I'm curious where support for the idea that spending by upper echelons does not help the economy while spending by lower echelons is comes from.
1. A person struggling to make ends meet ends up with an extra $200 a month.
2. A person who makes enough to meet all of their needs and many of their wants ends up with $200 extra a month.
Which one is more likely to spend that $200?
I'm not rich but I am in group #2. If I got an extra $200 a month it would probably go into savings or debt payoff. That's good for me, but it doesn't help the economy.
People with 2 million in bank are not going to spend that. It's sitting there. After a point there's on so many investments that can be made.
contrast that with people who need cash to buy things right now.
The second stimulates the creation of work.
No, it's not. The bank loans it out. There's a reason the banks offer free checking - it's not because they're in the charity business, but because they loan out the deposits and make money off of that.
There's more to it, and you can go deeper, but for the context of a simplified comparison, loans and investment were excluded.
The full explanation is that investment focused money has to be supported by consumption. You cant keep investing without people consuming stuff. Otherwise there's really no economy.
So consumption in the middle of the pyramid and bottom of the pyramid, generally has more impact on the economy:
2 million distributed between a bunch of people who will spend all of it immediately in purchases (toilet paper, food, clothes) has an immediate and direct impact on the economy.
Vs.
2 million to 1 person, who spends only 50k on daily expense, buys 1 car, and invests the rest, (there's only so many houses/cars and big ticket purchases people are going to make with their money. You don't need 7 dryers for example.)
That's the reason. Investments aren't going into the economy directly. They need someone else to be creating demand, thus creating investment need.
Nobody gets a loan or sells their company in order to store the cash in their mattress. Nobody hoards cash. Nobody with any fiscal sensibility, that is.
Money in a mattress is not working, and wealthy people especially always put the money to work (otherwise they become not-wealthy). Putting the money to work means it gets spent.
If risk is ignored and the money is thrown down a pit through ineffectual business, it's pushing on a string, velocity-wise. The company added the same kind of temporary stimulus you'd get by hiring people to dig ditches or do a cash transfer, but in a less efficient way than either one of those. Sometimes you get a hit, but dealing with direct investments is high overhead and introduces more conflicts of interest.
Capital that prefers lower-risk bets, on the other hand, ends up pooling in financial instruments designed for a low nominal risk: indexes, bonds, treasuries, real estate, and more sophisticated cocktails like the repackaged subprime mortgages that contributed to the 2008 crisis. These tools act indirectly on businesses, and so the money only gets "spent" in the sense that someone in finance is getting paid to handle the trades, somewhere along the way. Hence you get the effect of "velocity at the top", because money is sloshing around in a musical chairs game disconnected from goods and services, going from one large institutional investor to another. Each trade raises the pressure to speculate, allowing the market to trend upwards without actually doing much of anything for consumers, gradually increasing the likelihood of a crash.
And that is why Apple can end up sitting on $246B at the same time that the economy runs at less than full employment. Their strategy is already executing at full funding. They're financed for anything they could ask for, so if they're not doing it, they didn't want to do it. So they have to make a decision as an investor instead, and one of those options is to sit out if they perceive the market to be too risky.
Hoarding cash has a negative ROI (inflation). They are still going to put it to work. Apple is not sitting on $246B in idle cash.
> Each trade raises the pressure to speculate, allowing the market to trend upwards without actually doing much of anything for consumers, gradually increasing the likelihood of a crash.
There's no evidence of that.
So its normal for funds to return their capital back to investors as they say "hey, we really cant find more targets".
You seem adamant on assuming that investment = money at work.
This is like saying that pressing on the pedal = accelarate, while magicking away all the work done by the engine, and various other moving parts. The transmission mechanism.
Investment, is not consumption.
It is investment, in order to take advantage of consumption.
Directly providing consumption, is a far better method of improving economic activity, than by investment, in the current market scenario.
Oh wait - maybe I have a bead on where you are coming from:
In the scenario where all infrastructure and all factories were working at max capacity, any further investment in Infra/capex, will lead to an improvement in demand.
In the current scenario though, that is not the case, and adding more factories will not result in an increase in economic output.
Simply put, building a factory, but having no customers is investment with 0 return.
That's one way to look at it. But obviously at an extreme it doesn't work. The best way to increase monentary velocity and consumption is hyperinflation, but nobody is advocating that.
If consumption were truly driving the economy, Venezuela and Zimbabewe would be monentary powerhouses.
http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/advanced/how-money-...
Banks don't have a shortage of money if less people save. In theory yes, but in practice, banks can borrow money at basically a 0% interest rate from the government. If the government sees that there isn't enough money in circulation, they will just put more in circulation.
Then, as now, there was a lot of envy/dislike of wealthy people. That doesn't support the idea in this thread that wealthy people are bad for the economy.
Sure they invest, but that also tends to hurt the economy by driving up relistate prices etc without actually increasing output. They also tend to do vanity investing which is why VC firms for example average such terrible returns.
There's no evidence of that. The canonical robber baron, Rockefeller, steadily drove down kerosene prices by 70%. They did not go back up. See "Titan" by Chernow.
> wealthy people tend to spend money on less economically scalable things.
This makes no sense to me.
> hurt the economy by driving up relistate prices etc without actually increasing output.
This is claiming that rich people spend more money than non-rich for the same item. There is no "rich premium" paid for things. Even so, the person who gets paid that money then goes and spends it - it doesn't disappear from the economy.
> They also tend to do vanity investing which is why VC firms for example average such terrible returns.
You're asserting that wealthy people are terrible at managing their money. It's like saying an Olympic athlete doesn't know how to train effectively.
Would you prefer to take financial advice from a rich person or a poor person?
You can't automate million dollar paintings. If you sell 300,000$ watches the cost is part of the appeal, it's just conscious consumption.
Supply demand curve, if someone wants to buy land as an investment there is no new land created which increases prices somewhere. See any city with significant vancant housing stock from foreign investors.
JK Rowling did not become wealthy by being a wise investor. The Walton family includes someone who diversified and guess what they have less money than the others, demonstrating incompetence. I could go on but having lots of money and being a competent investor are very different things.
Or maybe, the assertion is that wealthy people are good at managing money in ways that benefit their entrenched holdings, but not good at finding the Next Big Thing. Or in ways that simply improve the economy overall.
Your entire argument can be countered simply by the example of the Ford Motor Company and its decision to pay workers more than the bare minimum so that they could actually afford to purchase the vehicles they were making. This lead to huge gains over other boutique automobile manufacturers at the time which produced vehicles that cost several times that of the Model T. And improved the economy of the area immensely.
In general, extreme concentration of wealth is bad for the economy because it does not allow enough people to make decisions that cause growth overall and improve the wealth of the nation. The most obvious historical example is that of the high middle ages where all of the land, currency, military power, etc. was in the hands of the few and 90% or more of the population was at a subsistence level. The wealth of the nation was not spent on improving the lives or economy of the people, but on defending the holdings of the rich from other wealthy people.
In contrast, the renaissance started when that wealth was distributed among merchants, craftsmen, and bankers who were able to invest their income and gains back into technology that improved productivity for everyone (but most especially for themselves) and resulted in an overall wealthier nation.
https://www.google.com/#q=concentration+of+wealth+effect+on+...
It's your right to believe whatever you want, but that's what this world-view is, belief, and nothing based on evidence or reality.
Just track GDP in (1776 vs 1913 / population in 1776 vs 1913 ) / (1913 - 1776). Well don't do exactly that you need to use logarithms because exponential growth. You end up with significantly less than 2% annual growth.
Not really. Nearly everything a farm family needed was produced on that farm at the time. Note that Jefferson made his own nails on his plantation. People were short, malnourished, and bone evidence of having worked incredibly hard. There was no farm mechanization.
A consistent food surplus was not produced until around 1800.
PS: Rememebr prior to the revolution the US was sending a great deal of wealth back to England. The even then the colonies enjoyed a relatively high standard of living at the time.
(There's always been some level of trade.)
PS: Yes, subsistence farmers can include minimal trade, but not support more than local governments as that would imply a significant surplus.
The roaring economy of the 50s was the result of massive government intervention during World War II - literal central planning in many cases - as well as numerous social and public-work programmes (GI Bill, National Interstate Highway construction, etc) funded by intense taxation on upper brackets (95% tax rate).
That's a huge oversimplification. It helped that Europe and Asia were devastated by the war, and our gearing up industry for war led to huge dividends for us because we still had factories and raw materials which remained intact.
And evidence on the new deal is equivocal [0]. It didn't seem to have much impact until the war.