[quote=“enso, post:32, topic:71891”]
A lot of technical folks find out in their 40s that if their career path is “being a good engineer,” they’re looking at being unemployable by 50 (at the latest) if they ever transition jobs…
…a lot of folks wind up in management at this point because if you are over 40, you can be hired in management and it may even be seen as somehow appropriate or that your age is an asset.[/quote]
This is a thing I dread. I suck at management. I don’t want to manage people or things, I just want to write code for a few hours and then go home and not think about it. No, actually, what I want is to not have to work for the man at all, and just do creative and fun stuff for the rest of my life. But “not management” is my second choice.
The article and concern has ALMOST NOTHING TO DO WITH SOME ANECDOTAL PIDDLY INCREASE IN WORKING INCOMES
You SHOULD be making a lot more after working a few decades.
The point is that the US Worker has, on average greatly increased their productivity per hour worked, yet all the benefits are being siphoned away from them and the commons to support a tiny non-working gilded class. This is supported by non-anecdotal statistics.
And… its more complex than that. As always.
Canadians declare bankruptcy because:
15% declared medical reasons the primary cause, although it was unclear from the data whether this was the costs of care over and above the Medicare system or income loss due to medical reasons, or some combination of both.
the median debt for that age group was $28,061
Whats the median being declared for bankruptcy in the US? My knee jerk is to add a zero onto that amount.
It has, however, greatly increased our productivity per hour worked, so we’re getting a disproportionate amount of work done thanks to technology, automation, and improved processes.
After reading through the article and the 86 replies I was surprised that no one had made the connection between loss of earning power, standard of living and the date when things began to reverse. That date was 1973. In 1971 President Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods agreement at the instigation of France. Bretton Woods was settled by the victor nations of WWII (in the West). It stipulated that, when the war was won all these nations would conspire together to use only the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In other words the dollar would be the sole currency against which all other currencies would be valued and payments from one to the other would be valued in dollars regardless of which currency was actually used to make the transfer.
The US also made a deal with Saudi Arabia whereby the US would guarantee the ruling family’s safety and continued rule in exchange for the Saudis selling oil only for US dollars - thus shutting out all other nations from buying oil (or selling it) for anything other than dollars.
The US agreed to guarantee to redeem its paper dollars for gold. This would fix the number of paper dollars the Federal Reserve could print to the fixed assets the US possessed in gold - thus ensuring fiscal responsibility and a guaranteed value for all the dollars foreign nations held.
France bucked the trend and demanded actual gold in exchange for dollars because it was suspected the US was cheating and printing more paper than it had gold reserves to cover.
Since 1971, with Nixon’s repudiation of redemption of paper for gold, there has been no restraint on the printing and spending of dollars and US public debt has grown into tens of trillions. This massive debt is only covered by the need, in other nations, for dollars to buy oil. It is this massive fraud, at the federal level, that has decreased the value of the dollars people are paid for their work. People may earn more dollars per hour of work but the dollars are worth much less when it comes time to exchange them for goods and services. This is one of the reasons, and a very important foundational reason, why people have to work more and more but have less to show for it.
The only job I’ve had that paid a living wage, i noticed the same thing: I’d have been happy to work less at that point, but as they paid me more, they expected me to commit more. Not just hours, I was expected to buy into my employer’s ideology as well.
This is a major clue: American workers aren’t overworked so they can squeeze a little more productivity out of us, we’re overworked to keep us from doing more rational things with our time that might impact the bottom line elsewhere. How do you think the credit fraud scandal of 2008 would have gone differently, if thee were a well rested, unionized citizenry with the option of looking up and doing something about it? What would have happened, did happen in, Iceland. The boss knows exactly what he’s doing.
Thanks, and I think you zeroed (ahem) in on the reason that more information was needed.
In the U.S., a medical bankruptcy might mean that the petitioner was too impaired by illness or injury for substantial gainful activity and was then overwhelmed by various other debts … mortgage, medical, student, consumer, etc. That’s true in Canada too.
However, in the U.S., medical bankruptcy might also include a financially sound household with assets and working people otherwise healthy and able to work and who can earn significant professional income.
The person can work, but the deductibles, copay and uninsured portion of one or medical debts exceeds what she could ever hope to repay, even after liquidation and working into late retirement age.
Those are very different scenarios. The second type of medical bankruptcy happens primarily, if not exclusively, in the U.S.
Paul Krugman has questioned the notion that “… the gold standard era was marked by price stability, or for that matter any kind of stability … gold bugs will [argue] that under a gold standard big bubbles couldn’t happen, and therefore there wouldn’t be major financial crises. And it’s true: under the gold standard America had no major financial panics other than in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933. Oh, wait.”
Krugman is fun to read but as a financial savant I wouldn’t trust him with a shiny new zinc penny. He missed every downturn and upturn over the last couple decades (as did almost all the other talking heads - to be fair).
There have been financial panics and losses just as there have been bubbles and tremendous gains while on a gold backed money system. These were not caused by the use of gold as money but through the use of paper as a substitute or credit when there was nothing behind it. Most bubbles and crashes come about through governmental manipulation of the supply of currency to finance wars or other stupid wastes of labor.
Through time, where the volume or the value of the currency was not being twisted by government gold has held a very stable value through time. It has one very redeeming feature and that is that it prevents inflation by limiting the amount of “money” available.
The Federal Reserve was chartered (how and why is another story) with the express purpose of preserving the value of the nation’s currency in 1913. By 1928 it has forced so much extra paper money onto the market that the 1929 crash was inevitable. Having a paper currency backed by gold has no meaning if the printer of the paper can set their own rules as to how much gold is needed to back up each slip of paper. Their duplicity was bailed out by FDR when he confiscated all the freely circulating real gold and replaced it with paper which, with a stroke of the quill, went from $20.00/ounce to $35.00/ounce or nearly half its former value.
Chicanery and thieving have dome more damage to gold to tarnish its image as money than any fault found within it.
Why is it that the same people who blather on about ‘fiat currency’ love bitcoin so bloody much? Yes, it’s much better to have a currency not backed by the worthless ‘full faith and credit of the united states’ but instead backed by… nothing… Deflationary algorithms for the win, right?
So we should standardize based upon a metal that some countries can mine a whole bunch of? And give China, Australia, and South America a bonus competitive advantage for fun?
Because you cannot Just Write An Edict and make a bunch of BTC out of thin air.
Anything can become a currency - pieces of metal, strips of paper, shells, rocks… - if the supply of the tokens can be suitably constrained/controlled to avoid just making the tokens.
With fiat currency you have some subject, a state or a bank, who makes the money out of nothing and backs it with a promise. The promise can be reneged (see the various we’ll-pay-you-the-gold-value-of-the-money ones) and more money can be printed at will.
With BTC, you cannot Just Make More. The ones you own are subject to demand, but no subject, regardless how much power they usurp, cannot decide to flood the market with newly minted BTCs. You can do a lot of shenanigans with the ones already out there, as long as you own them, but you cannot make new ones and depress the value of the ones already held.
It’s good to have an alternative. When the Powers That Be have something they cannot control, they have to play by the rules and their influence gets somewhat constrained. See the use of BTC to exfiltrate money from Cyprus during that one show of governmental capriciousness.
". . . You might think that the overwhelming empirical evidence against the hard-money view would count for something. But you’d only think that if you were paying no attention to any other policy debate.
Leading political figures insist that climate change is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast international scientific conspiracy. Do you really think that their party will be persuaded to change its economic views by inconvenient macroeconomic data?
The interesting question is what will happen to monetary policy if a Republican wins next year’s election. As best as I can tell, most economists believe that it’s all talk, that once in the White House someone like Mr. Rubio or even Mr. Cruz would return to Bush-style monetary pragmatism. Financial markets seem to believe the same. At any rate, there’s no sign in current asset prices that investors see a significant chance of the catastrophe that would follow a return to gold.
But I wouldn’t be so sure. True, a new president who looked at the evidence and listened to the experts wouldn’t go down that path. But evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias."
Not only that but isn’t gold basically a fiat currency… gold because this shiny stable metal of limited supply has always been used? Gold is worth something (outside of actual useful electronic things) because we all historically have decided it is. How is that also not a fiat currency?
I’ve also yet to see any convincing argument why a fiat currency is bad.
The main feature of a non-fiat currency is that it would restrict the ability of a government to use an inflationary Keynesian fiscal policy during an economic downturn. The effect of this is that the wealthy are protected from devaluation of their investments, while the poor are left to carry the consequences in unemployment.
Why is that supposed to be a good thing? Is the system not stacked enough in favour of the wealthy already?
Paul Krugman 