For his solutions:
"Brain drain" is what we had been doing for the past 80 years or so. It worked great. We're specifically driving people away now.
"Gold standard" is an idea every sane economist rejected decades ago.
"Brain drain" is what we had been doing for the past 80 years or so. It worked great. We're specifically driving people away now.
"Gold standard" is an idea every sane economist rejected decades ago.
Silicon Valley is actually pretty good at that, compared to e.g. academia in the US.
A simple manifestation of this is how we start up coal fire. The idea is similar, bring the hot blocks together so they produce a lot more heat which in turn heats up the entire coal load. Move away the red hot blocks to isolation and the fire would die away in no time.
Geopolitics from a less civilized time making their comeback, this time without mincing any words.
I don't think any sane economists have ever "rejected" the gold standard, it is known to work. Pretty much any empire ever founded was built on a gold standard. The US jumped away from it because they were going to go bankrupt and picked a system that put the pain off until a later date. Now, 50 years later, they appear to have lost the title of the world's major superpower.
It is relatively unusual for effective economic ideas to gain any traction in politics. It seems to be partially random whether a specific policy gets a tick or a cross when an economist is asked about it.
Disabling the feedback mechanisms isn't a win. When it had the feedback from continuous minor panics the US built an economy capable of taking on the entire word and winning by a massive margin in the 1940s. And I bet there were alternative mechanisms to deal with the "deflationary debt spiral".
Now the US keeps telling itself it is OK while it is increasingly marginalised. There isn't much evidence is it can win a major war or compete economically against more serious Asian efforts. The election of Trump suggests that US citizens don't even feel particularly fat and comfortable in their own economy. At least all the economic indicators say the US is OK though! The money printing is sure to lead to prosperity.
And I find it a bit of an eye roll that the minute the gold standard comes up all the "inequality is out of control now!" people fade into the background and the "back then, everyone was poor except the wealthy" arguments come to the fore. There is an inconsistency in the hive mind. This is a system where we print money and give it to the asset owners. It is visibly stupid.
Can't they just not print so much?
But the idea that you should manage your economy according to how much of some metal you can dig out of the ground is ridiculous.
Do people ever? I know plenty of people who cry poverty, and being “crushed by taxes and inflation”, and about “being a “wage slave” from a boat.
Good lord, why are these malformed talking points being engaged with here. I see these things being shared amongst my hoaxer and antivax groups.
And how is that causally related to the abandonment of the gold standard? Is the CNY somehow backed by gold, or the RUR?
Being able to issue fiat money is a feature of high trust governments and societies, not a bug, and people yearning back to needing a gold standard scare me, because that inevitably implies dismantling that trust to get there.
There is nothing to dismantle because it's already gone.
The society that elected Donald Trump on his current program is an exceedingly low trust society. The whole point backed by DOGE is that you can't trust government and must reduce it to the most basic, barebones function. A lot of the current silicon valley elite fell prey to the nonsense preached by people like Curtis Yarvin who preach forms of anarcho-capitalism and despise democracy.
The United States of America are no more.
The conceptual flaw with gold is that it is a desperate attempt to grasp at an absolute, because absolutes feel warm and fuzzy. Nothing is absolute in an economy. The relative value of everything changes constantly and trying to create an artificial peg to gold doesn't achieve anything useful.
In historical terms, by any measure you choose (monthly salary, purchasing power, etc.) gold is worth roughly 1/10th what it used to be worth a millennia ago and prior.
Adjusted for inflation, over the last 100 years or so, the value of gold has remained roughly constant in terms of salary and purchasing power.
Anyone else who isn’t prepped will take far too long to get their heads around all the major errors, and by discussing it, propagate its ideas further.
Since people recall even incorrect things, repetition of it ends up creating the idea that it is true - the truth effect.
The US and *every other country jumped from it because it didn't work well and caused frequent instability*. The countries who dumped it quickest recovered from the great depression the fastest
...because they didn't have the social and technological methods, as well as centralization of force, needed to make a fiat currency work.
The gold standard was never a great idea. It was just more functional and efficient than what came before it because the gold supply was usually inherently limited by how fast the mines could produce the stuff.
The "issue" with gold standard is that you cannot compete with countries that can print money at will, which gives them the advantage NOW, even though they'll suffer massive inflation later down the line. How will you ever win a war when your enemy has infinite money? I guess people forgot what happened to Germany's economy after WWI. Your only hope is to be the one that wins the war, and gets all the booty and reparations.
Fiat economics is basically an infinite money glitch, indirectly paid by your very own tax-payers 30 years down the line. Of course no government wants to get rid of it. All I hear is the same Keynesian party line that keeps being parroted by modern economists and taxpayers alike.
* for WW1, $12.5 BILLION
* for WW2, $413 million
Even Allies figured out that the ridiculous demands of WW1, with the double whammy of 1929, were a direct cause of hyperinflation in Germany trying to pay for it (which already had borrowed incredible amounts of money as they were the first country to abandon the gold standard to finance the Great War) and the second time around they allowed the country to have a chance to actually rebuild itself.
Ahistorical bullshit.
Gold coinage was never really a big thing, because gold was too rare to make gold coins for everyday usage feasible. Pretty much all historical empires used primarily silver coins. The UK pound used to be a literal pound of silver.
Really? For at least 20 years, if not quite a bit longer, the US has made it obnoxiously difficult for foreign students studying US universities to travel or to remain in the US after graduation.