"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula."
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation.
Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about.
I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
Yea, wealth seems invisible because we peasants aren't even let into the places where these wealthy people roam. They live in an entirely different world than us, and they invest heavily in that world's function.
Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?
No, but I dont think it matters if wealth truly translates as a 1:1 relationship.
What matters is that the wealthy specifically invest in the mobility of wealth itself. They will absolutely pay a premium to make the wealth move more easily from one place to another. Many will gladly pay $10 to make $5 more mobile, so to speak.
A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.
I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actually use at this income level. Or maybe their whole life is delivered to their door by this point.
Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.
This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.
… and then compare to two cities in different European countries and think THEY are representative. There are many cities in Europe I can name that feel terribly dilapidated.
I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
US didn’t have large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America.
I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do so many people think that the economy sucks when the official statistics don't look too bad?"
Ignoring how easy it is for statistics to be misleading, let alone outright lies, the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution. It doesn't matter how well an economy is doing, if the majority of wealth is accruing to a small minority.
"Moot" wouldn't be correct here. It is applied to a question, one whose assumptions do not apply. There are definitely moot questions involved here, but the usage above isn't about that. It is about statistics, which are not themselves questions. So they can be mute but not moot.
It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that.
But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
I call it Rent-seeking, of which, subscription fees are just a part.
The biggest issue here is that the "meta" of capitalism has turned to toll booths and rent collection. This is why people say that American capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism, the people making the money are not the people producing things of value, its the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies that can continuously tax the peasantry.
> the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies
Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers).
Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one.
I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.
Wait, your operating system was coded by one single individual? Holy shit that must have taken him 10 life times, if not more!
Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??!
Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?!
Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess...
But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.
We have more companies that can be classified as monopolies in existence than ever before.
In principal our market is not a zero sum game, but in practice we see it quickly collapsing to become one.
How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
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