What happens if large cohort of Boomers retires and stop working, instead living on their savings? Labor share of income drops. If you remove this effect, the labor share of income is flat - confirmed by last week's analysis in The Economist.
Honest question: why would one switch from a much more capable "carry everywhere" smartphone camera to this? Especially since phone is truly carry always & everywhere and that computational processing squeezes out insane amount of photo quality from already excellent phone cameras.
It doesn't negate the influence gain, however the Putin and Trump examples show that this influence is often (very) limited and short lived, not "tremendous"
Yes, people are getting wealthier in real terms, including the poor. Especially if you quantify it the right way: absolute consumption/expenditures, not relative % from median income (relative count will always show there are poor people even if they would appear insanely "rich" to a poor person from 100 years ago or from Afghanistan).
On lived experience: my lived experience tells me the Earth is flat.
How much bending is actually happening vs just hypotheticals thought? Elon Musk donated a lot and then suddenly Big Beautiful Bill hit Tesla very hard. Doesn't sound like he got a favor paid back. Also, not that we should emulate Russia (not at all) but since 2000s there any oligarch trying to do anything political goes to jail or "falls out of their window". So possible in principle to remove the influence (I don't approve of the method though).
Sure, HTF is zero sum. I just think that focus on it is excessive. 99.9% of businesses are not. Regret would be nice to include in consideration but I doubt one can reliably measure it in practice
I just see political influence as separate issue. Make sure they cannot lobby/donate (prison if they do) and problem solved.
Why being tangiable so important? E.g. a billionare made it on physical music CD cs one made it on music streaming? As long as it's legal, why prioritize physical form?
And I agree that _some_ redistribution is necessary for a healthy society. But the cost of slowing growth must be weighted agaist it. And populist calls for "no billionaires" etc are going to be bad for all, including the poor, in the end
"seems" as based on vibes? Beware of nostalgia bias!
It is true that middle class has been shrinking. What is often overlooked though ks that the majority of that middle class moved on to the upper class, so not bad at all and aligns with "growing pie"
Exactly, and thankfully those have been made based on natural experiments like the ones I shared. And the consensus among serious modern economists (not those making money on selling popular books) is that redistribution negatively affects economic growth with all else being equal
My point is that the pie is growing and all are benefitting. Yes, rich may be getting more but not at the expense of poorer people as their wealth is increasing too. It's rather unfortunate but it seems that the pies grows fastest (and poor benefit from that growth too) when wealth is allowed to accumulate and yes that means more inequality but if all get better off, that's the price we have to pay for faster growth of total pie
Can we? Do we even know the counterfactual? Perhaps Norway would have been 2x richer (incl. their poorest people) if they implemented ultra aggressive libertarian policies.
The best we can do is learn from natural expriments like Finland and Estonia being about as rich before ww2, then by 90s the gap got massive since one was forced adopt more redistributive policies. Same with North / South Korea. Here we have at least some hope of extracting causality
If your logic is right, people back in the Stone Age were all like Jeff Bezos with mega yachts and stuff... It all went downhill from then - the population has increased so much and everyone has gotten so much poorer :(
Yes, that is a fair point. However, the cost of drone versus latest generation ballistic missile that has a chance to reach us naval ship is very different. And in that sense, iterating on a drone is closer to iterating on a line of code because one drone would cost you a thousand bucks and your iteration is a small tweak like adding a different grenade triggering mechanism. Rockets require custom design, custom manufacturing lines, and generally much more difficult to modify and make more effective.
You also have a lot more tries with cheap drones since the target is lower value, so you have hundreds of data points on how each iteration performs vs hitting a naval ship which is an extremely rare event, so it's hard to see whether your iteration on a rocket actually succeeded.
And here is one for 55+yo: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230
All is fine