Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

I think regardless of the stats, there is a movement of people wanting a better work and life balance.

But what will this mean for society?

For one, I see in the immediate future a bit of a reduction in commerce for a while. This is simply because people will have less money To spend. Duh.

Still… humans always persist and adapt.

Therefore in maybe 5 years there will be more of a Renaissance and a big change in how we work, shop and play which could be positive in unexpected ways since some people will learn to live with less.

Unfortunately though this will lead to a bigger segment of the population that won’t have enough to live on.

And the segment of the population that are “driven” to create will get richer serving that lower segment in innovative ways.

So the wealth gap will increase for sure. And probably pretty widely.

I know some of you reading this are getting triggered just about now…

But what else do you expect? I’d love to hear how the next 5-10 years would play out.

But it would be silly to say that so many people stopping work will not have some measurable (most likely negative) effect on the economy and what we normally expect from society.

It's hard for people to have less money to spend when there's 5x as much M1 [1], and 32% more M2 [2], and for the entirety of the last year - the personal savings rate was at an all time high [3].

People have more money now than ever before. I wouldn't expect a reduction in commerce in aggregate because ~3% of the workforce quit temporarily or even permanently.

I won't be surprised if inflation gets so high that there's a reduction real terms. But that hasn't happened yet.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

How did the M1 supply increase $12+ trillion? That's surprising to me, especially when it doesn't include bank reserves, and anyway it's much more than even the total amount of quantitative easing from what I can tell.

The Fed's balance sheet increased by $4T.

Federal deficit was $3.1T

Bank lending for mortgage originations increases M1 - this increased by over $1T.

Total = $8.1T

Since the Fed bought most of the government's debt, though, a lot of that $3.1T government deficit should be included in the $4T balance sheet increase of the Fed.

So this could possibly only account for half of it. I'm not sure.

Other personal debt (which includes auto loans) isn't even up another $1T. Margin debt in stocks is up $260Bn. Anyone else know what the rest is?

TL;DR: the federal reserve board did away with a requirement on the classification of certain bank accounts, causing savings accounts and checking accounts to be reported as the same.

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/01/whats-behind-the-rec...

> In any case, it seems that the modification of Regulation D in late April has effectively rendered savings accounts almost indistinguishable from checking accounts from the perspective of depositors and banks. Accordingly, the composition of M2 between M1 and non-M1 components conveys little economic information.

> I’d love to hear how the next 5-10 years would play out.

You, me, and every economist, analyst, and investor.

Assuming US military continues to be functional and at the top, and US society remains relatively peaceful and productive and reliable, then next 5 to 10 years will being decrease in price of dollars and increase in price of other asset classes.

Just like it has for many decades now. Some things that may de-rail this are war, sudden demographic changes, societal instability, weather catastrophes and/or changing weather patterns, or some other destabilizing force that causes the US to no longer be the premiere option for "order" compared to the rest of the world.

Meta-response, but what is with the carriage return after every sentence, (and sometimes in the middle)? It's a jarring way to write.

Haha good point. I learned to do it so it’s easier for people to read instead of a wall of text.

People usually get bored with a wall of text.

My sentences are longer on desktop - but I was writing on mobile now.

I am

really glad

not everybody does this

Technically their text's line breaks are at the end of finished sentences. I don't write as staggered but after 20 years out of school I've also shifted toward writing mostly in bullet points.

I have separated

the sentences

that were in

the paragraph

I learned to do it so it’s easier for people to read instead of a wall of text.

There's a new technology call "paragraphs" that a lot of people are using these days. I don't know that it'll catch on long-term, but it might be a worthy middle-

road

between walls of text

and unnecessary line feeds.

Reminded me of good-old Troff pages.

It makes it easier to read. I don't like reading big paragraphs and text that span all the way across the screen. I wished more people was like OP.

In my opinion it's an instinctive response to HN's line spacing being too low, and paragraph width being too high. But That being said, the people here are disproportionally used to starting at packed lined of code so the problem doesn't get picked up.

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