📈Are We Better Off?
Shout out to Weekly Upside parents and their friends because Ian has some strong “old man yelling at clouds” vibes this week.
I am only 33 years old and don’t have kids yet but I am developing some very strong old-man tendencies. Maybe I’ve always been a cranky old man in a young man's body, maybe my days are numbered and I need to buy some cargo shorts and get it over with.
But the latest thing that triggered me was trying to order lunch for my team at work from Potbelly which is right across the street from our office. After the location finder told me that I was 3 miles from where I was, and then the manual zip code search found ZERO locations within 5 miles. I finally found the location's website and was prompted to order from their online system which looked pretty slick right up until it wouldn’t let me add anything to my cart. Finally, I called, and magically a human being took my order. And within 10 minutes one of my co-workers picked up a completely correct order.
Online ordering in some cases is wonderful but I have found in some cases it becomes highly frustrating. And last weekend I was at an airport bar that suggested I order a beer by scanning an app and placing a digital order and via magic a human (gasp!) would bring me out said beer. But first I had to get my table unlocked, and then the POS (point of sale/piece of shit) system shut down so a waitress swung by and I ordered my beer with a verbal spoken word like in the good old ice ages.
Okay, rant over, and back to finance. I have relentlessly tried to convince everyone reading this blog that things are better than they appear on social media. We are the richest this nation has ever been, we are more educated and far more progressive. This isn’t to say America is perfect - far from it. But things aren’t always as bad as the headlines will suggest.
I will acknowledge that everything isn’t sunshine and rainbows. Just like not all technology improves your life (talking to you Potbelly). Not all advances in the economy are good either. And to take it a step further, I will lay most of that blame from 2000-2020 to bankers and finance bros like myself. We took every industry we could find and “financialized” it for the sake of profits.
Not only does this disenfranchise workers the same way taking only 3 point shots in the NBA is mathematically “correct” - it just sucks for the tall dudes getting all those rebounds. Financialization has also distorted the economy in ways that were not immediately apparent. And our old friend the Federal Reserve has basically thrown gasoline on the fire with a 0% interest rate policy over the last decade or so.
uhhh….
This means for nearly a century, roughly the entire modern era of our country, the economy grew in tandem with how much we produced. And on a fundamental level that makes sense, if we make more things, we can sell more things, make more money, and therefore buy more things.
But when that failed to generate enough growth (due to a variety of reasons: outsourcing manufacturing, immigration decline, etc) finance bros/gals stepped in and said we can supercharge growth with low-interest rates and financial engineering.
And they weren’t completely wrong because it kinda worked. That top line shows the growth of wealth in the country via home prices, stock markets, and all sorts of other assets. America was richer than ever despite mediocre real growth. The side effect of this is it made the country much more fragile and widened the wealth gap. If you owned a house or stock you benefited greatly while the rest were left behind.
Or described in words by Ben Hunt at the Epsilon Theory:
This brings us to the pandemic where we see what actually happens when you don’t make anything in a country that consumes more per-capita than any country in the world. We end up with grocery stores that look like 3rd world countries and an embarrassing lack of access to basic needs for children like I dunno, medicine, and baby formula.
But profits, bro.
And while I wrote this a little bit to clear my conscience as a finance bro who made more money because of post-covid trading, there were plenty of other grifters that we have also covered here. Whether it was crypto, meme stocks, or otherwise.
What’s the Upside? Why am I telling you all this?
Because I am always preaching the benefits of capitalism, telling you how great we have it, and generally telling you to “Do less”. But sometimes it's fair to look around and ask what exactly are we tangibly getting in return for all this excess wealth. Sure vacations and double espressos from Starbucks are cool. But soaring costs of living are squeezing millions of families in this country.
We are still one of the most diverse, educated, and empathetic civilizations in history. So I say this is the renaissance and not the fall of Rome. Even better news?
We get to decide that for ourselves.
For Your Weekend
Read:
End-of-Life Dreams by Paul Lauritzen (Commonweal Magazine)
I was moved by this article. It’s true: we don’t often confront death and what it means. It is comforting to know that, in many cases of those in hospice care, our final moments are often preceded by dreams like the one described above. Curiously, if not surprisingly, the research behind these end of life dreams is often scoffed at, in no small part because end of life care often requires real doctoring, not just following the playbook and prescribing the meds. I urge you to read it.
Chuckle:
