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Comment by harha | Hacker News Reader

No, but let’s not overestimate what the rest of us are doing. I studied engineering at a prestigious school, I don’t think any of my jobs was particularly useful and this applies to most people I’ve met in my professional life. Something’s severely broken but I can’t really point to what it is.

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I've been thinking about this lately, and to put it bluntly, my conclusion is with the "sound money" people, that monetary intervention at the whims of bureaucrats has progressively poisoned the economy as the information system it is. Basically all irrationality observed both at the macro and micro level (down to individual insanity) is due to something being wrong with how money is made and allocated. This creates irrational behavior at top level, and that trickles down from there.

Low interest rates disincentivize saving and incentivize reckless speculation. In a world where savings accounts yield 0.25% and bonds yield negative, even ordinary people are forced to consider investments like crypto, SPACs, and high growth tech stocks just to maintain their wealth. Monetary policy has made us all into gamblers.

Money is not wealth. Money is an IOU for future wealth at an unclear price.

You should spend your money on wealth, or give it to someone who will.

If you save your money and don't spend it, that creates inflation because it isn't stimulating production of wealth.

But isn't keeping your money providing information to the economy? And conversely, forcing it to be spent as investment generating malinvestment, investment in frivolous activity? I'm just thinking out loud...

Savings don't cause inflation at all. Imagine adding $100K to every one's bank account in the US, and make sure that these accounts are frozen for 30 years; this doesn't increase aggregate demand at all.

Fractional reserve banking allows a bank to take deposits and create loans up to some ratio, thus increasing money supply in the economy.

Loans create deposits, this whole fractional reserve banking is nonsense taught in many schools.

I've never heard of this before.

A substantial net worth is known as wealthy. Net worth is defined as the current value of one's assets less liabilities.

Having a billion dollars in one's bank account and zero liabilities is wealthy, unless you are defining wealthy some other way.

Are you talking about wealth as a a nation, as opposed to individual wealth?

Please explain.

I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with our monetary policy that leads to wild speculation, but isn't "just to maintain their wealth" overstating it? I guess it remains to be seen what happens from here, but ignoring this year the S&P has been a good solution to maintaining wealth, has it not?

Yes, anyone can easily track inflation by buying and holding a cheap broad market index fund like VOO or VTI. In fact, it has never been easier for people to ensure they keep up with inflation. As you get close to retirement, you can transition to cheap bond index funds like VCSH.

There are even cheap target date funds where all you need to know is what year you want to retire.

The people who feel the need to gamble on the things listed below are those who are not earning enough, not saving enough, or want to gamble:

> even ordinary people are forced to consider investments like crypto, SPACs, and high growth tech stocks just to maintain their wealth. Monetary policy has made us all into gamblers.

Is this a complicated way of saying “it’s because markets are regulated”?

I guess, I just have this sense that things could've been much better if we intervened less, and that's in general. I think bias for action does harm in many instances.

Bias for action makes sense for present or near term.

Unfortunately, terrible for the long term.

I like this vibe. I too am at the "nobody knows what they're doing and nothing really matters" stage of life.

Yeah and at least in tech you get to play with: technology.

So it’s fun, but I have this constant feeling that I could actually create value and also earn more.

All the paths seem to be closed though whenever I dig a bit deeper. I was optimistic with decentralization for a while because that would let you operate outside of established firms that all seem to have the issues a sibling poster describes [1], unfortunately it didn’t take off for many notable non-financial use-cases.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33214646

Edit: added link

> at least in tech you get to play with: technology. So it’s fun

Right, without this fact, the tech landscape would look like a lot different.

I too am in that stage of life. Why, even the other day I wondered "Do those 'bypass all authorization" buttons on the ICBM launch console (@ our hole in North Dakota) actually work?"

To my surprise they do! Fortunately the "Shutdown engines" button also works! But it got me out of my funk.

Well, got to do some cleaning: seems Minuteman-III silo vibrations cause bowel evacuations in most people.

I’m self-taught but I feel the same way after a decade of working for various startups. What’s disheartening is that all the code I wrote over the years is likely no longer running or cordoned off in some “legacy” codebase, slated for eventual removal. All those agonizing decisions that I had to make over performance, code style, and library choices were ultimately for nothing (other than a paycheck). I suppose many professional jobs are like this though.

Absolutely.

Incomplete List of useful jobs that get pay a fraction of my yearly salary but yet provide actual value to society : teacher, nurses, day-care worker, trash collector.

I think what is severely broken is how we compensate different jobs. Something as meaningless as wrapping crypto in a extra layer of code should not be 5 teachers salaries.

We're all "shoveling coal" and "put on our pants one leg at a time."

Pedigree gets noticed as a social and business scarcity signal, and ease of opportunities and expectations ensue. "It must be good if it says 'Mercedes'!" (just don't check the used car ratings for that model not built in Germany)

What I noticed was pedigree dulling or "overload" amongst high performance individuals from relative overachievement backgrounds like EE/CS and MD IITians + Ivies. At that point, they're "Mike", "Bob", "Venkatash" and the titles and diplomas are hiding in the corner somewhere. The ideas and work were central over an antithesis like: "How can you help my personal-professional brand get another book deal, startup funding round, and TED talk?". One time, a new software development manager came in and drove 5 developers into resigning by trying to micromanage and impose ", Ph.D." authority (a type who belongs MENSA and brags about it) on them. Sigh

The smartest successful people I've known are/were decent people. The latter might have something to do with it. I've seen enough gloriously cocksure, arrogant individuals set themselves up for hubris like Theranos.

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