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#Post#: 8166--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: August 20, 2021, 11:45 am
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If You’re so Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? Turns out It’s Just
Chance.
--- Quote ---
> The most successful people are not the most talented, just the
luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms.
Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of
investment.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern
sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is
owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year
concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to
that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.
>
> This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a
well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide
range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is
among the most controversial because of the issues it raises
about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much
wealth?
>
> The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in
which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence,
effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates
into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy
dose of luck can play a role.
>
> But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth
distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human
skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric
about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured
by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody
has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.
>
> The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some
people work more hours than average and some work less, but
nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.
>
> And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some
people do have billions of times more wealth than other people.
What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest
people are generally not the most talented by other measures.
>
> What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy?
Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody
expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be
exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?
>
> We finally get an answer thanks to the work of Alessandro
Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of
colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human
talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in
life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in
this process.
>
> The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations
accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world.
But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented
(although they must have a certain level of talent). They are
the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way
societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in
everything from business to science.
>
> Pluchino and co’s model is straightforward. It consists of N
people, each with a certain level of talent (skill,
intelligence, ability, and so on). This talent is distributed
normally around some average level, with some standard
deviation. So some people are more talented than average and
some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more
talented than anybody else.
>
> This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human
skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some
people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the
size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite
similar.
>
> The computer model charts each individual through a working
life of 40 years. During this time, the individuals experience
lucky events that they can exploit to increase their wealth if
they are talented enough.
>
> However, they also experience unlucky events that reduce their
wealth. These events occur at random.
>
> At the end of the 40 years, Pluchino and co rank the
individuals by wealth and study the characteristics of the most
successful. They also calculate the wealth distribution. They
then repeat the simulation many times to check the robustness of
the outcome.
>
> When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is
exactly like that seen in real-world societies. “The ‘80-20’
rule is respected, since 80 percent of the population owns only
20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent
owns 80 percent of the same capital,” report Pluchino and co.
>
> That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20
percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what
happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most
talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never
coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the
researchers.
>
> So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth
distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor
is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.
>
> The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the
number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout
their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful
individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less
successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”
>
> That has significant implications for society. What is the
most effective strategy for exploiting the role luck plays in
success?
>
> Pluchino and co study this from the point of view of science
research funding, an issue clearly close to their hearts.
Funding agencies the world over are interested in maximizing
their return on investment in the scientific world. Indeed, the
European Research Council recently invested $1.7 million in a
program to study serendipity—the role of luck in scientific
discovery—and how it can be exploited to improve funding
outcomes.
>
> It turns out that Pluchino and co are well set to answer this
question. They use their model to explore different kinds of
funding models to see which produce the best returns when luck
is taken into account.
>
> The team studied three models, in which research funding is
distributed equally to all scientists; distributed randomly to a
subset of scientists; or given preferentially to those who have
been most successful in the past. Which of these is the best
strategy?
>
> The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is
to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the
second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at
random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists.
>
> In these cases, the researchers are best able to take
advantage of the serendipitous discoveries they make from time
to time. In hindsight, it is obvious that the fact a scientist
has made an important chance discovery in the past does not mean
he or she is more likely to make one in the future.
>
> A similar approach could also be applied to investment in
other kinds of enterprises, such as small or large businesses,
tech startups, education that increases talent, or even the
creation of random lucky events.
> Clearly, more work is needed here. What are we waiting for?
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://getpocket.com/explore/item/if-you-re-so-smart-why-aren-t-you-rich-turns-out-it-s-just-chance?utm_source=pocket-newtab
One word: Trump. A moronic billionaire born into money. Trump is
definitely not the only moronic talent-less wealthy person on
the planet either....
#Post#: 8249--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: August 23, 2021, 1:31 pm
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The Racist History of Austerity Politics In America
--- Quote ---
> Hi. Here is an episode about history, racism, America, and how
socialist programs that benefit everyone are good actually.
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMMTNwmED7w
#Post#: 8698--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: September 10, 2021, 8:55 pm
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The Myth Of The "Self-Made" Billionaire
--- Quote ---
> It’s no secret that Americans love to hear about billionaires.
You’ll find them everywhere. They’re on the news [Bezos space
launch], have their own TV shows, movies, and even make their
way to elected office. Specifically, we consistently give
massive audiences to “self-made” billionaires, the people who,
unlike the aristocrats and monarchs of yore, didn’t simply
inherit their wealth. In this episode, we’re talking about the
obsession with so-called “self-made” billionaires, how
misleading that term can be, and everything wrong with the myth
of the “self-made person.”
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316nOvHUS8A
#Post#: 8930--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: September 21, 2021, 7:01 pm
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Is this the end of China's experiment with capitalism? |
Counting the Cost
--- Quote ---
> Since President Xi Jinping became head of the Communist Party
in 2012, he has launched an anti-corruption purge, interned
millions of Uighurs and crushed the hopes of pro-democracy
protesters in Hong Kong.
>
> Now, Xi has got his eye on a huge segment of the economy that
has powered economic growth in recent years: billionaires,
celebrities, property, gaming and technology companies. He
argues the side-effect of growth has been inequality and that it
is time for “common prosperity”. Iris Pang, the chief economist
for greater China at ING Bank, sheds further light on this.
>
> Plus - why collectors are snapping up second-hand watches
during lockdowns, according to the Founder and CEO of A
Collected Man Silas Walton.
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkAVSqVtNeo
#Post#: 8989--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: September 23, 2021, 1:15 pm
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TikTokers Use Congress's BRAZEN Corruption To Beat Stock Market
--- Quote ---
> A couple of TikTokers have found a new way to try to beat the
stock market: copy the corrupt purchasing habits of people like
Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYlOBAYQ1ag
#Post#: 9058--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: September 26, 2021, 12:57 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The Less You Want, The More You Have | Minimalist Philosophy for
Living in Abundance
--- Quote ---
> Suppose we let our life satisfaction depend on things
challenging to obtain. In that case, we set ourselves up for
stress, discontent, and insecurity. We tend to worry a lot about
not having what we want, losing what we have, and the future not
playing out as we desire.
>
> A much better alternative would be a minimalist mindset of
abundance. If we experience no shortage in getting our needs
met, we’ll quickly achieve a state of contentment. And the
quickest way to reach abundance is by downgrading our needs. The
less you want, the more you have. And when we have plenty, we
care less about gain and loss; we’re less stressed about missing
out and less fearful of change.
>
> This video delves into the benefits of being satisfied with
little, how this leads to a more carefree life, and how we can
experience abundance instead of scarcity through a minimalist
mindset. The less you want, the more you have (Minimalist
Philosophy for Living in Abundance).
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrMOLqgv714
Why Letting Go Is True Wealth | Minimalist Philosophy for Simple
Living
--- Quote ---
> Humans often overburden themselves with all kinds of material
possessions, buying much more than we need to stay alive and
thriving. Consumerism comes with a price as well, as it requires
resources to keep up with the other consumers.
>
> Therefore, many people are willing to work themselves into an
early grave, and simply accumulate, what we could call,
‘extensions of themselves’; extensions of their egos. “I have
more, so I am more,” they tend to think, so by increasing their
possessions they increase their sense of self.
>
> But there’s a counter-movement to the consumerist society
we’re living in, known as minimalism. Minimalists are people who
turn their backs to overconsumption and decide to live with no
more than necessary.
>
> Aside from it being a lifestyle trend today, minimalism is a
concept that people have been practicing for centuries. There’s
a sense of freedom in simplicity, and not owning much, which
many sages and philosophers have experienced throughout the
ages. They saw that possessions don’t define who we are and that
the ongoing pursuit of external things prevents us from
experiencing life to the fullest.
>
> This video examines the philosophical side of minimalism and
explores why more is less and why less is more, and why letting
go is true wealth (minimalist philosophy for simple living).
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHcGmiZqKXo
See also:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/simple-living-movements/
HTML https://emilysquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/EmilysQuotes.Com-free-wisdom-intelligence-Ali-ibn-abi-Talib-great.jpg
HTML https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c9/bd/c5/c9bdc5a7a27e15a3e53e28a6e5bc2062.jpg
And, if it's about to fall push it!
#Post#: 9062--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: September 26, 2021, 3:23 pm
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Money: Humanity's Biggest Illusion
--- Quote ---
> The illusion of money is one that we never really think about.
But just like the Kings of old, the governments of today
understand the power of money and, as always, want more of it.
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFO6OtnmEDo
#Post#: 9213--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: October 5, 2021, 2:03 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the
Latest Sign.
--- Quote ---
> Many experts are rethinking longstanding core ideas, including
the importance of inflation expectations.
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/upshot/inflation-economy-analysis.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
I intuitively understood this in my childhood as well. Perhaps
why I never took economists or money seriously?
#Post#: 9219--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: Killthebank
Date: October 5, 2021, 6:49 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote ---
> Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the
Latest Sign.
> Quote
> Many experts are rethinking longstanding core ideas, including
the importance of inflation expectations.
>
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/upshot/inflation-economy-analysis.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
>
> I intuitively understood this in my childhood as well. Perhaps
why I never took economists or money seriously?
--- End Quote ---
This article has a paywall. Can you place the article text in
the message body or synopsize if you want to be more ethical?
#Post#: 9220--------------------------------------------------
Re: Monetary Wealth
DIR By: guest55
Date: October 5, 2021, 6:57 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote ---
> This article has a paywall.
--- End Quote ---
Are you sure? I've never paid the NY Times a thin dime and I can
access the article easily? Here's the article:
--- Quote ---
> It has long been a central tenet of mainstream economic theory
that public fears of inflation tend to be self-fulfilling.
>
> Now though, a cheeky and even gleeful takedown of this idea
has emerged from an unlikely source, a senior adviser at the
Federal Reserve named Jeremy B. Rudd. His 27-page paper,
published as part of the Fed’s Finance and Economics Discussion
Series, has become what passes for a viral sensation among
economists.
>
> The paper disputes the idea that people’s expectations for
future inflation matter much for the level of inflation
experienced today. That is especially important right now, in
trying to figure out whether the current inflation surge is
temporary or not.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> “Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the
quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental
level the forces around us,” said Adam Posen, president of the
Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview.
“We’re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus,” just
figuring out the basics of how the universe works.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> “It requires more humility and acceptance that not everything
fits into one model yet,” he said.
>
> Or put less politely, as Mr. Rudd writes in the first sentence
of his paper, “Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that
‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant
nonsense.”
>
> One reason for this, he posits: “The economy is a complicated
system that is inherently difficult to understand, so
propositions like these” — the arrant nonsense in question —
“are all that saves us from intellectual nihilism.”
>
> And from that starting point, a staff economist at the world’s
most powerful central bank went on to say, in effect, that his
own employer has been focused on the wrong things for the last
few decades.
>
> But the Rudd paper is part of something bigger still. It
reflects a broader rethinking of core ideas about how the
economy works and how policymakers, especially at central banks,
try to manage things. This shift has also included debates about
the relationship between unemployment and inflation, how deficit
spending affects the economy, and much more.
>
> In effect, many of the key ideas underlying economic policy
during the Great Moderation — the period of relatively steady
growth and low inflation from the mid-1980s to 2007 that also
seems to be a high-water mark for economists’ overconfidence —
increasingly look to be at best incomplete, and at worst wrong.
>
> It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the
thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have
tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a
black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one
another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing,
intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses
and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex
that no human fully comprehends it.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Mainstream policymakers, very much including Mr. Rudd’s bosses
at the Fed, believe that inflation is, in large part,
self-fulfilling — that what people expect future inflation to
look like has an ability to shape how much prices rise in the
near term.
>
> In the common telling, the Great Inflation of the 1970s got
going because people came to believe inflation would keep
spiraling. The surge in gasoline prices wasn’t simply a
frustrating development, but a harbinger of things to come, so
people needed to demand higher raises, and businesses could feel
confident charging higher prices for most everything.
>
> In this story, the great achievement of the Fed in the early
1980s was to break this cycle by re-establishing credibility
that it would not allow sustained high inflation (though at the
cost of a severe recession).
>
> That is why today’s discussions over the inflation outlook
often spend a lot of time focusing on things like what bond
prices suggest inflation will be five or 10 years from now, or
how people answer survey questions about what they expect.
>
> Mr. Rudd argues that there is no solid evidence that the
conventional story of the 1970s describes the real mechanism
through which inflation takes place. He says there’s a simpler
explanation consistent with the data: that businesses and
workers arrive at prices and wages based on the conditions
they’ve experienced in the recent past, not some abstract future
forecast.
>
> For example, when inflation has been low in the recent past,
workers might not demand raises as they would in a world where
inflation was high; after all, their existing paychecks go
pretty much as far as they used to. You don’t need some theory
involving inflation expectations to get there.
>
> Some economists who are sympathetic to the idea that central
bankers have overly fetishized precise measurements of inflation
expectations aren’t ready to fully dismiss the idea.
>
> For example, Mr. Posen, a former Bank of England policymaker,
says there remains a simple and hard-to-dispute idea about
inflation expectations supported by lots of history: that if
people distrust a country’s monetary system, inflation shocks
can spiral upward. Economic policy credibility matters. But that
isn’t the same as assuming that some survey or bond market
measure of what will happen to inflation in the distant future
is particularly meaningful for forecasting the near future.
>
> “It has been a noble lie that has become a critical part of
the catechism of global monetary policy, that long-term
inflation expectations are not just interesting but are a
decisive determinant of real-time inflation,” said Paul
McCulley, a former Pimco chief economist, commenting on Mr.
Rudd’s paper.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> This isn’t the only way in which basic precepts underlying
economic policy are shifting beneath economists’ feet.
>
> Particularly prominently, for years central bankers believed
there was a tight relationship between the unemployment rate and
inflation, known as the Phillips Curve. Over the course of the
2000s, though, that relationship appeared to weaken and become a
less reliable guideline for how to set policy.
>
> Similarly, interest rates and inflation fell worldwide, for
reasons that scholars are still trying to understand fully. That
implied a lower “neutral interest rate,” or the rate that
neither stimulates nor slows the economy, than was widely
believed to be the case as recently as the mid-2010s.
>
> In many ways, the Fed’s policies just before the pandemic were
aimed at incorporating those lessons and embracing sustained
lower interest rates — and the possibility of lower unemployment
— than many in the mainstream thought reasonable a few years
earlier.
>
> In the realm of fiscal policy, some conventional wisdom has
also been upended in the last few years. It was thought that
large government debt issuance would risk causing a spike in
interest rates and crowd out private sector investment. But in
that period, huge budget deficits have been paired with low
interest rates and abundant credit for businesses.
>
> All of this makes it a challenging time for central bankers
and other shapers of policy. “If you’re a policymaker and you
don’t have robust confidence in the parameters of the game you
are managing, it makes your job a whole lot more difficult,” Mr.
McCulley said.
>
> But if you are in charge of making economic policy that
affects the lives of millions, you can’t simply shrug your
shoulders and say, “We don’t know how the world works, so what
are we supposed to do?” You look at the evidence available, and
make the best judgment you can.
>
> And then, if you think it turns out you were wrong about
something, publish a sassy paper to try to get it right.
--- End Quote ---
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/upshot/inflation-economy-analysis.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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