No Stupid Questions

Covid made things worse, but the fundamentals were bad.

We are in the middle of a massive tightening of the labor market as boomers retire and there aren't enough young adults to fill the gap. This is causing major ripples in the market, with a very antagonistic relationship forming between capital trying to keep labor costs down and labor tired of the bullshit.

This is causing some mild inflation, so companies are jacking up prices since they have an excuse to. This increased inflation is making the time value of money cost more. So now you have companies that were losing money having to scramble to finally generate a profit. This is causing the enshittification of the Internet and the loss of jobs in the tech sector.

The worse economy is causing political problems as it is harder for politicians to justify their positions in power. This encourages conflict between nations and the justification to deny some people of social benefits to create an underclass to benefit voters.

Capitalism. The longer Capitalism exists, the more it has to find new ways to stop/slow its own built-in death clock. If it doesn't, it dies, due to problems like the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall and rising disparity. Enshittification, so to speak.

With each economic disaster, the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie can claim large swaths of cheaper Capital at a discount, compounding the issue into a form of neo-feudalism that will eventually collapse under its own weight.

You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.

Shareholder value. Companies are cutting everything they can to increase stakeholder value: wages, quality, support, ownership, etc.

You see, it all started in May, 2016 with this Gorilla being killed. That's when this timeline split off....

In the UK, 14 years of Conservative government has really made the rot grow.

Late stage capitalism

Capitalist governments are pro-finance, not pro-people. Totalitarian gvmts (China etc) are pro-system, not pro-people. They're just different ways of maintaining classes of people who control the power/finances.

There's always been an uber-rich elite, all the way from the first tribal chieftain or Pharaoh or whatever until now and there's always been a huge underclass of the rest of us. The first law of any hierarchy is to protect the people at the top.

What we see today (in Westernised countries) is the natural, logical progression of economics driven democracy. Economic theorists say wealthy people create wealth by purposefully distributing it via jobs etc but in reality they do everything possible to minimise the loss of what they see as their money by abusing labour laws, privatising everything, trying to kill unions, creating convoluted laws to protect their fortunes, avoiding taxes and hiking prices up to the point most of us are just about surviving with enough carrot to ignore or pretend we don't see the stick.

And we're willing participants in that system. We know this is happening but we're dazzled by lotteries holding out the chance to join the rich, promises of work making us rich and a media which lionises the elite as some kind of fabulous aspirational status to the point we have people on social media faking a rich lifestyle for internet points.

The uber rich believe they're better than us and our acquiescence with this system really means we agree with them.

Capitalism is the answer. We're in the part of capitalism where regular people are almost completely out of money. Bezos is building company towns preparing for a huge influx of new desperate Amazon employees.

I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.

On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.

Jobs haven't become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it's been about the same since.

Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.

The question "Why has the world gone to shit in the past 5 to 10 years" has routinely been asked every five to ten years throughout history. It's largely due to the perceptual biases of the human mind.

One of the major reasons is that Milton Friedman had a thought back in the 70s that fucking everyone in the western world latched onto, and the consequences have been getting worse and worse for the average person for most of the time since then.

Are you American? Because I seem to recall between five and ten years ago a particular event that changed the way we ran a lot of the government.

For the US it all started (well more accelerated) with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinion_of_the_court and since we have a knock on effect with the rest of the world...

Capitalism arrived at its limit. Now it must do these shitty things to continue to grow profits. Basically it's now cannibalising itself. Next there will be fascism and war so that it can reboot the machine.

So, before I say "capitalism" like everyone else id like to argue many of the monetary/economic policy can be used by either authoritarian state capitalists or free capitalists alike.

https://42macro.com/education Edit: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjqe6xtZYTfvA4pHs0HgJsQ

This can be useful^ it's a brief read. Also I love Adam Taggart, he's a really good person to follow on YouTube for economics.

Things were getting bad for a while, and we kick the can down the road until an exponentially worse problem arrives, then repeat. Let's look at COVID for now tho instead of going back decades

COVID happens, society has to adapt, and now there's growth issues with the economy (growth domestic product or gross domestic income)

First, government gives a shit ton of stimulus checks to the consumer market. A market is a collection of buyers and sellers. The consumer market is a collection of buyers and sellers who spend their money on one thing and don't retain that value. So most of the stimmy money went from consumers to corporations. To give you an idea, over the last 3 years we've seen 35% of inflation that is never going away, it will forever weigh on the consumer market (and that's the market that needs to be well off for an economy to be anything more than the stock/financial market)

Second, Fed sees an incoming recession so they lower interest rates to make banking loans cheaper to encourage investment to increase growth again. This means people who are not suffering from the economy can easily afford another house since they're basically not paying any interest on it, then rent it out to Airbnb or whatever.

All these things cause growth in the short term, while making inflation a much worse problem in the long term.

FED starts raising interest rates slowly over the last year or 2. Now they're about to lower them again which is a sign we're in for another recession, but let's look at what raising interest rates did:

Banks operate on a very tight margin and raising interest rates hurts banks in the short term and takes a while for markets to react to (which is part of the reason why we saw so many bank closures like silicon valley bank)

But raising interest rates also makes it more expensive for people to afford mortgage payments.

H.O.P.E: housing , orders, profits, employment

When mortgage payments got more expensive housing got expensive. When housing gets expensive orders go down and/or credit card usage goes up (which is another separate problem / indicator). When orders go down profits go down, and when profits go down employment goes down.

It should be worth noting the one thing J Powell did right was creating slack in job openings to prevent a complete crash in the labor market, but that's the last thing to crash in a recession so we're still just kicking the can down the road.

That's the best analysis I can do with respect to COVID, but some other interesting things:

The average boomer is 2 years into retirement. The labor force is going to continue shrinking for the next 7 years. It won't be this bad in America, but in south east asian countries, there's going to reach a point where there are more old people than young people, and when that happens there's not enough people to care for the elderly and support the rest of the economy, so both tend to suffer. America will feel this pain as well, but our population "pyramid" is more of an hourglass, where south east asian is an upside down pyramid

Also, geopolitical tensions are likely going to get worse over the next few years. China manufactures everything consumers like that don't have to do with defense, so things like smartphones are going to get much more expensive , and tech stocks are likely to suffer. Edit: not to mention food and gas prices increasing from Ukraine war (which isn't in the Feds basket of goods for inflation which is HILARIOUSLY STUPID considering that's their excuse for inflation)

Also, there's tons of shadow banks with stealth liquidity where there's no information how much money they have. So however bad inflation was the last few years and will continue to get with the Fed cutting rates, it can get MUCH worse once those banks start releasing their liquidity.

So, things are bad and they're going to get worse before there's a chance things get better. I really recommend listening to Adam Taggart and the people he interviews to help form your decision making

Religion, tribe mentality, greed.

Don't forget that global climate change has really kicked into gear the last few years. Just 10 years ago, summer in Arizona was terrible, but you wouldn't get third degree burns from falling on the ground. The polar vortex is getting all screwed up, causing severe cold in winter on one half of the northern hemisphere while the other half experiences very very mild winter weather. global weather phenomena are getting more and more severe, and still the people who actually can effect change on large scale are loathe to do so because it would hurt their bottom line. Hell in a hand basket would be an apt descriptor for where we're going and how we're getting there.

A significant part of it is that for a couple decades our economy was based on bullshit. Instead of companies being profitable, especially in tech, their primary goal was to attract venture capital. There was a lot of money floating around with not many easy options to make it grow. Investors were willing to take big risks for the possibility of big future returns. Executives ywe're happy to spend as much as they could and hire as much as they could because the more they spent the higher the company's valuation would be, regardless of current profit.

With the interest rates rising, money is abandoning riskier investments. All these places that had tons of cash flowing in because they might be the next big thing are suddenly trying to be profitable now.

This is compounded by companies wanting constant growth, and flat out refusing to take any of the hit. Investors want companies to show profit now, and goddamn if they're not going to deliver. (Even if it does cost future revenue and stability.) So instead they're trying to push the entire burden onto consumers and are just testing how much they will tolerate.

Are you still buying coke and Pepsi products? Because their prices have doubled in five years. For a lot of cheap things, especially food, demand is fairly inelastic. People gotta eat, and they're not looking to change any habits based on prices.

I, for one have cut way back on coke/Pepsi products. It's not because I can't afford $13/case, because I can. I can afford $20/case without really noticing. I refuse, mostly out of spite. (Unless there's a good sale.) Those companies don't need to improve their 2019 profit margin of 20% (it's now 23%). First, that profit margin excludes the ridiculous salaries of execs. Second, 20% of $13 is already a bigger number than 20% of $6 was. They don't need to both increase their profit percentage WHILE increasing their prices. They're double dipping. And they're passing none of that windfall to consumers or the government or to their employees.

Here's the thing... There's always shit hitting the fan, that doesn't change. What has changed is our perception. We see everything that happens everywhere all the time right in the palm of our hands. Our ability to have control over any of it hasn't changed much. I was born in the 60s when a president, presidential candidate and a civil rights leader were assassinated which is pretty intense and everyone is aware of it. There were other events that were "big deals" at the time that younger people today aren't aware of. It's a thing that strikes me as I get older. I guess that's how it goes, we all together stress over one thing or another. The first one I remember getting wrapped up in was the Swine Flu outbreak in the 70's. My 5th grade class got a new textbook with a picture right inside the cover of a kid getting an inoculation shot. The needle device looked more like an industrial staple gun than a traditional needle and I was scared shirtless of it. I waited for my turn to get that shot and it never came. The next news headline replaced Swine Flu and the whole thing blew over. My point is these things come and they go, it's nothing new. I'm not saying don't be concerned about the state of things just don't stress out too hard. It's not on your shoulders to save the world at least not yours alone. You do have an effect on things just not everything.

My "why has the world gone to shit" was the 2007/8 banking crisis when everyone realised that you could pull off any swindle you wanted and no one would stop you. So everyone then did.

So presumably people older than me would point to the start of Trickle Down Economics, and so on

Everyone has their own "None of this works and it's intentional!" moment

Things were getting really good in the late 1990's to early 2000's. Pay was up, more people were making money and starting companies.

Then 2008 happened.

Since then the lower 99% have been fighting over less and less. Some people try to build, but it often gets destroyed by others. Some take their anger out on the physically near them.

Late stage capitalism. The ownership class has accelerated the widening gap ever more during the pandemic, out of simple greed. Control and wealth distribution systems, even governments are increasingly beholden to their wishes, and do nothing to help aside from lip service. The ecosystem dies of the same disease, endless greed and growth. Number go up is all that matters.

The powers that be realised that a non-stop feed of bad news for you to Doom scroll makes people apathetic and apethic people don't protest, or revolt, or even vote against you. They go through life scrolling on their phone and just accept whatever life gives them.

Greed

Mostly late stage capitalism and Citizens United.

Because we elect people who promise things. Then incumbency bias takes over.

(This is not US centric. There were a lot of promises in the 1920s worldwide, too.)

Edit: The only solution I can see (and it's regrettably too slow to tip back the suck gracefully) is routine, vigorous primaries. Do you see how bad those adjectives suck together, "routine and vigorous"? Plus primaries are a snooze-fest.

I dream to see 60% engagement in primaries. And I mean for Congress. Was your congressperson challenged at the primaries? Yes? Did you weigh the arguments or just hope those primary voters know what they are doing?

No? Were they perfect? Or did they know the primaries would not be engaging enough to unseat them?

The establishment will say "no one comes out of a primary smelling pretty". But people that come out of a primary should have their plans defended. The promises made should be what the people of the party like best, not what they think will run best against people who can't agree with the party about who gets human rights. (See how I snuck in a both sides phrasing.)

Sorry for being a bit of keyboard warrior.

My theory? The Mayans were right. 2012 was the end of the cycle, and so the 12 years before and 12 years after are the transition period.

So we're in the final lap, we just have to make it to December

(I'm not coping, you're coping)

Greed !!

I want more, you want more , everyone wants more.

With Globalization from the 80s onwards, the income from work (which in turn feeds consumption) in developed countries started going down, and on the consumer side that income shortfall was compensated by growing debt.

Then in 2008 the debt growth and hence Economic growth under that new model were jobs were outsourced, was stopped, hard, because too much debt had been accumulated and the Economy was becoming unable to service the interest on that debt (think about it: if $1000 are lent today and in a year's time $1050 is due, to repay the principal plus interest, those $50 of interest have to be created as new wealth in the meanwhile. Now expand that to the whole Economy - more debt = more wealth has to be created to pay interest).

Central banks intervened by lowering interest rates to historically low levels (the so-called Zero Interest Rate Policy) supposedly temporary but not really, which in turn extended how much debt the whole Economy could stand without sinking under the weight of servicing the interest on it (lower interest rates = more debt for the same amount of interest needing servicing).

We're running out of runway again, so what's been hapenning is that, to maining profitability in an environment were all but a few are getting poorer (the ones getting richer are those will all that money which they lend, who have been receiving the interest for loaning money) companies are cutting on the cost side, so manpower, product quality and even trying to push consumers into new and more profitable models such as everything as a service.

This is just one side of the whole thing. There's also a resource depletion side in that most of the easy and cheap stuff to extract - from minerals to oil - has long been extracted and that too goes against continued growth, which is another pressure on companies to keep profits growing by other means.

People elect Conservatives. Don't elect Conservatives. They want to make the world shit.

Chronic disease and general poor-functioning has been skyrocketing and the vast majority of people just ignore it like it's no big deal.

Obviously it's a big deal when the intelligence and competence of a majority of people has been severely diminished. We're now living in Idiocracy. And it's why for two elections in a row we've ended up with the choice of two senile old white men.

My take: the result of decades of incompetent leadership, at all levels from the government to individual households, that ultimately lead to a society that mainly uses dilatory tactics instead of finding solutions to its issues.

What happens when the economy crashes? We push the goalposts back a few yards so that it's actually better now and will become a problem later instead. Notice how the frequency of market crashes is increasing? It was every 50 years or so, then it was every 10, now we've had 3 in 5 years, yes I'm fucking counting COVID you had literally over 60 years to prepare for a worldwide pandemic and you sat on your asses.

What happened with education? Well let's see. Why do we pay for education in the first place? To increase our knowledge and push the boundaries of human civilization, or to put it bluntly: we don't wanna live in a world filled with idiots. But like why do we need education? Cuz like jobs or something...Ever wonder why you MUST have a degree for a job? That's a legal requirement, if something is on the job posting as a requirement then it's a fucking requirement. Suddenly everyone needs a higher education, because the job posting is a legal requirement that must be met, else ye suffer the consequences of immediate disqualification. Fortunately the law miraculously doesn't really care which degree you have, the companies get to choose how narrow the scope is and if they don't do that well that's on them lol xD! So we need a degree, but let's say we don't wanna put in the effort to learn all that hard shit. Besides, we just need survivabile minimum wage, so let's aim for that. It sure is convenient that all these now impacted universities made up all these new bullshit degrees so they could pretend to deal with the influx of morons that are getting intimidated and bribed into their schools via their parents. This sounds like a game to me, and I love games. Wait wait wait wait. We said that we want education because we want people to be smart, but like technically we only need education to get a job. Suddenly education is like this super fun game where you get sorted into a socio economic class in a fun and interesting way. And then people realized they could influence that as early as elementary school, and well gee fuckin golly! They get to vote and control the public education because that's how public school works. And if we loosen up the restrictions on what our kids need to get good grades, their chances of getting into college get better. Guess what? Money also works too, if we have money we can avoid the tiring scramble of public education and just pay to win baybee!!!!

Why does the everything suck? Because it's owned and operated by investment firms and run by people who are the result of decades of systemic degradation. And who's to blame? The worse generation in human history. The only generation in United States history to have a losing record when it comes to war lose, while simultaneously being the single generation to have started and sustain the most wars! The same fucking generation that didn't die off at 55 because their children didn't huff lead gasoline like they did for Christmas and actually got bothered to learn medical science - as much as I shit on the education system as a whole, there are always some tryhards that slip through. The same generation that still controls 60% of the political offices in this country, while at the same time being composed of the top 1% of mentally unstable weak and decrepit elderly part of the population. The same generation that voted to fuck over retirement pensions from the previous generation back in the 70s or whenever it was, and then now in past decades have undone all of that to secure retirement protections for them suddenly now as they reach their sunset years. The same generation that still currently in the current fucking year of two thousand twenty-four are the two frontrunners for Presidential candidacy.

And you know what the funniest thing about it is? It's not just the United States. How's Japan looking over across the Pacific? A problem with a top heavy elderly population? Wow who could've guessed. What about the boys across the pond? What does the British parliament look like? Who are still the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea? What families are still in power in the Middle East?

Our ancestors have failed us. They have failed their brothers and sisters. They have failed our entire goddamned species. I am embarrassed and ashamed for all intelligent beings anywhere and everywhere in any reality where intelligence is possible that we are capable of such idiocy.

I take great solace in the fact that they will not be around long enough to etch their final memory into the stones of history. And we will.

Despite all of that it feels to me less like things are getting worse and more like a loud death rattle from a bloated creature - the final shout before the eternal void. I see the same feelings as mine in both my cohorts and in the future generations. I have hopes for the future and strongly believe that the world is just now entering the upswing. It's painful and awkward right now while the old skin sheds, but I am confident we will emerge from our chrysalis transformed into something greater. Maybe that guy who brought up the 12 year delay on the Mayan calendar shit earlier in this thread was on to something; the timing is just too coincidental.

I'll do my best to explain what I can. But it's hard, and many PHD dissertations will be written on this. It's not exactly something that can just be explained.

But yes, Covid was probably the most easily identifiable source. In addition, you could make a claim that Putins' moves, the support from Russia to for various "alt-right" groups, and their eventual war in Ukraine (assumedly, aiming for culmination in reuniting the Soviet Union) have an impact. Lastly, we have various AI projects reading "maturity" (or at least public notoriety), and various services realizing they were missing out on a piece of the "AI pie".

Covid was.... bad. It's a new, deadly disease that potentially leaves people with life altering side effecs (long covid). The Vaccines are good, if not great even for having been developed so quickly and drastically change your likely outcomes, but they aren't full immunity (like we have for Polio). This left governments in a dammed now if you don't support people, or damned later if you do. They all chose various levels of later. Some governments supported businesses directly and left people alone to suffer, others supported people and left businesses mostly alone. Either way: Cash injections into an economy produces inflation.

Fighting inflation... the most commonly accepted method in the western world is to raise interest rates* and then let it play out. With the loss of cheap money from low interest rates, many businesses are now being pushed by their owners and shareholders from focusing on growth to make profits (eg: Raise prices, crack downs on password sharing, API use).

There are other claims you could make, and construct narratives with. For a few years now companies have been growing by expanding into growing countries, but now the number of countries left is short, and companies are running out of places to expand into to grow. Once again, as growth becomes impossible or undesirable, the focus shifts to extracting profit from your existing base. We are reaching maximum saturation.

*Alternatives: If you would like to slash government spending... see Argentina's inflation (it's bad), for windfall taxes see Spain (it's good).

Greed won.

I'm coming across this post after reading an article about how Netflix is bathing in money and now making their options worse for customers, how the most wheel of a Boeing 757 fell off, and a how a country has been so free of criticism for decades that they're able to commit genocide for over 3 months.

I'm having a hard time seeing hope in our future. Every company operates solely to extract as much profit as humanly possible (and not as Artificialally Intelligently as possible) without considering for a single moment how a decision they make may effect their relationship with customers or the quality of their product. I know companies are in it to make money, but they used to at least correct decisions in the face of public outcry. (Hell Microsoft did an about face on Xbox One features in 2013 after public outcry)

But things seem different now. Since the pandemic and the overall regard for human life went up, companies almost feel vindictive and emboldened to do even more to fuck customers over. Its almost like they're holding a grudge over consumers for considering anything in life over their spending habits from March 2020 - September 2021. After all, the biggest push to "return to normal" was to get the economy back on track. I'll never forget some asshole on a fox news segment saying "We gotta return to normal people. Yes some people will die, but grandma would sacrifice herself for the economy." That's when I lost all hope of things getting better.

We've had the chance many times to change the way we act as a species and potentially make the world better, but somehow we always fail to do so. We're just fucked.