Less people are able to move out and start families due to student loans and wages not keeping up with cost of living.
This isn't a matter of 'well , in time you'll have everything you want'. It's more like you may never have what your parents had.
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-gl...
"A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA."
"According to the OECD, state the researchers, the UK recently became the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria."
Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now.
More people died during the period of time energy prices rose rapidly recently than during the covid pandemic in the UK, but you cant point this stuff out to people in the street because they'll have a go back, a form of denial of the situation in the UK.
Its become very dog eat dog, quality of work in decline but costs still going up.
Crime in my experience is also off the scale and the attitude of the police now means I no longer report crimes to them.
So yes this sort of article is portrayed as positive spin but is in fact deceitful spin.
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
Very high cost of living, inflation, uncertainty due to layoffs, salaries down due to a combination of lack of raises and stocks going down, housing price still increasing despite the high interest rates, which have made real estate even more unaffordable. To top things up the green card priority dates for my immigrant class have gone back, so I have even more uncertainty of when I will achieve permanent resident status.
I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US. The whole reason why I left Spain was lack of jobs and low salaries, but Covid and remote seem to have incredibly improved the situation (I know from second hand accounts).
The only reason I'm holding on is a combination of sunken cost fallacy and an unjustified optimism in the future. It took me years and tons of effort to move my family to this country, so I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'm also aware than my bad experience is in part due to random circumstances, and if the situation improves (both for me personally, and for the country as a whole) my experience will be different.
Still, I give it a 50%/50% chance that in 3 years I will hate my situation here, give up and move back home.
However my knee-jerk reaction is that, the various programs governments will incentivize regarding foreign investment and relocation are not necessarily in the best economic or social interests of the locals for a given area, despite that governments intent.
One story I recall from earlier this year was regarding Lisbon and the backlash against their visa [1]. From the article it's obvious there were other (tax) incentives that existed prior to the nomad visa, however it appears to me that the visa was a turning point in public discourse on the topic, as it incentivized highly paid individuals to relocate to Lisbon (4x the average Portuguese salary).
Though I don't disagree that it could still have been weighed by the government and determined it to be a net-positive still.
[1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubb...
> merchants
hire a whole panoply of people as their business increases.
That said, I’m not sure there is much literature on the negative economic side of tourism, or work tourism specifically. My suspicion, is that while it tends to create inflationary pressure, it still increases local wealth generally, and rarely are there very extreme negative situations (like locals who live in regions that can grow quinoa that can no longer afford it resulting in serious nutrition issues).
Plus, some countries in LATAM have the same issues we dislike about the US but magnified (e.g. inequality).
> I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US
The US is giant. I always find it funny when people try to use anecdotal evidence of their lived experience in a single expensive city in the US to describe the entirety of the US, when that is absolutely, unequivocally, not representative of the vast majority of the US. Check out the prices of an apartment in Seattle[0] vs Austin[1], or NYC[2], or Pittsburgh[3], or Indianapolis[4].
When I lived in Seattle, I was paying around $1900 a month for a microstudio with around 600 square feet. According to the website I pasted below, that would get you a 4 bedroom apartment in Indianapolis (which sounds about accurate, I'm currently spending less than that for a 1400 square foot 2 bedroom apartment on the east coast).
In other words, it would be like if I moved to London and then declared the entirety of Europe (not just the UK because the US is around 96% the size of all of Europe[5]), and then declared that Europe just isn't for me because of how expensive it is in London, and how the culture is and... etc.
Now, I'm not denying your experience and I believe you 100% having lived there myself. I also am not going to pretend picking up and moving across the country is something you can just do at a whim's notice. I'm only cautioning against extrapolating your experience on this single city to describe an entire country that is almost the size of the entire continent of Europe.
[0]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/seattle-wa
[1]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/austin-tx
[2]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/new-york-ny
[3]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/pittsburgh-pa
[4]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/indianapolis-in
[5]: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/euro...
E.g., around CalPoly most people just... Went home after work? No meeting up to do something, have a drink, etc. They just went home and stayed there. I found it super strange.
Other than that I explicitly address in my comment that my experience is particularly bad and I'm willing to give this country a fair try. However, if the answer is to cut my salary in half and move to Pittsburgh, at that point I rather return to southern europe.
Software developer or equivalent income capable tech job, remote, university city/town. It's a fairly easy set-up (unless you're already very rooted somewhere). They're relatively inexpensive to live in (you can actually buy a real house at $100k per year!), and there are tons of safe choices (specifically with a low murder rate). Primary downside is far weaker food/nightlife/etc. vs what you get in major cities.
Yes. From the Left as well as the Right. Jeremy Corbyn is an example of the former.
>> ... from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair.
Labour Party.
It seems traditional party politics were not the primary factor. There were Leavers on both Left and Right. Centrists were less likely to be Leavers than those on the wings of their party.
Demographic factors were more determining of a Leave vote than political affiliation: Age (older vs younger), region (England/Wales vs Scotland/N.Ireland), population density (rural vs urban), income (low earning vs high earning)
Exaggerate, embellish, etc., sure, but not outright lie.
How do you measure conformity across a country?
TV Set top boxes being paused at 8pm on Thursday, wifi connected devices seeing a weakening signal, social media posts.
The internet is a security services and big businesses surveillance tool wet dream.
Whats been interesting since is how various websites and their algorithms are being used to challenge your view point. What Eli Pariser highlighted in his Ted talk 12 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s) has grown to all the major US tech companies because if everyone has their nose in a device connected to some website, the state can control people in deniable spooky hacker ways.
Remember intelligence is a cheaper and easier form of nipping problems in the bud before you have to puts boots on the ground, beit military boots or police boots, and at least here in the UK every element of the state is involved in surveillance, including the NHS and the educational system.
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
That's in addition to the sudden shock from the invasion of Ukraine, making it politically necessary to switch fuel even at cost which your linked article starts with.
Economy in the west is not that stellar mainly due to much more focus on social aspects, more paid time off, free education including universities, free healthcare, we take care of the poor, disabled etc. Of course none of this is free, we all pay for it. Economies in the east have their own issues, relatively poor and corrupt is never a good mix.
Some people don't give a fuck about anybody else, its just me or just the closest ones, and for those US system looks much better and numbers alone do support it. Only to the point when societal issues hit back. Or you want to raise kids, and they want to study on university. Or not to worry about your health issues, which will inevitably come to all of us unless you die suddenly without any prior health issues.
So yes its by choice, but I don't think most folks understand that choice, done for them in the past, without them having a say.
There's a thing I remember but not well enough to search for, where someone was asked to forecast the challenges the UK was about to face, and they went through the decades of the 20th century showing how the biggest and most obvious fears of each period had basically nothing to with how events actually unfolded.
A global pandemic happened simultaneously with this.
Anecdotally, as an American expat in SE Asia and Australia for the past 14 years, I've NEVER met a British expat who's keen to return. Tax, crime, weather, etc.
Anecdotally, a very good friend of mine who's an Indian national did his BS and PhD in EE (specifically in VLSI and Semiconductors) from a Tier 1 program (ie. Cal, MIT, Stanford, UIUC) and was working with a major Semiconductor company. His F-1 wasn't converted to H1B (or his O-1 app was messed up) so now he's heading back to India with a chip on his shoulder and 10+ years of experience in a technology we are trying to regain expertise in.
This same story happened with Chinese immigrants 10-15 years ago, with the 2008 recession causing a number of Chinese nationals to lose work sponsorship and thus return to China. A lot of those guys ended up founding major startups, becoming professors at top Chinese institutions, and advisors to the Government there.
* while salaries are higher than eg most of Europe, they're still nowhere near the US - US salaries are often at least double (or more, a lot more)
* their cost of living and taxes are high
* they're backwards and insular (maybe you think the US is too, but the US has 350 million people, Australia has like 25, lol, so insular takes on a whole new meaning there)
* they're not as diverse as the US (sure, London is diverse, but still, the diversity of the US smokes them all, so many different cities here with so many different demographics, climates etc etc)
I'm saying that as a Scandi who's lived in UK, Canada, Australia and now US. Of course the US has a lot of problems too, but as a destination for skilled immigrants, the others don't even compare IMO.
Care to expand on this?
You need to distinguish between which education systems produce people who innovate, vs which countries' capital markets companies get floated on. Compared to the US, the EU doesn't have any large cohesive stock market.
We will soon see how differing national attitudes to strong/weak regulation on AI (vs say data privacy) decide where the investor money goes; just like how national energy and regulatory policy on crypto mining in the last 5 years decided where mining moved to. There's lots of fashionable chatter about AI regulation, but I'm going to predict that there isn't anything like even a weak transnational treaty, meanwhile the 2024(/25) US/UK/Canada elections will see AI-driven exploits pushing the limits.
And the UK is now chasing the tail end of the crypto boom with a promise to have weaker regulation. [0]
[0]: Prof G Markets: ... Andreessen Horowitz’s London Office https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVQPAb6_Ic&t=25m47s
Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personnel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there).
What's interesting is we opened a satellite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada.
The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
Do you have a source for this? I was looking at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1115077/monthly-deaths-i... which made it seem like that wasn't the case. I've seen https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/10/expensiv... which shows that more people died from high energy prices than from covid, but only since energy prices went up, not in total.
Any source for this? And this seems possibly meaningless at face value.
Total deaths have generally been increasing in the UK since 2011. [1]
I assume that's because of an aging population.
And just glancing at this graph of total deaths with 5 year average [2] I think it's doubtful that excess deaths from the energy crisis exceeded pandemic deaths.
So the statement would have more value if it were about excess mortality rate.
There does seem to be some evidence that non-covid excess mortality rate increased due to the energy crisis (and possibly exceeded covid excess mortality at the time) [3] but I don't think it's clear by how much (especially when you consider there was increased non-covid excess mortality even in the summer).
Other sources speculated on different causes for the excess mortality but it doesn't really seem like anyone knows. [4]
There are some BMJ articles that might better explain it but they're not on sci-hub yet.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/281488/number-of-deaths-...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
[3] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/10/expensiv...
My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now.
I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures.
Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
The sad truth is that employees that can’t afford the cost of living have little leverage and might be replaceable by employees that will work for even less (because they have to, not because they want to).
More than 50% of small businesses fail in the first year of business according to well published and cited industry data. These are all people who tried to "invent their own futures" and it did not work out. That also doesn't mean that the remaining percentage were successful. Many of them have their owners working much more than corporate full time for less money then they'd be working on a cushy 9-5 job.
For an opposite anecdote to yours, a family opened up an ice cream shop around the corner. They had good business and made ok money, but closed after 2 years. Why? Not only was the end of the day profit not great, they were heavily sacrificing time with their own family in order to run the day to day operations. They could have hired more people to handle those day to day hurdles, but that would have meant almost no take home pay.
We should encourage people to "invent their own futures" but we also have to be realistic, because we don't have good safety nets for what happens when inventing your future fails, which means you have to make your own safety net. It's also not always trivial to re-enter corporate gigs after you've been doing something else for years, especially if closing of your small business has burned you out.
It takes much more than just a good idea to make a small business succeed.
this is in fact what 99% of people will tell you in real life if you try it.
10 years later those same people will either forget they said anything, or pretend they were on your side all along if you make it.
The people who succeeded eventually landed on one with staying power, and the people who didn't eventually gave up. I bring it up to say that a single owner can be responsible for multiple business failures, and like you say, no one remembers those once you're successful.
Note that you can buy in via personal debt, but that is not “leave with nothing”.
the landlord took the risk, could have been $0.
second hand restaurant equipment can be bought at a discount. food suppliers offer credit, 30 - 60 days.
if you are willing to put in the work, there are ways to get started other than borrowing money from a bank.
The rule of incorporation in the US is to minimize the cost of failure to the individual.
> and negotiated a 5 year lease for a percent of his gross sales.
> the landlord took the risk, could have been $0.
Gross sales. That's sales before expenses. Your brother-in-law took on literally all the risk in this scenario. Unless the zombie apocalypse started in that very mall, any store was going to sell some burgers and your brother-in-law was going to be paying out to the landlord before he had covered his own costs.
I am 36 and working on my 4th company over a period of 16 years. I've started even more projects that never materialized into companies. I worked for 4 years at a startup in-between failures. Besides working at the startup, I made minimum wage or less (12/16 years).
I'm 4 years into my current company, and things are just beginning to work.
You won't find success if you are always playing the victim card, complaining that it's the state or some big bad boogeymen oppressing you from challenging yourself.
Because you simply go "oh they just keep trying" and I'm sitting here thinking, "well that's interesting, they're losing all this money and can just keep trying?"
Edit, regarding OP's flagged response: Wow. Hope you have a nice day.
And now I have way less fear, way more risk tolerance, so much knowledge about things. Taking risks and doing new things is less risky to me because I can always make my own future. I have enough connections and history to take jobs, or raise capital for something new. It might work, it might not, but I’m willing to try and it’s so much more fun. Of course I want the lottery ticket but I’ve had enough singles and doubles to be very comfortable. It required many 60 hour weeks and sacrifices but I feel so alive, all the time.
So what is the point of your anecdote?
My immigrant parents worked their ass off in their small business, 24/7. No health insurance, no benefits, and no barely anytime to spend with their kids.
>So what is the point of your anecdote?
What is the point of yours?
Pot. Kettle.
People today talk about FAANG jobs and such but right after I graduated, all of FAANG (except Apple) were crazy oversized startups losing money. I was one of the few who stuck it out in the tech industry because I just wanted to program for a living, and I was willing to take lower salaries doing PHP than I would working at KFC. I ended up freelancing for about 5 years because many employers couldn't figure out how to make apps profitably, right until venture capital came to the country and the first unicorns appeared.
Alternatively, recognize that you have two anecdotes of people succeeding. It doesn't mean there aren't systemic issues, and people can both strive to succeed in the current system and push for its change.
It's dull reading tl;dr: bootstrap yourself like my friends.
Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.” Everything in reality is hustle and sales.
As another anecdote a former gym trainer is now a firefighter. She tried a long time to be a firefighter but couldn’t break into it despite passing all the tests - there is a whole application process following all the tests and credentials and it’s quite complex. So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that because the people who could make it happen helped her, after she took the initiative to think outside the box and meet them in a unique way.
All the successful people have a different story. And your definition of success can vary greatly. But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time. Unless you are disabled or traumatized or have some other issue, I can’t take someone who blames society for their lack of “being where they want to be in life” seriously. Not in America at least.
Yes, guaranteed healthcare and land.
Option 1) you can have a likelihood of being able to provide healthcare and decent home for your kids.
Option 2) high likelihood of not being able to provide either for your kids.
I am not referring to the 0.1% of people who have the option at tech startups paying generous pay and benefits.
It's not impossible. It's harder than it was 20-50 years ago. Real wage growth has stagnated since the 1970s. The cost of higher education has grown at a faster rate than wages can keep pace. Young people (those under say 35) can't afford to buy homes, with the rate of home ownership amongst this age group dropping by ~20% since 1993. The median age of a home owner is now 56 years old, the highest it's ever been.
It takes but a moment to look up these things and realize there are systemic issues at play, but no, continue to share anecdotes and hyperbole.
I think you and the person you're responding to are dealing in absolutes. In some ways it is harder, but in others it's easier. The world's knowledge is literally at people's fingertips now. Almost any creative skill someone has can be leveraged to make money. In many ways it's the easiest it's ever been to start a business or make money.
But, as you mention, homes are priced insanely high. The flight to the coasts has caused anything within 50-100 miles of the ocean to go crazy price wise. That is much harder on people.
Healthcare is a mess. One of the biggest small business unlocks the US gov. could do is pass universal healthcare. So many people are tied to companies for healthcare, and boom we would see if we could break that tie would be like the tech boom all over again, if not greater.
Homes in some areas are higher. Others they have increased with inflation and are more affordable due to lower interest rates.
The "life is so hard these days" crowd is living in a bubble. They live in a coastal city and have debt from their expensive school that they may be struggling to pay back. [Not coincidentally this describes lots of the media].
Reality is that the majority of people don't go to college. And the majority of those that do graduate with reasonable debt into jobs that pay well enough to pay it off. Simply put, it's easier to live today than virtually any other time in American history.
If the US passed some sort of halfway decent universal healthcare bill, then I would walk of my job that same day.
There are two ways to read this sentence. One optimistic, people can monitize their skills! The other pessimistic, anyone with the same skills as me can easily compete with me. Thats why it seems that skills that are highly specialized are rewarded most these days. And the average joe doesn't have highly specialized skills, otherwise they wouldn't be average. And if prices are a race to the bottom through vigorous competition, you will find that the largest capital owners will be the biggest winners, since they already have a leg up.
There is a difference between "anyone can" and "everyone can at the same time".
The economy grows only a few percent a year. That means the society as a whole is an almost-zero-sum game. In the long term, things will get better. But in the time scale relevant to individual success, they remain mostly the same. If you are successful, most of that success is at the expense of other people. The majority can't be successful at the same time.
It is tough when the pessimism is there. But I look around me and see so much to be positive about and hopeful for.
And 3% of 23 trillion is a lot of new cash. But yes, it all goes to the rich, or whatever. Don’t bother being hopeful, don’t bother trying something new, you can’t overcome whatever etc. etc.
Also, 3% of $23 trillion is not that much, if you divide it by 330 million. That's what success looks like if we are talking about success for everyone at the same time.
That feels like quite a lot to be honest.
> So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that
You’re saying that people tear down successful people by saying they’re privileged or have connections (but implying that they’re not successful because of these things and rather because they took a risk), and then immediately say that if it weren’t for the connections, she wouldn’t be successful? Seems contradictory to me. There’s no recipe for success, so discounting the luck factor also seems disingenuous.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that your friends “made it” but I doubt that it’s solely their own doing without any “insider” help. It’s the same thing now, applying for companies - if you don’t have a referral, you’re not getting to the front of the line for callbacks.
Personally, I’m against glorifying hustle culture and this sort of risk taking, because it implies that everyone can do it and if you’re not successful then you aren’t taking enough risks.
> Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.”
But that’s how it used to be - and it’s not so anymore. I think it’s a valid complaint.
When people say "oh, they're successful because of their connections," they generally don't mean because they went out did a bunch of customer acquisition work, they mean because they have a dad who's a bigwig at Amazon or something.
If what you have is the only means of survival, your appetite for risk is strongly diminished. So when someone claims that “you would have made it if you took risks” is a little two-faced.
But even if we go with your scrambling goalposts, small business start rates have declined markedly over the past 50 years at the noted high rate of failure:
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56945
So yes, all signs point to it actually being more difficult for small businesses to succeed.
> All the stats I've seen are that there has never been less poverty in the world.
How are these two contradictory things?
Put another way, at the individual level, there is still lots of opportunity. But at the aggregate level there is a squeeze.
In some ways this is in direct conflict with working-class people being able to assemble a stable life where they can depend on being able to work diligently and have some stability in life. I think the total wealth of society could be greater if we adjusted some laws and the tax code to make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work.
The problem with this is that, ultimately, if you view yourself as "working class", as opposed to being an entrepreneur, then your shot at a stable life through diligent, hard work is not dependent on the laws and the tax code, it's dependent on the overall business environment and what kinds of employers you can find. Which means, on luck.
If you are a lucky working class person, you will be able to find an employer who (a) recognizes your diligence and hard work, (b) is able to manage the business risks of the company so that they can afford to reward you accordingly, and (c) does in fact reward you as you deserve, i.e., is willing to share the benefits of the business with you even though you're not an owner, you're just an employee.
I'm not saying there are no such employers out there; but my description should make it evident that they will be rare. Far too rare for all diligent, hard-working working class people to benefit from them. The diligent, hard-working working class people who aren't lucky enough to find one of those employers will have to live with whatever they can get, which will range all the way from "okay but not great" down to "sweatshop".
The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on (and in practice it has to be a large enough piece that your voice will carry weight in business decisions). In other words, dealing with unavoidable business risks due to the fact that the world is always changing and businesses have to adjust, is something that, all things considered, you are better off not outsourcing to an employer.
> The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on
If everyone is an entrepreneur, then all of the production is being done by entrepreneurs. That means the "actual jobs" are now being done by entrepreneurs, i.e., people who own their own businesses (or a significant share in them) and produce as owners instead of employees. There is nothing at all impossible about such an economy, although of course it would be a loss for many entities in our current economy (such as large corporations who owe their profits to rent seeking, buying favorable regulations from the government, artificial monopolies, etc. instead of to actual productive advantage).
> That means the "actual jobs" are now being done by entrepreneurs, i.e., people who own their own businesses (or a significant share in them) and produce as owners instead of employees.
But there is no reason why all production, or even a majority of production, needs to be of a kind that must be produced that way. Most entrepreneurs own small businesses, and most businesses in existence are small businesses, and in some sectors of the economy (for example, many kinds of services), small businesses actually do most of the production, and much of the production is indeed done by the owners, not by employees they hire. So in an economy where everyone was an entrepreneur, much if not most of the production would be done that way, much as it is now, only more so.
one could posit that a reason that large monolithic businesses exist (with centralized control etc) is because at scale you can get efficiency (to a limit i suppose)
with many small sized business interacting i wonder how it could keep efficiency with so many interacting parts (many middle-men for lack of a better word)?
Exactly--to a limit. But if you look at how large corporations work, it is at least highly plausible that they are over the limit--i.e., that they are larger, in some cases much larger, than the optimal size of a firm in their particular line of business.
The reason such large corporations can survive while being well over the optimal size of a firm in their line of business is government regulation. Government regulations favor larger businesses because the larger the business, the easier it is to absorb the costs of regulatory compliance. (And also the easier it is to buy regulations that favor your company.)
> with many small sized business interacting i wonder how it could keep efficiency with so many interacting parts
A free market does this naturally via the price mechanism. You can still have economies of scale, and in a free market we would expect most businesses to be at or near the optimal size of firm for their line of business.
Large corporations have coordination problems too--that's a key reason why there are limits to economies of scale. At some point the coordination problems outweigh any efficiencies from scale and the business gets less efficient overall if it continues to get larger.
I think you might be surprised by how few people actually want to be business owners. Lots talk about wanting to be a big baller, but to actually put your capital on the line and put in the hours year after year with risk of losing it all, not to mention being where the buck stops for all decision making - it's just not something most people want to do, if they can avoid it.
I'm not surprised by it at all (though I'm not the poster you were responding directly to--that poster might be, I don't know).
I'm just pointing out that you can't avoid the tradeoff I described: if you are not a business owner, you are putting yourself at the mercy of those who are, since you are going to have to be employed by one of them. At the end of the day, business risks are real and cannot be avoided, and those who do not want to be directly exposed to those risks must realize that they are forgoing the associated rewards.
because the prescribed paths work for a larger population. it doesn't need ingenuity, and less luck. hence why it is generic advice.
economies cannot support everyone being an entrepreneur. if you want to be a go-getter that's fine. you're in like company here. but its dumb or at least disingenuous to think of this as a predictably available example for all.
Sorry, but I'll trust the data around economic equality above random stranger anecdotes online.
Yeah, I myself am doing wonderful as well, but I'm not so narcissistic as to imagine that's some special property of "not being a victim".
What a bleak outlook to have of one's fellow man.
Why aren't you those people? Why don't you have their story?
Let people afford a home and family-raising, and without a lifetime of student loan debt required for BS jobs.
And stop trying to twist the forced economic exploitation of us, to sell us your avocado mindfulness spa package, like a gratuitous insult thrown on top of everything else.
Basically, the typical process of getting iterative raises has become fighting to tread water. Saving cash or cash-derived assets is somewhat meaningless because you're guaranteed a future where the savings buy a fraction of what they do when you put it away.
The message is around things happening in their due course rather than in some sort of age-delimited set of phases.
While idealistic, it's more optimistic than the feeling of having failed many of us feel as we compare ourselves to others.
Now we're in our mid 40s and it's far too late.
Except when it isn't and we're left wondering "why didn't I think of that?".
Deadline is early 30s for kids and 50 to buy a house
Also, it doesn’t actually matter much when you have kids. As long as you have a fertile partner and sufficient resources you can basically have them whenever.
The time to have kids depends on what parenting style you want. If you want a more hands off approach where you mostly just prevent kids from making stupid decisions while they decide their own course in life, it’s fine, perhaps advantageous being an older parent. If you prefer though to micromanage your kid and learn about life with them as you go along and get in arguments with them about the best way to do things, being younger is better.
It's dropped by much yet, but I anticipate life expectancy to drop further - and become more significant in relation to previous generations as economic adversity increases, also making adequate medical care harder to come by.
That’s a natural consequence of economic mobility.
It would suck in a different way if everyone always had more than their parents in absolute (inflation-adjusted) amounts and obviously, not everyone can have more in percentile terms.
The average Australian in 1984 could buy a home that cost 3.3 times their annual income. In 2023, it's 10 times what the average person earns in a year.