Farming was the 1800s. Manufacturing was the 1900s. Counterintuitively, could investing become the most common "job" of the 2000s?
Reason: crypto and fintech are turning everyone into an investor, just like the internet turned everyone into publishers. How far does that go?
One way of measuring this: what percentage of income do people derive from investments vs wage labor?
We think of wage labor for a salary as the default today, but the transition from farming to manufacturing was a big change. An improvement in some respects, and not in others.
Many bemoan the financialization of the economy. But perhaps we lean into that. Perhaps investing is what people do in a robotic economy if they don't want to be founders.
Investing is similar to consumption. Just click to buy. Picking is hard. But you can join a rolling fund...
In this hypothetical world:
- everyone is micro-investing, every day
- the $10000 micro-exit is kind of like the viral tweet
- what would have been "college money" seeds your fund
- picking a fund manager is like picking an employer
- robotics gives a low-scarcity basic lifestyle
One response is "someone still has to do the jobs."
But the share of farming jobs crashed even as the population rose, because we got really efficient.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore did well in the 20th century while the Chinese mainland was gripped by a mind virus.
Quite possible that Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore do well in the 21st century while the Western world is gripped by a mind virus.
Why Australia and New Zealand?
They’re arguably the best-run countries in the Anglo world. I compiled some graphs in the thread below. But you can see that they’re qualitatively less indebted than the G7.
REALITY PRECEDES PROSPERITY
I think we agree on one point and disagree on two points.
THE BUKELE ANTIBODIES 1) First, yes, force alone is not the recipe for an ailing country. Ultimately you need community. Latin America suffered from generations of drug dealing and money printing. So now they have developed antibodies in the form of crime prevention and Bitcoin adoption. And Bukele is the incarnation of those antibodies. But society basically has to be ready to turn around before a Bukele can appear. He can wield force against the 1.6% of criminals because he has much of the 98.4% of non-criminals on his side.
I saw this in India as well, after generations of socialism. And in Vietnam, after generations of communism. Those societies finally had the antibodies to fight off the mind viruses that had brought them low. Of course, many societies just succumb. Is Cambodia mounting a comeback anytime soon? Or North Korea, or Cuba? Not really.
This is also the problem in the US. Many in the US have yet to even acknowledge it's declining. Many Democrats are Stalinist Bidenists, whose monthly checks are dependent on mouthing the party line. And many Republicans have replaced G-o-d with G-o-v. They see the US military as a god replacement, in its stern father form, and can't bring themselves to admit the country ain't what it was. They're Soviet conservatives, patriotic to a fault, saluting the worst because they've captured the flag.
I don't think this is true for everyone — people like @realchrisrufo and @davereaboi know what time it is — but it's true for too many. If you still think, like Biden recently said, that his empire is still "the most powerful country in the history of the world" and that it just isn't trying or is like one election away from being fixed — you are wrong in a deep way.
The values that underpin the valuations have been broken. The current society is coasting on fumes. Fixing this is at least a generational rebuild. It's not something one vote will solve.
IT'S NOT RICH 2) We also disagree that the US is a rich country. It has a fake economy, built on debt, with exponentially increasing interest payments, that doesn't have much runway left, and doesn't have factories to fall back on when the money printing stops.
For example:
^ Why are interest payments suddenly spiking? Because the bill for QE is coming due. Either die by high inflation or high rates. Or both.
^ Why is the country issuing debt at emergency levels, without acknowledging it's an emergency? Because that's the only thing that can keep this fake economy afloat through the 2024 election.
^ Why is China the world's #1 trade partner on just about every physical good? Because the US only exports (a) printed money and (b) technology. Anyway, I could keep going, with literally dozens of graphs like this. But X only allows four per post.
IT'S NOT STABLE 3) On the topic of whether it's a country with a "turbulent history of...violence", the level of drug addiction, violent crime, homeless encampments, squatters, road blockages, and massive BLM/Hamas mobs swarming the streets has obviously spiked in recent years.
2020 didn't represent a one-off, it's a preview of what is to come, particularly in Blue America. Crime statistics are systematically faked — in San Francisco, you can actually see some dashboards where things like car ticketing have gone to zero — so we don't have an accurate picture.
Until you see undeniable things like stores closing and people moving out of blue states. And then blue politicians yell at those companies, and try to stop them from moving out. This is systematic: blues always disable the warning lights that tell you we're crashing into the ground, just like the mortgages labeled AAA in 2008, just as a mosquito anesthetizes you before drinking your blood, just as a snake evolves to employ camouflage before it strikes. Alongside lawfare, faking the stats is a core competency of both communist reds and woke blues.
TLDR: I think we just have very different mental models of the prosperity and stability of today's United States. Wokeness is hegemonic and the damage is deep. I wish it weren't so — but agreeing on reality precedes prosperity.
A few more citations follow 👇
Here's how SF fakes its crime statistics. The law is not enforced so the crime is not reported.
This is a BLM/Hamas mob.
And this is a scene from World War Z.
Complete with the fast zombies.
That guy in the car did nothing wrong.
Other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Namely, Blue America.
This doesn't happen in a stable country.
These are the options. I get the logic, but banning signals technological and cultural weakness. Yet so does capitulation of the Newsom variety. The best way is to build something *better* than China, as Elon and others in tech have done.