I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.
High prices are the result of shortages. When the government makes it hard to get a permit, or simply doesn't allow housing to be built, and add 12 million people, then prices inevitably go up.
If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening:
Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequality comes to be, why it's not good for society and how it could be adressed
If the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources to preserve the status quo by preventing desperately-needed housing from being built.
Those with wealth will tend to steer the economic system more towards their own interests in a runaway feedback loop, often in ways which create no overall net welfare for society.
If we define wealth as it's often used colloquially -- the amount of liquid cash one has -- then your potential share of the pie of goods and services shrinks. This is true unless the pie itself grows proportionately.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with parent comment, the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some.
Historically one usually amassed monetary wealth in exchange of providing goods and services on the table. Stock markets, high frequency arbitrage markets have broken this. Yes there is liquidity insertion, but is that liquidity worth so much ? At microsecond scale ? I don't think so.
Stock market let's one encash a perception of promised future delivery of goods and services without the need to actually deliver it. Yes the market will eventually, hopefully, price it correctly, but by then some other retail sucker is holding that bag.
Walter, I believe the idea against wealth inequality is not purely that there are wealthier people but that their wealth should be redistributed such that the wealthier people are less wealthy (but still wealthier) and the poorer people are less poor (but still poorer).
There have been many attempts at taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and the result was always everybody was worse off except the people who ran the government.
It’s a rather public example but DOGE did immense damage and was facilitated by the ability to leverage wealth into power. There is a dangerous feedback cycle.
I have not read Piketty. But I could imagine a society where the poor are 10% better off and the rich are 1000% better off to be a less stable society that ends up falling apart.
I was just thinking about it, rich people have money to spend in elections to get their representatives elected. When they do they make laws, or remove existing laws, to help rich get richer, so they have more money to spend in the next election. And so it goes.
Solution might be legislation that puts limits on how much money each person can spend on elections. But it may be too late, there are so many rich people in the congress that such laws can not pass.
The rich not only want to get richer they also want the lower classes to get poorer so they will work for less and will have to work longer hours so they will have less time and money to educate themselves, and thus will remain clueless about what is going on.
When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else.
Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments.
How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles? I suspect it would be like what we see today in private equity with illiquid funds and subpar returns. The response of a market in this condition would be to look for sources of liquid funds, get them to buy the illiquid funds so that the original investors could get out leaving the new investors holding the bag of crap.
Oh wait, isn't private equity doing just that trying to make PE acceptable investment vehicle for 401ks?
> When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else.
That's called "theft". In a free market, transactions are mutually agreed upon. Equal wealth for equal wealth.
> Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments.
Your statement presumes that "value" is some construct independent of the market. The only "value" in commerce is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is no other useful definition of value.
As for how wealth is created, I buy a canvas and some paint for $50, and paint a masterpiece that Ritchie Rich buys from me for $10,000. I created that wealth. Taylor Swift figured out how to turn her song skillz into a billion dollars. She created that wealth. Musk figured out how to turn hunks of metal into rockets that are quite profitable. He created that wealth. And so on.
> How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles?
Now that is a complex topic. But I'll make a simple take on it. When there is more cash than things to buy, then the value of the cash diminishes. We call that "inflation". Wealth creation does not cause inflation.
As for private equity, nobody is making you invest in it.
The inequality doesn't come from the creation of wealth so much as the destruction of it. Inflation and rising prices of staple goods (there is some covariance, but the latter seems to be outpacing the former) impact poor people disproportionately hard because staple goods are more or less fixed costs. The marginal utility of an extra dollar is much higher for someone on the poverty line vs. someone who is a multi-millionaire.
Inflation is caused by the government, not wealth creation. The US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914, despite incredible amounts of wealth creation. The inflation since 1914 is caused by government deficits.
Government deficits are not caused by rich people. They're caused by the people you voted for.
> staple goods are more or less fixed costs.
No, they're not. Their availability and price is determined by the Law of Supply and Demand.
The wealthy do not cause food prices to rise, as you can only eat so much.
Inflation. If i print $1 trillion dollars, i buy up all the resources you need to live and dangle them in front of you and control every aspect of your life.
The French Revolution is no longer possible. The surveillance state plus wealth mobility means the wealthy will be in New Zealand before anyone erects a guillotine, and the people that would foment a revolution are heavily surveilled and infiltrated.
Are you sure about that? Tech cuts both ways & asymmetric drone warfare has become cheaper than ever … how hard it is it to sink some yachts or down some jets?
I could only relate to this stuff in my 20s but now I just don't care. Maybe it's cause I went from < 200k net worth to over 1M in that time. I've seen the country I was born in collapse in my lifetime. I saw my grandparents give their entire life to that country only to be left destitute. I saw my parents come to America with literally $0 and after thirty years I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
This idea that people will rise up and replace what we've got now with better is part of the problem. You literally do not know how lucky you are to live in this time because you are living in the middle of a golden age and don't even realize it. Because when you're in the middle of a golden age it feels normal.
And for some reason there's an entire population of folks like you that wanna FAFO while they are living in literally the best time ever to be a human being. I'd sigh but I'm not surprised.
New Zealand is zero defense vs a large populist uprising, especially one taking place in New Zealand.
That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.
It was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France.
Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.
In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?
Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
> In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution
“Fundamentally inherent from”
is such a broad statement that it’s essentially meaningless.
The US constitution also predates the French Revolution.
> so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule
If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of a single country rejecting the divine right to rule why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
That is a bit of revisionist history: conspiracy theories gripped the revolution, and a lot of them thought Marie-Antoinette was already organising an Austrian invasion of France (since she is Austrian), so rather than wait for the supposed inevitable to happen, France attacked first. And that's what made the coalitions form. Not that they liked the idea of a Republican France, but before France attacked, they were unlikely to do anything about it.
What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?
Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.
Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.
> A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.
The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good.
> “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.”
Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit.
> If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?
Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?
Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.
Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis?
Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?
Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.
> Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks?
the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.
Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, not the 1960s.
With investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom.
The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest.
With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.
Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.
Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.
All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.
Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.
We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.
Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.
You just named symptoms not cause.
1. People vote for old idiots .
2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that .
3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know
> American lost engineering culture everywhere except software
microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?
Both companies created in the previous century and running on old fuel of past success
> People vote for old idiots .
i think this is also a syndrome not a cause
> wealth inequality
How does creating wealth hurt others?
> skyrocketing housing
High prices are the result of shortages. When the government makes it hard to get a permit, or simply doesn't allow housing to be built, and add 12 million people, then prices inevitably go up.
If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening:
Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequality comes to be, why it's not good for society and how it could be adressed
How about a summary of Piketty's argument?
We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?
If the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources to preserve the status quo by preventing desperately-needed housing from being built.
Those with wealth will tend to steer the economic system more towards their own interests in a runaway feedback loop, often in ways which create no overall net welfare for society.
Let me address the second part.
If we define wealth as it's often used colloquially -- the amount of liquid cash one has -- then your potential share of the pie of goods and services shrinks. This is true unless the pie itself grows proportionately.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with parent comment, the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some.
Historically one usually amassed monetary wealth in exchange of providing goods and services on the table. Stock markets, high frequency arbitrage markets have broken this. Yes there is liquidity insertion, but is that liquidity worth so much ? At microsecond scale ? I don't think so.
Stock market let's one encash a perception of promised future delivery of goods and services without the need to actually deliver it. Yes the market will eventually, hopefully, price it correctly, but by then some other retail sucker is holding that bag.
Creating wealth means the pie gets bigger by that amount.
And no, wealth is not the amount of liquid cash you have. If that were true, I'd be dead broke.
> the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some.
Wealth creators will be growing the pie at a higher rate than those who do not create wealth.
I agree that's the theory. It used to be mostly true in the past, but given current valuations it does not look true at all.
My worry is that we are not creating enough new wealth but just distributing it lopsidedly.
Walter, I believe the idea against wealth inequality is not purely that there are wealthier people but that their wealth should be redistributed such that the wealthier people are less wealthy (but still wealthier) and the poorer people are less poor (but still poorer).
There have been many attempts at taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and the result was always everybody was worse off except the people who ran the government.
It’s a rather public example but DOGE did immense damage and was facilitated by the ability to leverage wealth into power. There is a dangerous feedback cycle.
I have not read Piketty. But I could imagine a society where the poor are 10% better off and the rich are 1000% better off to be a less stable society that ends up falling apart.
The USSR made everyone equal and it fell apart.
your first question was better.
"how does creating wealth hurt others?"
most of this "wealth" is not "created" out of thin air. nor created at all.
more like, transferred.
Wealth is a positive not zero sum game. It is not transferred except in the most literal cases like lotteries and casinos.
To be asking these questions you lack fundamental economic knowledge and you should really educate yourself.
I was just thinking about it, rich people have money to spend in elections to get their representatives elected. When they do they make laws, or remove existing laws, to help rich get richer, so they have more money to spend in the next election. And so it goes.
Solution might be legislation that puts limits on how much money each person can spend on elections. But it may be too late, there are so many rich people in the congress that such laws can not pass.
The rich not only want to get richer they also want the lower classes to get poorer so they will work for less and will have to work longer hours so they will have less time and money to educate themselves, and thus will remain clueless about what is going on.
> How does creating wealth hurt others?
Creating wealth doesn't. Extracting wealth does. We have long switched from a creating economy to an extracting economy.
Extracting from what?
You are 100% correct.
When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else.
Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments.
How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles? I suspect it would be like what we see today in private equity with illiquid funds and subpar returns. The response of a market in this condition would be to look for sources of liquid funds, get them to buy the illiquid funds so that the original investors could get out leaving the new investors holding the bag of crap.
Oh wait, isn't private equity doing just that trying to make PE acceptable investment vehicle for 401ks?
> When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else.
That's called "theft". In a free market, transactions are mutually agreed upon. Equal wealth for equal wealth.
> Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments.
Your statement presumes that "value" is some construct independent of the market. The only "value" in commerce is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is no other useful definition of value.
As for how wealth is created, I buy a canvas and some paint for $50, and paint a masterpiece that Ritchie Rich buys from me for $10,000. I created that wealth. Taylor Swift figured out how to turn her song skillz into a billion dollars. She created that wealth. Musk figured out how to turn hunks of metal into rockets that are quite profitable. He created that wealth. And so on.
> How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles?
Now that is a complex topic. But I'll make a simple take on it. When there is more cash than things to buy, then the value of the cash diminishes. We call that "inflation". Wealth creation does not cause inflation.
As for private equity, nobody is making you invest in it.
The inequality doesn't come from the creation of wealth so much as the destruction of it. Inflation and rising prices of staple goods (there is some covariance, but the latter seems to be outpacing the former) impact poor people disproportionately hard because staple goods are more or less fixed costs. The marginal utility of an extra dollar is much higher for someone on the poverty line vs. someone who is a multi-millionaire.
Inflation is caused by the government, not wealth creation. The US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914, despite incredible amounts of wealth creation. The inflation since 1914 is caused by government deficits.
Government deficits are not caused by rich people. They're caused by the people you voted for.
> staple goods are more or less fixed costs.
No, they're not. Their availability and price is determined by the Law of Supply and Demand.
The wealthy do not cause food prices to rise, as you can only eat so much.
> If i print $1 trillion dollars
Your dollars will be worthless. You've got a printer, give it a try. Let us know how it goes.
"create"
???
> Perhaps the danger is not 2008, 1999, 1973 or even 1873, but 1789.
1789 was the year of the French Revolution [1]. The rest are years with financial crises.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
The French Revolution is no longer possible. The surveillance state plus wealth mobility means the wealthy will be in New Zealand before anyone erects a guillotine, and the people that would foment a revolution are heavily surveilled and infiltrated.
You know New Zealand has borders right? And guillotines (or the makings thereof).
Are you sure about that? Tech cuts both ways & asymmetric drone warfare has become cheaper than ever … how hard it is it to sink some yachts or down some jets?
I could only relate to this stuff in my 20s but now I just don't care. Maybe it's cause I went from < 200k net worth to over 1M in that time. I've seen the country I was born in collapse in my lifetime. I saw my grandparents give their entire life to that country only to be left destitute. I saw my parents come to America with literally $0 and after thirty years I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
This idea that people will rise up and replace what we've got now with better is part of the problem. You literally do not know how lucky you are to live in this time because you are living in the middle of a golden age and don't even realize it. Because when you're in the middle of a golden age it feels normal.
And for some reason there's an entire population of folks like you that wanna FAFO while they are living in literally the best time ever to be a human being. I'd sigh but I'm not surprised.
New Zealand is zero defense vs a large populist uprising, especially one taking place in New Zealand.
That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.
The French Revolution was an orgy in mass murder that led to the slaughter of millions in the Napoleon wars.
It really need to be romantizied much less!
It was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France.
Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.
In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?
Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
> In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution
“Fundamentally inherent from” is such a broad statement that it’s essentially meaningless.
The US constitution also predates the French Revolution.
> so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule
If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of a single country rejecting the divine right to rule why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
That is a bit of revisionist history: conspiracy theories gripped the revolution, and a lot of them thought Marie-Antoinette was already organising an Austrian invasion of France (since she is Austrian), so rather than wait for the supposed inevitable to happen, France attacked first. And that's what made the coalitions form. Not that they liked the idea of a Republican France, but before France attacked, they were unlikely to do anything about it.
Oh it’s definitely starting to feel like 1789 vibes. The oligarchs have taken too much, too fast.
https://archive.is/q1GxG
Isn't there a better alternative to this archive site?
It does the job for me, but please do tell me if you find a better alternative.
What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
Hrrm :-(
Well, for one, it wants me to scan a QR code as a captcha.
Me too, and ain't no way I'm doing that. That's blocklist behavior.
I chose the audio option to get around this.
I've never once had that happen. It's always straight to the unrolled article.
Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.
Is it true that Thiel moved to Argentina
Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.
> A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.
The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good.
> “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.”
Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit.
> If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?
Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).
Death to the fascist insect that feeds on the blood of the people.
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
We've (tech workers) been in the labor aristocracy for the last 15 years ignoring the plights of the rest of labor. We kind of have it coming.
These rich folks should probably study Mao and the revolutions of 1848 before the worst possible things happen.
Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?
Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.
Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
It would require participation by all strata of society. So no.
Fnord!
I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis?
Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?
Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.
> Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks?
the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.
Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, not the 1960s.
We came back from the gilded age. So there’s hope right?
Sounds like we need a modern day Teddy Roosevelt?
Gilded age is one of the GOATed times in America though.
Pretty much, yea
With investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom.
The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest.
With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.
"much of wall street is in a fatalistic mood" yeah the SPY is going vertical, sure sure.
Yeah, this article does not seem evidence backed to me. There is a ton of optimism now.
Isnt Economist , like, a super prestigious publication? Why would they let something flimsy seep thru?
Zerohedge is probably more reliable at this point
I know someone who has called it “The Ecommunist” for 20 years, so not everybody has the opinion that is is prestigious, but some see it as elitist.
Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.
Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.
All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.
Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.
We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.
You can be in a fatalistic mood and buy.
America is a communist nation since the majority of the populace holds the majority of the productive capacity in joint ownership
That claim needs explanation. My understanding is that substantially less than 20% hold the controlling ownership of U.S. productive capacity.
No ones labor is worthless. Guys this is so retarded but I understand why tech people find this difficult.
Humanity runs off of romance. This is not sexual romantic love but rather the thrill of other human people.
An AI cannot provide this. This interaction has value. Technology frees us from having to deal with the mundane so we can deal with the exemplary.
Just go to a poorer country and see that it is not possible there. America is friggin awesome.
Why are there homeless people then?
Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
No reason to black pill. Tons of opportunities - be creative.