I have previously said interest rates only rising in the face of wage inflation and ignoring decades of asset inflation was a attack by the investor class who feel they shouldn't have to share the rewards with workers.
This guy confirms that thinking is likely prevalent.
Workers need to be reminded who they work for? They need to be reminded that the Hamptons isn't a defensible position.
Asset multiples will collapse if unemployment rises significantly and the labor market weakens. Surely the investor class will still come out ahead, but it's interesting they seem to be ignoring this fact (except Warren Buffett, who's cash reserve to equity ratio is far greater than most of his peers)
It’s fear. They fear losing wealth, which if why they must always have more of and do anything to keep, even at the detriment of others— sometimes even their own family.
I don't think that's it, it's more that line has stopped going up and they need someone to blame that isn't the gross misallocation of their own resources. Investing has been incredibly short sighted for the last 40 years, and they're reaping what's been sewn now.
I believe, in spirit, what he was referring to was the inordinate premium young people spend for conveniences. He doesn’t have anything against avocado toast, except for the fact that it costs $1.25 to make, but restaurants in NYC or any large city may charge $12 before gratuity for it.
No lie, I’ve seen a slice of avocado toast on a menu for $12. It made me irate. When I go out to eat, I optimize for price, and difficulty to make at home. Thus, I often opt for Ribs with brusselsprouts, because both take a lot of time: tending to the grill, chopping annoying Brussels in half…etc. Even then, you can mess it up, rendering your time spent wasted. I’ve eaten bangin’ ribs with Brussels for $25. Avocado toast takes 2 min, tops and requires 0 skill.
This is ridiculous, IMO. When you go out to eat you should optimize for pleasure, not the difficulty of constructing a dish. Avocado Toast was chosen in the "young people suck" articles because it was trendy, not because it simple.
Look at the other complaint - espresso drinks at cafes. People whine that young people could save more money if they just stopped buying lattes. Given that virtually nobody has an espresso machine at home, this is the polar opposite of the "well, you can make it at home" situation.
No. The complaint is "young people should stop complaining about their economic fortunes because it is their own damn fault." Nothing to do with trading money for convenience.
I think it is some of both. Doing without or compromising for your own financial well being is well established pattern. For example, don’t buy or lease a car beyond your means is a perfect example of a poor decision that holds one back. Our society doesn’t help with offering 8-year car loans and sales people convincing a young adult how affordable the vehicle is.
So in some ways younger generations are not setup for success. Their own fault. In some ways they create their own self-demise. Eating out constantly when making your own food or coffee is a perfectly viable option.
In total, society owes it to itself to ensure future generations are successful. I don’t think we’re doing that well enough.
If the complaints were about major things like high interest car loans or living without roommates in your early 20s then sure, I'm confident that there are plenty of young people who are making very expensive financial decisions without thinking it through.
But "why can't young people afford houses" is well explained by student loans and high home prices even for financially careful young people.
Nah, he's 100% a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" guy. He goes around making a bunch of assertions for which he has no evidence, but conveniently confirm his worldview and require him to change his habits not at all. I googled "how much do millennials spend on avocado toast" and got a bazillion results with sources about how it's not an issue. I also just googled "australia tradies productivity" and after some reading, it seems a lot more likely that the slowdown in productivity is from firm consolidation leading to a lack of competition.
If he really cared about this stuff, he'd be advocating for stricter antitrust (monopoly regulation is I think what it's called in Australia) rules, but weirdly you find almost no multimillionaire business owners doing so. Instead they spend their column inches arguing that we need to whip the rowers harder so the boat goes faster.
Or hey, CEO pay spiked too, meaning they've also been paid a lot more to do at least the same amount of work they were doing. Is he also advocating for higher levels of unemployment for the CEO class? Definitely not!
> No lie, I’ve seen a slice of avocado toast on a menu for $12. It made me irate.
For a point we have in common, I have problems in most Italian restaurants because of exactly this. I'm like, "I know this cost $4 and 15min to make, why does it cost $25". Yeah yeah I know I'm subsidizing the steak or whatever, but:
- I probably more than make up for that w/ my drink orders
> I believe, in spirit, what he was referring to was the inordinate premium young people spend for conveniences.
And why shouldnt they? It's not like not spending that money would have allowed them to buy a home.
If rich people would have shared more, making things like buying a home possible, you would most definitely see more people skipping avocado toasts. But rich people fucked everyone over, so might as well go for the little things in life.
You're defending his point while simultaneously missing it. See this quote: "There was no discussions around, could I go out for breakfast, could I go out for dinner."
Or maybe just maybe, we ought to move away from our current school of economics and find a different one that addresses the shortcomings of the current one.
I would love to see more coops start up as it puts each employee with the responsibility of working as hard as they wish, but also taking on the responsibility.
Or at least giving employees stock shares.
Oh also raise taxes, on the rich or force them to invest their excessive money into the economy (investment projects or even funds/stocks for instance).
Huberman Lab and Marc Andreesen just had an episode about this. Something about status and power dynamics, and how the current guard will never allow such a drastic change to the status quo because it jeopardizes their existence.
Idk if they said this in the episode, but I believe this to be true, even if it were the most optimal economic arrangement. People’s desire for finding their local maxima prevents us from achieving a global maxima.
I have long thought our society would be a lot better if we did more to incentivize small and medium-sized businesses to flourish, and to discourage scale. Better for employees, better for consumers, better for the overall character of communities. Also, regions that are dominated by smaller firms tend to have the most robust economies.
Too late for that. Too few people were born in the 21st century and now are entering the workforce in record low numbers.
And this time you can't just throw people at the problem, because it's a worldwide phenomenon - at least in countries where most of the population gets the 9+ years of education required to participate in an advanced economy.
1. Retirement ages have generally been increasing over the period which should offset this.
2. Immigration is a thing.
3. Kids are labour intensive so if we weren't having kids, maybe that freed up labour depressing wages that are now returning to 'normal' rather than wages being 'normal' previously.
> 1. Retirement ages have generally been increasing over the period which should offset this.
It won't because you're adding like 5 years of work from a cohort that amounts to around 3% of the total population, while at the same time you're already missing at least double that from the deficit of births in the 90s and it's only going to get worse.
> 2. Immigration is a thing.
From where? The supply of immigrants who went to school is dwindling - and has been for over 20 years now because they're not born in source countries.
> 3. Kids are labour intensive so if we weren't having kids, maybe that freed up labour depressing wages that are now returning to 'normal' rather than wages being 'normal' previously.
Children aren't "full time for the rest of your life" labour intensive - I should know since I'm a parent.
> 4. What nation has anywhere near zero employment?
I don't understand this question and how it relates to what I wrote.
> Retirement ages have generally been increasing over the period which should offset this.
Wait wasn't capitalism supposed to bring us less work hours and less overall working years ? That's what every politicians/economics were saying in the 60s/70s/80s, where did it go ?
> Immigration is a thing.
A thing that brings other things that are less and less accepted in a lot of countries
The market has no rational incentive to pay people the same for less work or to keep paying superfluous workers as automation evolves.
At the end of that article, an economist is quoted as speculating that the rise in productivity would decimate the hours we need to work, but that makes no sense when you think about it. If I can get yesteryear's daily productivity in a minute, why would I, holding yesteryear's productivity as a constant, decide that I and my employees should only for 1 minute? Why not just work for a day and reap in the TONS of extra productivity, especially considering competitors might be doing that? The only way it works is if the government forced everyone to.
> "Wait wasn't capitalism supposed to bring us less work hours and less overall working years?"
It did. For the few who are willing to accept the lower standard of living of the past, this era is quite comfortable. A lot of things that people think too basic to give up today were special treats or luxuries in the past, like eating out at restaurants or going out to the movies.
But, no, the majority wanted to keep up with the Joneses and are happy to spend away all their income even if it dooms them to toil away at a unloved job forever.
As an American who has spent a couple of years in Sydney, there are a few interesting observations:
- Tradies (construction workers, train workers, etc) are super common, it's a well-respected job, and it pays well (something like $25-30/hr AUD).
- Sydney has so many construction projects. Every little bit of road is endlessly built, ripped up, redesigned, and built again. There are MANY train stations (~200?) and many of them constantly get refreshed and made super nice.
- Speaking of trains, there are like 7 competing public transit train systems in the greater Sydney area. Many of them are not interoperable
- Construction is FAST here. From train station upgrades to apartments (though they're cookie cutter like the US), everything goes up in like 6-12 months.
A part of me feels they have so much money to slosh around everyone's got jobs, and they can throw it on endless civic projects. It's like playing Sim City with an infinite money cheat.
The joke here is that Australia makes money "by selling pieces of it to China" but that will probably end sooner or later... and that's when unemployment will soar, and the good times will end.
Until then, let the good times roll (on one of the competing train lines)
Trades pay significantly more than that in the urban US in my experience. Not sure if it is because of a history of being less well-respected but supply is definitely low still relative to demand post-COVID.
I wish my midwestern US city had some more money sloshing into civic projects.
They still have you guys fooled with the income/capital gains trick huh?
When corporatist dems say "tax the rich" they are talking about income tax, but that isn't how the rich make their money. Paul Pelosi's insider trading profits shall not be infringed!
That's why I genuinely dont like justice-through-taxation. Expropriation is a way more effective tool to restore democratic balance and a powerful deterrent.
Ironically of course, the standard of living for the average Australian hasn’t changed over the last 20 years. Growth means nothing to most Australians, because ultimately, the money doesn’t wind up in our pockets.
Politicians and rich people treat ever increasing GDP as some kind of admirable pursuit when in reality it’s making Australia far worse. We are not investing in infrastructure and any investments we do make are quickly skimmed and shipped overseas.
I want to try a stagnant economy, as I’d rather everyone works 20 hours and have great lives than what we have now.
I wonder what software would look like if employers wanted to see a jump in productivity and thus eliminate all usage of things like web frameworks and jobs reliant upon such. That would restrict employees and hiring to fewer people capable of performing without those frameworks.
What the hell does the broader business care about web frameworks? Everyone's on salary and there's deadlines. You wanna really eliminate people? Start missing deadlines. They'll replace everyone with contractors indiscriminately regardless of how much you love python or rust and hate javascript.
The purpose of software is automation. If that means eliminating positions that cannot achieve automation, because they just fill in the blanks of some tool API, then so be it. Ultimately it comes down to a single business question:
What costs more, training people or hiring many replaceable people to backfill some tool?
That's a naive perspective of web dev or any dev for that matter.
What "training"? You're getting ripped off if you're getting billed for that beyond a subscription to Udemy or whatever. I can't think of any dev projects I've ever worked on that weren't full of unique problems to solve web or otherwise. Most of the work is integration, not just making a frontend, and much of that bleeds into the frontend anyway.
What costs the most is destroying projects and burning bridges with clients after delivering crap just to save a few bucks. Assuming your projects are scoped correctly, the ratio of devs to projects tends to be about pizza scale (3 to 5 people or so). If you're trying to lean it out more than that, expect disasters or at least to be significantly late on deadlines.
If you try to hire "replaceable people" you must anticipate what happens when they're replaced. False economy is what's being sold to ignorant bosses the world over. If cutting payroll despite all this common advice still looks like the only way, you're dealing with years of debt at the hands of severe incompetence. What's being made is always more important than how much it costs. Costs are far less flexible than the sale price. Automation is not a silver bullet and most software dev is already as cheap as it gets in any industry. Just give up and sell the company to someone who knows better before further eroding the value left. Leave the employees alone.
The perspective is not naive. I have been writing frontend code for 25 years and been a full time JavaScript developer for 15 years. The single greatest human problem I encounter in this space is insecurity and a variety of compensating or masking behaviors. That insecurity is almost universally the result of poor preparation.
This guy confirms that thinking is likely prevalent.
Workers need to be reminded who they work for? They need to be reminded that the Hamptons isn't a defensible position.