As is so often the case, the first comment explains more than the entire article:
"Economic division was built into USD: you either pay interest on Treasury bonds, or you live off it."
"Economic division was built into USD: you either pay interest on Treasury bonds, or you live off it."
I also don't think it is all so clear because I assume the distribution of entities holding gov. debt is not the same as " the top 0.1% vs the rest" (I found https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-33... but let's continue...). Don't banks, insurances and pension funds also hold a lot of it? Furthermore, we cannot simply look at who owns those entities, the funds they get directly and indirectly from holding government bonds don't go directly to the owners after all but are used in their business. So I don't think that one sentence helps all that much because no, I don't think it's that simple.
Historically, however, debt has been social nitroglycerine, which is why Christianity outlawed usury and Judaism had a 50-year debt jubilee built into it. We will relearn this lesson eventually, but in the meantime our bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.
For an economic prediction to be meaningful, it needs an approximate date attached to it.
On the other hand, if you enjoy the surprise of financial crises every decade and major currency crises every five decades, you can continue listening to modern economists.
Not quite true: it’s the money we owe our future selves.
So you can arrive in the future and find that the pension that should have been waiting for you there was borrowed by past-people and they never paid it back. And you can’t go back in time to demand it back.
Money is an idea, nothing more. It is incredibly flexible, humans can do with it whatever they want, whenever they want. Did you notice, looking at history, that whenever there was a crisis humans discovered that "money" is not an obstacle? For example, financing wars (WWII especially), or the recent crisis.
Economics and money are tools that could help mitigate the consumption-at-all-costs problems we have today.
I don't think that that is true. For one, the meaning of "easily" shifts all the time, second, I don't see the problem when people actually have something worthwhile to do with their lives.
I am very concerned about what we do to the environment (as someone who had chronic heavy metal poisoning treated by chelators in a university clinic when I hear about mercury in sea fish it actually has a deep personal meaning), but that is a different issue than resource extraction (which of course may make the environmental situation even worse).
On the other hand, I see researching and developing capabilities to understand and manipulate the environment on a large scale much much better as a very worthwhile economic endeavor. For example, this also gives us a starting point for future projects in space, including "terraforming". It's obviously something we could have lots of fun developing - instead of selling insurance, "financial tools" (on top of financial tools), and other BS "products". People working in that sector, which could very well be(come) a major part of humanity, would not have the problem of finding their job meaningless, as so many do today. That the control system we use to steer humanity is incapable of steering us into such an obviously useful and worthwhile direction, but instead steers us towards environmental destruction, creating meaningless jobs, gets people to cheat one another like there's no tomorrow and being honest actually takes a real effort tells me our control system is really bad and out of control. Th eproblem is that the control system (e.g. "finance") has become the final target, instead of being seen as a tool. Instead of optimizing the tool for society we try to optimize society for the tool ("everybody has to be in the stock market - for retirement!" -- Wallstreet approves).
I’m not talking about “generations”, I’m talking about us.
The people who enjoyed an easy credit-fuelled boom in the 00’s didn’t fully understand that they were merely spending their retirement money now (or rather, then)
Now, whether society allocates less resources to some people and more to others despite being perfectly capable of producing enough for all is an entirely different question, that's a problem at any given point in time. Such as right now, today, in the by far richest country on this planet in the last four billion years. The numbers stored in computers don't force this upon us (there is no law of nature that connects the tiny electrical charges in silicon with a family not getting adequate housing, a dentist, or food despite all of those easily available, or easily producible), that is all completely man-made.
"Saving for retirement" on an economic level must be one of the biggest scams in history. Unless the government stores products and services (like doctors) in warehouses to be used 50 years from now for retirees paying to get all of that produced and stored right now - and I don't think the government or anyone does any of that that - on an economy level there is no such thing as "saving for retirement". What will be needed in the future will have to be produced in the future. They also don't need "saved money" of today in the future, since it's all virtual they can and will create that on the fly anyway, just like today (money creation process).
It could be useful if the original purpose was still true: When resources (work, machines) are scarce, do you use them to fulfill today's consumption dreams, or do you use them to build capacity for the future, i.e. instead of building consumer goods you build more and better machines and factories. In that case "saving" actually has a meaning. However, today we don't live in an economy that has that restriction. What is not being consumed now does not increase the work put into future productivity in any meaningful way or amounts. Well, maybe in some countries, but hardly anywhere in the West.
So farmers should eat their seedcorn now and worry about what to sow only when it’s already the next season?
If this were true humans wouldn't even have a concept of "hyper-inflation". The Venusualian government could just print up all the money they need instead of trying to get people to eat their pets[0].
Money, as an "idea", serves two purposes -- as a store of value and a means of trade. Without money trade would be so inconvenient (ie the coincidence of wants problem) complex societies probably couldn't even function as you would have to go out and perform multi-party trades for everything you needed. By solving the coincidence of wants problem money also allows you to delay consumption of current production since it, historically speaking, is generally based upon a non-perishable good.
[0]https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09/14/551026492/...
The economy won't grow forever.
Inflation has a large aggregate effect, the people who first get the newly minted dollars can spend them at the current dollar value before their distribution dilutes the value of the dollar as a whole.
The effect of each newly created dollar may be immeasurably small but over time may result in things like, perhaps, growing wealth inequity and the "destruction" of the middle class.
The federal reserve driving limited inflation has occurred for around 100 years, and the time in America with the least income inequality fell squarely in the middle during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Federal Reserve and it's monterary policies aren't the issue.
The federal reserve driving high monetary inflation (ie low interest rates) has fallen squarely in the times of the most income inequality, the 1920's and today.
The Federal Reserve and its monetary policies can not be ruled out as the issue.
[...]
> The Federal Reserve and its monetary policies can not be ruled out as the issue.
The current easy-money policy postdates the trend of rising inequality by around four decades; it can unequivocally, therefore, be ruled out as the cause of that trend, unless one accepts retrocausality as plausible.