-you-didn't Youtube. Here's some economics from Hank Green(whom I hate). Hey, Hank - where's the real money at? so really I’m only down $53,000,000. Actual television advertising is vastly more variable than that. I'll say this: I've got a show that airs on Sundays. In 2010 we sold a block of 6 (off-season, network prime-time) 30-second spots for $250k. There were six of those blocks, the program is 42 minutes long. We averaged 6m viewers that season; $1.5m/6m viewers x 1000 is a CPM of $250. Fundamentally: Youtube has created a world where people are falling all over each other for 2 grand per million viewers. This world will never be visited by the people making six figures per million viewers. When your revenue stream is a factor of a thousand less than you're used to, you pack it in and go home, you don't economize. Multiply by everything Google does. Importantly - Google is happy to lose money doing this. They're making more money than the Youtubers are and it still isn't enough to sustain itself. As someone whose livelihood lo these 10 years has been directly dependent on massive, heartless studios I've got tales that would curl your toes... but as someone who has also worked with half the fucktards headlining Vidcon any given year, allow me to say with no quaver in my voice that a Youtube future is a dark one.Sometime in the last year, my YouTube videos received their billionth view. At the average YouTube ad rate of $2 per thousand views (a $2 CPM), that’s around $2 million in revenue from advertising over the last eight years. Not bad! Though, during those eight years, we have spent more than $4 million on the creation of YouTube videos. So also, not good!
A 22 minute TV program is accompanied by sixteen 30-second ads, at an average cost of $25 per thousand impressions. That leaves us with a per-minute CPM of around $19. A 5.5 minute YouTube video monetized the same way would make about $100 per thousand impressions. After a billion views, that’s $100,000,000. To be fair, YouTube would have taken 45% of that money,
You seem to have taken my argument to be "Google is a force of good". That is not my argument, nor has it ever been. That said, I don't want to remain involved in this conversation: nothing I could say would change it. It's disengaged: everything is shit and everyone is stupid for not changing their ways "for the better".
You're too generous. It's more like a two second cut of a fact that's sort of true in a certain context but is provided as irrefutable and the context is dropped. You're right about everything. I've used Bing, and it's fine. But I use Google because that's what I do. When I want a video, I go straight to YouTube. I think Google has become the Kleenex of facial tissues. Others are just as good, but I remember the name brand.2-second-cut useless-facts-you-already-know
I'll give it a try. One person changing 10% of their searches won't break Google's stranglehold, but that's no reason to not explore options.
FWIW, I have no position on Sam Altman, or what he was arguing for or against. My only point in the earlier discussion was that I don't believe that there's a such thing as an idea that's too dangerous to discuss. This has nothing to do with the tech industry specifically.
Okay. But. 1) The title of the essay is a Galileo quote. He could have gone with a more offensive allegory but atheists aren't as likely to go with "and there was light." Nonetheless we have a tech billionaire insinuating he's the persecuted genius responsible for heliocentric thought and pretty much everyone who isn't in the tech industry on the side of the witch burners. That's some straight up Erlich Bachman shit right there, down to the goddamn Latin. 2) His comparison is to Beijing, where men are coolies and real men are mandarins. China knows how to treat poor people. 3) His "heresies" include "intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension" and I mean fuck. HG Wells whipped out the Morlocks and Eloi 120 years ago. It's bad enough that rich people are living longer and poor people are dying precipitously. Fuckin' Justin Timberlake knew the optics on that shit weren't great in 2011. 4) Fucking Newton and alchemy. Turning lead into gold is not the same as turning ghettos into places nobody can afford to live anymore. The normies are commuting from Stockton. “Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” - The New Yorker 5) Bitcoin. No one on earth outside of Sam Altman's food group thinks Bitcoin is a good idea. "I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong." Said literally the rest of the world. Too crazy and too dangerous are pretty much the majority report on Bitcoin right now. 6) Fucking SpaceX. "If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard." SpaceX is trying to make space cheaper through reduce, reuse, recycle. Meanwhile, about 1 in 3 apps out of Ycombinator in 2017 are tapeworms for the digital digestive system. 7) And if you didn't get the Galileo reference, let's put it on the nose while I stand next to SpaceX and Bitcoin. Nobody fucking needs that. Nobody fucking wants that. And it's the kind of bullshit that makes a cracker box in Menlo Park cost $900k. It's not San Francisco. It's not ideas. It's not things that are too dangerous to discuss. It's Sam Altman and the fundamental entitlement of the tech industry and it shows that you can take the bloom off the rose but you can't take the glass off the glasshole.On the far side of a fire pit, two founders of Shypmate, an app that links you to airline passengers who will cheaply carry your package to Ghana or Nigeria, were commiserating. Kwadwo Nyarko said, “We’re at the mercy of travellers who never have as much space in their luggage as they said.” Perry Ogwuche murmured, “YC tells us, ‘Talk to your customers,’ but it’s hard to find our customers.” Altman walked over to engage them, dutiful as a birthday-party magician. “So what are your hobbies?” he asked. Nonplussed, Ogwuche said, “We work and we go to the gym. And what are yours?”
Wildfire seems to be a bit of mixture of Yik Yak and Patch, bringing local user-submitted news and campus alerts that are tolerated though not officially approved by university adminstrations.
If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand.
I did. I read a biography of Galileo a few years ago, and it's safe to say that we don't have a modern day equivalent of Galileo. One major difference between Galileo and the "heresies" in question here, is that Glaileo was fighting for that which was obviously true. In fact had been proven theoretically for a long time (millenia), and he now had the precise experimental verification. Politics stood in his way moreso than science. That's quite a bit different than hypothesizing things that would fundamentally change the nature of society, then trying to unleash them without regard for experimenting on people. I'm clearly not as well read on the Valley bigwigs as you, but my view of them is fairly negative on balance. I've read close to nothing on Sam Altman; hence the above demureness. However, I think your long response supports my original statement that ideas can never be too dangerous to discuss. If we hypothesize, say, letting everyone live to infinity and beyond so long as they can afford it, then we should have a societal discussion about what that would look like and how it would affect people before anyone implements such as thing. The problem with the Valley is that they fundamentally don't want to have those conversations. They kick and scream whenever anyone tries to kill their valuation, and they do so on "free speech" grounds. If we truly got to have a societal conversation around, e.g., Uber (vis-a-vis debated legislation, say), then we might come to the conclusion that yes, people want an easier way to get a lift quickly and maybe the taxi industry could benefit from some innovation and deregulation. But, we never get to have that conversation because on the one hand "my right to make a profit says your town council can go fuck itself", and on the other hand, "fuck you, we're rioting and shutting down the streets to keep you capitalist pigs out of our little corner of heaven". Move fast and break things is the opposite of conversation.And if you didn't get the Galileo reference...
I agree with you but it isn't the point. Ideas can never be too dangerous to discuss, but ideas can be too controversial to discuss in any situation at any time with any audience. Thus my rather long-form "it's not the idea it's the dick" - if Sam Altman were to say "we are grappling with technologies that have the chance to improve the length and quality of life for humans everywhere but right now only the rich can afford it, what are we going to do about that" I'll bet half of California would jump into the fray. If instead you say "I'm gonna make rich people immortal, bitchez, outta the gene pool" you're gonna get run out of town on a rail. There are far, far, far too many examples of Silicon Valley wunderkinds in dire need of sensitivity training. That's the issue. Not the idea itself.However, I think your long response supports my original statement that ideas can never be too dangerous to discuss.
Totally disagree here. If Facebook failed, some investors would lose money. Nothing else would happen. In that sense, it would create a small but noticable ripple through the economy that we would recovery from almost instantly. Banks are too big to fail, because of their importance to credit markets. I'm convinced that most social media companies are not a value add to the economy (at least no where close to what their market caps suggest). I would riot in the streets if the government bailed any of them out.The big tech companies are too big to fail, too complicated to be parsed or regulated, and too integral to business, the economy, and day-to-day life.
Presume there are 3 billion shares of Facebook. 6.6 million of those shares are owned by the Central Bank of Switzerland. As of this writing, FB is at around $180. Suppose that drops by half. Switzerland loses half a billion dollars. Granted - they've got 750 trillion dollars on their balance sheet but they also own Amazon, Apple and, well, $84 billion worth of the US stock market. Meanwhile, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet are 10% of the market cap of the stock market. And that's just primary effects. Facebook's market cap is half a trillion dollars. Bear Stearns' market cap was a hair over a hundred billion. LTCM created a trillion dollars worth of exposure with a $5 billion balance sheet. We all need to stop pretending that tech companies could vanish tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Everyone has piled so much money into this bullshit that a massive Facebook boycott could literally cause a market crash, the way a stray cigarette could burn down a forest.
Yeah but you know as well as anyone that not all collapses are created equal. Lehman's cap was $60 billion, and their collapse triggered paralysis. FB collapse would be painful, but not catastrophic. The market might have a shit for, but it wouldn't cause a decade long sluggish economy. It might even prompt us to reevaluate our priorities.
Put on your tinfoil hat for a minute. "Tyler Durden" sure ain't Ben Bernanke but they occasionally find some interesting charts and graphs. Here's what I know: when you can't make your yields with safe bets, you make riskier bets and the safe bets right now aren't making yields. If the whole world is used to 3% and the whole world is making 1.4%, the whole world starts buying junk. I also know that a horrifying percentage of the daily float is algorithmic and an even more horrifying percentage is in dark pools. LTCM was an object lesson in systemic risk; the 2007 bailouts were an attempt to learn from that lesson that assumed as baseline the interconnectedness of the financial system. And I would argue it's gotten worse, not better. The market thinks Tesla is worth $57b. Tesla loses about $4 a share. What happens when God snaps his fingers and says "Wake the fuck up you lemmings"? There was a point where banks proved mathematically that it made sound business sense to lend money to people who probably couldn't pay their mortgage. That shook out a lot of shit. I particularly enjoyed how hard Washington Mutual lobbied to make discharging credit card debt impossible... thereby encouraging their customers to pay their $10k credit card balances at the expense of their $250k mortgages. "Shareholder value" is a toxic enough philosophy. "Go fast and break things?" Alphabet is at a thousand dollars a share. It made $28b last quarter. $25b of that is ad revenue. They're rolling out native adblocking and a non-profit started making a better browser. If Lehman was a sand castle the tech industry is a house of cards on a shaky table on the San Andreas fault and the winds are picking up. I think that when it goes, it's gonna rip.
Right, so what the world needs to do is ask the question "Why are we getting 1.4% when we're used to getting 3%?" Because this is the same shit that fueled the commercial real estate bubble in the 80s, the dotcom bubble of the 90s, and the residential real estate bubble of the 2000s. The main answer is that we haven't had any real productivity growth basically in my entire life (and I'm 35). This despite the fact that all sorts of machines can do shit now, humans have PCs that help them find whatever info they need instantly, etc. Productivity should be skyrocketing, and given that productivity increases are the main thing that expands the economy, productivity stagnation is killing us all. Saint Milton used to say if you want more of something, tax it less, and if you want less of something, tax it more (an obvious anathema to today's worshiper of Friedman, since the apparent number things that should be taxed more is 0). So it would seem obvious (if we take his sage advice) that the tax code is forgiving of bubble investing and doesn't encourage real business investment (in productivity, i.e. making things). This is supported by the fact that pretty much every major corporation is essentially a finance company, regardless of what they actually do as a company. Hypertrophy of the finance sector is suffocating all of us. Although we may disagree about how bad it will hurt when the winds pickup, I certainly wouldn't disagree with your characterization of the tech industry as a house of cards writ large. If it's a doomsday scenario, I can only hope that we have a reasoned response to the crash. The GOP is trying mightily to accelerate this scenario with their laughable tax 'plan'. What we really need are structural changes in the way we do business (with an eye toward what a functional, inclusive economy looks like), and rebuild the framework from first principles. Instead what we're getting is a massive national credit card debt fueled trophy for everyone, but really, really bug trophies for job creators.If the whole world is used to 3% and the whole world is making 1.4%, the whole world starts buying junk.
Dude your link is whack. Straight-up bullshit. It links to a graph from the Saint Louis Fed which is every bit as linear as you and I both know the productivity curve to be. 1945-1973: 24.6-51.4 (about 100%) 1973-2001: 51.4-80.9 (about 80%) 2001-2017: 80.9 -108 (about 40%, but also half the time span) Productivity is up. Period. Efficiency is also up. Your article effectively says "the problem is that bear over there. It's gonna kill us. How are we going to kill the bear?" While pointing at a dead bear. Mutherfucker we're within 25% of that right now. ___________________________________________________ That out of the way: What do you think that looks like? I think it looks like the people who can afford to go "my potential gains are not commensurate with my potential losses" going to cash, and the people who cannot go "we'd best make hay while the sun shines." Everybody I follow who does personal finance is screaming cash, while everybody I follow who does institutional is talking about 1-month and 3-month signals and where to maximize right the fuck now. It's fundamentally a tragedy of the commons problem - an individual investor cannot fix an economy whose investment returns are half what they're used to; all they can do is lower expectations (which gives your business to the people willing to lie to their clients) or chase alpha. I think we are literally watching the investment class grapple with this very problem. I think their solutions take as base the fact that it's unfixable. And I think the whole world wouldn't be piling into crypto if they could get satisfactory returns out of conventional investments. You can solve this by inspection: Something between 74% and 80% of that is in retirement accounts and therefore sheltered. Compare and contrast: our business is taxed every year on our equipment. Yeah - not the year we purchased it, every year. Our nitrous machine? Our county gets a bite of that every year for seven years. Our business loan? Taxed as income on our pass-through. Interest on that loan? not deductible. So yeah - if you want less small business, tax it more. If you want more Americans playing the ponies with their retirement funds, tax it when they hit retirement age. I'm a white male entrepreneur with a lot of experience with pass-throughs. More than that, our business gets better the more people are on Medicaid. More than that, the fewer people with insurance, the more people pay our cash-pay (because it's about 15% what a hospital costs). I fuckin' hate the Republicans and I fuckin' hate Trump and I would gladly roll it all back if I could. But the tax bill is almost written for me. No state income tax deduction? No worries! WA has no state income tax! Personal taxes at the expense of pass-throughs? No worries! I've wound up and wound down like six of those in the past ten years! Private school tax waivers? Fuck yeah! Got one of them, too! But I look around my neighborhood and they're fucked. Totally fucked.Average output per person per hour grew at roughly 3 percent annually from the end of World War II to 1973, but has since settled at about half that level, excepting a few boom years in the late 1990s and early 2000s (and a blip in 2010).
In the late 1990s, oil was dirt cheap.
Right, so what the world needs to do is ask the question "Why are we getting 1.4% when we're used to getting 3%?"
So it would seem obvious (if we take his sage advice) that the tax code is forgiving of bubble investing and doesn't encourage real business investment (in productivity, i.e. making things).
That link may not state the problem exactly correctly, but the fact that productivity growth is too weak to raise wages meaningfully isn't exactly a novel argument.
Ahh - but what's the link between productivity and wages? Everyone is currently hectoring the Fed about whether or not the Phillips Curve is still relevant, which links wage inflation and employment. Theoretically when employment drops below X, inflation will go Y so you need to raise interest rates. But I've never heard anyone claiming that productivity and wages were linked. Rather, the brief period they were is "the Golden Age of Capitalism." Piketty put a button on that - it was all about the spoils of the biggest war ever fought. No more war spoils, no more growth.
I've been watching this bullshit bubble grow since the early 1990's. Every time I think the tech universe has expanded as far as it possibly can, it makes more universe to expand in to. Paper currency works because everyone buys in to the myth that this piece of paper is worth anything at all. If people woke up tomorrow and thought, "what the fuck? This is JUST PAPER!" the effects would be catastrophic. But for something like three centuries now, and uncountable generations, we have kept this delusion going simply because everyone suffers if we don't. The tech industry is there, as well. We all know this technology is largely useless bullshit, but it fires our little endorphin circuits, and we buy in again. And every time the tech industry is going to burst, die, explode, crash... it doesn't. The universe just gets bigger, and the tech industry grows into the new space that has been created. Investors are so far beyond any logic or reason (Tesla, Google, Facebook, etc.), that they are building a whole new bubble to grow in to. It's beyond logic and math. And has been for a long time. I think we may need to reset the baseline on our measurements...