[diamondhandle]

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world.

This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary value, think they’ve “won” or accomplished something real. This doesn’t work long term, and will eventually collapse on itself like all false religions.

If you’re planning to be alive in 20 years, you’re better off making sure you have a work ethic and skills that generate value, than obsessing over any sort of wealth-hoarding instrument at all, because it is the only true protection against change.

[jpdus]

What you call "corrosive" (appreciation of non-value-creating assets) is 1:1 applicable to Real Estate.

Compared to the appreciation of worldwide real estate, the market value of crypto is only a drop in the ocean. And countless people got unbelievable rich due to rising prices and "crowding-out" in cities without creating any value for society at all (in the opposite, making life harder for everybody struggling to keep up with their rent).

And nobody so far managed to explain convincingly, in which ways investments in (existing, residential, not for self-use) real estate creates any value. People don't by these assets b/c they provide better service or can run their properties more efficiently than someone else. They buy these assets b/c its risk-free return on the backs of tenants who need a place to live. In this aspect, Real Estate investors are arguably way worse than Crypte gamblers. But I agree that the rent-seeking behavior we see in more and more parts of our economy and our society is indeed corrosive in the longterm....

[alert0]

Comparing cryptocurrency to real estate is laughable. With real estate you have either a place to live, reducing a real world expense (rent), or an income producing property. No matter how much you dress up cryptocurrencies as stocks, by using terms like market cap, you are not buying a share of an income producing asset. You're speculating on a digital collectible. You can speculate on real estate and stocks, but you can also invest in them.

[andrepd]

> If you buy an income producing property that's good because it is an income producing property.

Not sure I understand your reasoning there.

> You're speculating on a digital collectible.

And if you buy properties not for self-use you're speculating on a physical collectible. So?

[alert0]

First quote isn't exact, so I'm not sure what you're addressing.

If you buy properties not for self use, you can hold them indefinitely and have an income stream. If you buy a share of a company and hold it indefinitely you can have an income stream. There is no equivalent in cryptocurrencies. You buy it and hope you can sell at a later date for a higher price.

Investing versus speculation.

[galaxyLogic]

I agree. I think it's worth pointing out that investing in crypto-currencies is really no different from investing in any currency say Euro. And when you have money in a US bank-account you are (typically) "invested" in US Dollars. But see below, that really is not investment, but speculation.

Investing in a currency/cash is speculation in the sense that currency itself does not produce anything but its value can go up and down. Investing in a currency is like investing in roulette in casino, you may win and you may lose.

So, keeping your money in bank for ~0% interest really is gambling/speculation too.

But, from the point of view of the individual investor it does not matter if you are "investing" or "speculating". In both cases you may win and you may lose.

[muskox2]

Many people buy real estate and let it sit empty, to sell at a later date when the price increases. This is actually a destruction of value as the house is no longer being utilized for it's intended purpose.

[solosoyokaze]

They compared it to the appreciation of real estate, which is wildly divorced from real value. Real-estate prices in say, the Bay Area are driven by legislation and speculation. Not actual value. The move to remote works accelerates the discrepancy.

[clpm4j]

Isn't the value of a house what someone is willing to pay for it? There are still a lot of people buying homes in the Bay Area to live in. There are just a lot of rich people in the area, so they're willing to pay the price that the market is setting.

[solosoyokaze]

> Isn't the value of a house what someone is willing to pay for it?

This is why it's being compared to crypto currency. The parent comment I was responding to said it's not a fair comparison but "it's worth what someone is willing to pay for it" describes both.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Real estate prices in the Bay Area are also driven by the boatloads of money coming into the area and then not going back out. Our local money supply has gone way up. After all, when local worker salaries go so far up, why wouldn’t the price of goods they’re bidding for go up too?

[carom]

It isn't. If you look at residential income properties, they trade around the rents that they command, sometimes with some development potential sprinkled on top.

[imtringued]

California has statewide politics that prevent the housing problem from being solved, so people move to the next state, which they don't like because California has nice weather.

[betaby]

California is not much different in that regard from Ontario or Quebec, or most of the western world really.

[CyberDildonics]

> And nobody so far managed to explain convincingly, in which ways investments in (existing, residential, not for self-use) real estate creates any value.

Shelter is literally third on the list of human needs after water and food. Make something desirable and people will leave their previous (possibly decent) place behind to move in. I'm not sure how anyone can say real estate doesn't create value just because they are frustrated that some people make money off of real estate.

[unholiness]

In densely populated areas, the value of real estate has very little to do with what's built on the property, and everything to do with the land it is build on.

GPs point is that owning land is not creating value. It is, however, very profitable.

[imtringued]

You either have a sufficiently large land value tax or let the government rent out land instead of selling it.

In both cases the land would become a liability that you constantly have to take care of instead of being an "investment".

Productive work like building on top of land should be rewarded, waiting for a train station to be built in your neighborhood is not productive work that should be rewarded.

Pretty much every economist thinks that the work <-> reward relationship should be as tight as possible. However, most of them don't think of anything other than cutting taxes and strangely enough they insist on being able to take advantage of negative externalities (CO2 or illegal waste disposal in general).

[andrepd]

Hi fellow Georgist! What a great summary.

And yes it does not stop at LVT which encourages useful development and discourages speculation and keeping land/homes empty. It extends to anywhere where society/the public/the commons is not being adequately compensated by private interests for the benefits they take. Goes from natural resources to pollution and paying for the waste processing of the products you produce (no more saving 5c by using a plastic bottle which costs the public 10c to dispose of).

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> However, most of them don't think...

That’s not the impression I get. They seem to have all kinds of broad beliefs.

[DylanDmitri]

People who build housing create value. People who manage properties create value. People who speculate on properties do not create value.

[ryan93]

Why are people selling real estate assets to speculators for less than they are worth?

[imtringued]

Because the real estate market is very illiquid. Each property is unique. It's not easy to figure out the right price. Trading isn't even bad, it's contributing to price discovery in the market and makes sure that the average sale price is close to the actual market price.

The problem isn't that speculators are evil people but rather that the "arbitrage" they are doing is fueled by regressive housing policies. Increasing the efficiency in the housing market exposes the fundamental housing problem. After all, it can't just be that speculators are snapping up properties, there must be buyers that are willing to buy properties from the speculators, otherwise the speculators lose money. Those buyers don't even need to think that the house is overpriced, the house could genuinely be a good deal for them.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Who says they are? Speculators are betting on what costs will be, but the people selling to them are (tautologically) doing it based on what it costs now. Some speculators win, some speculators lose, but I would say they’re necessarily performing arbitrage.

[andrepd]

So people use unfair property rights in order to extract a rent from an essential human need, without doing labour or providing any service in return. Is that your argument?

> If you complain you're just jealous

Everytime.

[CyberDildonics]

> So people use unfair property rights in order to extract a rent from an essential human need, without doing labour or providing any service in return. Is that your argument?

That wasn't anyone's argument, I think you hallucinated all of that. The person I replied to said real estate has no value.

> > If you complain you're just jealous > Everytime.

I did not say this, you hallucinated that too.

[aabhay]

In the grand scheme of history, land ownership by the larger public is essentially nonexistent. Land almost always was ‘owned’ by a government-supported aristocracy. For the vast majority of history, land ownership also meant sovereignty. As in, it’s yours if you can fight for it.

So yes, I agree that real estate ownership is not ‘value creation’ in the modern world. It’s speculation of a finite resource, but unlike Bitcoin that resource is essential to livelihood

[Invictus0]

> They buy these assets b/c its risk-free return on the backs of tenants who need a place to live.

Where were you in 2008?

[Mizza]

> as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world.

I guess this is the thing that people are having a hard time coming to terms with - we no longer live in the real world.

All of these surveillance-advertising tech giants, all of these financial instruments, all of these media-induced bad feelings and ideological trends, everything that defines our contemporary era - none if it is real.

If it all simply stopped, wiped out from a solar flare - for most of us here, nothing "real" would change. We'd all sit for a moment looking at dead black rectangles, then we'd have to go and find something else to do. My bet is that we'd all be happier for it.

[entropicdrifter]

> My bet is that we'd all be happier for it.

Yeah, except for those who'd suddenly be without electronic medical assistance. There are definite downsides to the digital era, but to act as if there's been no benefit is laughable at best and dangerously ignorant of the past at worst.

[WJW]

Everyone whose food supply depends on electronic supply chain management (ie everyone who is not actively farming their own food _right now_) is also going to be in for a pretty rough time though. Or everyone who needs gasoline for transport because they live a non-walkable distance from the nearest food and water.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Here hoping for a “non essential services” solar flare!

[seph-reed]

An interesting theory from "Sapiens" is that human happiness doesn't change too much throughout macro history.

People adapt to whatever the new norm is, and sort of fall back to whatever their bio-chemical baseline is. When things are in the process of getting worse or better, it'll push them one way or another. But once it settles again, so too do they.

The point being that happiness generally has more to do with internal bio-chemistry than whatever the new norm is.

[Hoasi]

> I guess this is the thing that people are having a hard time coming to terms with - we no longer live in the real world.

This, and the parent comment:

> If you’re planning to be alive in 20 years, you’re better off making sure you have a work ethic and skills that generate value, than obsessing over any sort of wealth-hoarding instrument at all, because it is the only true protection against change.

You see, the problem is that they both read like correct statements, which is rather worrying.

[Mattasher]

I agree with your last statement, but I think you are mixing cause and effect. Crypto is exploding because our system is already corroded. Starting with the creation of the Fed, and tracing through endless money printing and complex financial instruments which let well-connected companies and politicians create paper wealth out of nothing, we've decoupled money from value.

Savings pay no interest, manual labor doesn't scale, but rent seeking and financial games get many people riches in no time.

What are the incentives in this kind of a system, and where are the safe harbors for storing value? And if you can't in value creation, your safest bet may be to gamble.

[XorNot]

Crypto is exploding because people are looking to get rich via speculation, that's it.

There's a wealth of uninformed investors and they're all hearing stories about crypto millionaires and how much it went up and FOMO narratives about it.

People haven't been transacting in crypto basically at all - it's not even a blip in the popular discussion about it, except as a flimsy justification for why its value is not tulip-mania.

The only thing in effect is the ultimate truth of investing: the market can stay irrational a lot longer then you can stay solvent. No one was "surprised" when the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, and no one will be "surprised" when crypto collapses, but as we saw in 2008 when the returns get high enough even the "sensible" investors can't justify to their stockholders/board why they're not jumping in on the apparent "easy" money.

[jasode]

>Crypto is exploding because people are looking to get rich via speculation, that's it.

No, that isn't just it. Like other assets, there can be multiple narratives that explain cryptocurrencies rising prices.

Yes, pure speculation is one of them. But another reason for some is deliberately shifting wealth from an asset ($USD, euro, bolivar, etc) they believe is deteriorating.

E.g. a multi-billionaire like Ray Dalio is already rich. He's the one saying "cash is trash" because he like many others see the M2 money supply growing very rapidly which erodes future purchasing power. (The "cash is trash" also means not holding US Treasury government bonds because of inflation.)

Yes, the Fed + US Govt can have all sorts of rationale to justify $2 trillion stimulus checks and printing billions to buy corporate bonds (Home Depot bonds), bail out banks, etc ... but economic actors can also counteract the money supply expansion by taking steps to retain future purchasing power. E.g. Shift wealth into real estate, tech stocks, gold, bitcoin, etc.

That fact that nobody uses bitcoin to pay for Starbucks coffee is irrelevant to the wealth holders looking for alternatives away from $USD liquid assets as long term holdings.

[XorNot]

Ray Dalio at no point in his life ever believed he should be keeping his wealth in "cash". It has been basic economic knowledge that cash is a terrible place to keep large idle piles of wealth, and that it has to be invested to not depreciate.

This is not new information, this is literally by design as a product of the Fed's 2% inflation target.

US treasuries have always been a last resort investment, because the return sucks but they're as close to risk free as anything ever gets - what's happened recently is demand for them has been so incredibly high (because better investments are so rare) that the US has at various points been able to issue them with negative interest rates - taking a loss has been less of a loss then just holding currency and no better options existed.

Crypto has a narrative being pushed to increase the value of crypto, but "the end if nigh" doomsayers definitely don't act like they think it's actually coming - otherwise they'd be diversified into Swedish gold depositories and basically planning to move country. Because come whatever "collapse" they think is going to happen...the power company is still going to want to be paid in USD.

[jasode]

>Ray Dalio at no point in his life ever believed he should be keeping his wealth in "cash".

I'm not saying that. His recent "cash is trash" was talking about staying away from investments like US government bonds because of negative yields and money printing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZyWVxGXPHo&t=24s

(Because in the past, reasonable people did believe that buying and holding US Treasuries was a semi-decent way of investing. To be clear, we're not talking about just leaving pure cash in a $250k FDIC-insure bank savings account.)

>the US has at various points been able to issue them with negative interest rates - taking a loss has been less of a loss then just holding currency and no better options existed.

And this is the part I was responding to in your first comment. It's not just speculators. Another narrative for crypto's rising price is that some investors believe a better option now exists for preserving purchasing power. This is the defensive financial perspective that can simultaneously exist with other market participants who are only in bitcoin for the casino gambling speculation.

Yes, some people buy real estate and just leave the houses empty for "speculation". But some others also buy houses to live in them and many buyers bid up prices with competing offers because of desirable location closer to the office. If there can be 2 or more different narratives for rising real estate prices, why can't there be multiple narratives to explain crypto?

[XorNot]

I'm not dismissing the idea that "some" investors believe that, I'm dismissing the idea that they're a big enough group to matter in anyway. Or that they're likely to believe it for very long over looking at how much USD they think they'll cash out for. And if they were looking for a stable store of value, an asset under enormous speculation is a terrible choice.

The real estate comparison is also irrelevant: unlike any other asset, cryptocurrency doesn't do anything useful.

[lottin]

> is literally by design as a product of the Fed's 2% inflation target

Holding more cash than you need for transaction purposes is inefficient, regardless of the inflation rate. This is because what makes holding cash a bad idea is not the fact that it depreciates over time (in inflationary circumstances), but the fact that holding cash has an opportunity cost, and that opportunity cost is unaffected by inflation.

[imtringued]

>E.g. a multi-billionaire like Ray Dalio is already rich. He's the one saying "cash is trash" because he like many others see the M2 money supply growing very rapidly which erodes future purchasing power.

As I have said in previous comments, the Fed has been unable to erode future purchasing power, because the excess savings rate increases to compensate for the increase in the money supply.

> (The "cash is trash" also means not holding US Treasury government bonds because of inflation.)

But the entire problem is that the newly printed money ends up in exactly those places. Negative interest rates are impossible, because people can just get cash or rather, they get cash equivalents, namely treasury bonds. The Chinese government is using excess dollars from its trade surplus to purchase treasury bonds. The money put into treasury bonds can only be tapped into by issuing new debt, thus excess savings (uninvested savings) are being created. The government has to employ people on behalf of the Chinese investors otherwise the end result is unemployment because the household savings rate has to go down which means spending more than you earn.

>Yes, the Fed + US Govt can have all sorts of rationale to justify $2 trillion stimulus checks and printing billions to buy corporate bonds (Home Depot bonds), bail out banks, etc ... but economic actors can also counteract the money supply expansion by taking steps to retain future purchasing power. E.g. Shift wealth into real estate, tech stocks, gold, bitcoin, etc.

The problem with this strategy is that it is built on the existence of excess savings. If the inflation rate were to go up, which eats away at corporate savings, companies would be forced to find viable investments and thus generate jobs. The existence of these investments would allow the Fed to raise the interest rates again and excess savings would flood out of treasury bonds and other cash equivalents into regular bank accounts and corporate bonds again. That means stocks, real estate and cryptocurrencies would go down, precisely because inflation is going up i.e. because your future purchasing power is eroding.

[jariel]

XorNot is essentically correct.

Crypto is a 'get rich quick' speculative behaviour, driven by multiple narratives as you say, but those are effectively just narratives used to validate the participation.

Amway's 'narrative' was that you could 'help' your neighbours by selling them cleaning products.

But really it was a pyramid scheme.

There are some questions around the Fed and monetary dilution etc, but BTC is not the answer.

And of course currency was never meant to be a 'long term holding'.

Literally by design, we build at minimum a tiny bit of dilution into our currency, that's 'part of the plan' so don't hold it, hold something else.

[avidphantasm]

“People haven’t been transacting in crypto basically at all”

Exactly. When I did a deep dive on crypto currency a few years ago I wondered, what can the transaction rate be for proof of work schemes. Turned out it was less than a dozen per second across an entire network. I don’t think this has changed (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-tx-day). How many transactions does Visa alone do?

[mariojv]

I'm not deep into the cryptocurrency world at all, but a good friend of mine is really into it and has given me a bit of Nano. Transactions are settled nearly instantly on a mobile device, and it relies more on a "proof of stake" than proof of work style system: https://docs.nano.org/whitepaper/english/

I really don't understand how it can be secure and haven't tried to read more into it due to skepticism about cryptocurrency generally, but are non proof of work schemes more viable?

[Ekaros]

I have for years heard about pressuring merchants to accept bitcoin or what ever currency and in the end the number of daily or even monthly users was most often laughably low. Not that there isn't some that move stuff, but that isn't really too many...

[dale_glass]

Crypto basically changed tracks in the last few years.

Initially it was supposed to be money, and so there was a lot of effort to drive adoption. You could buy games on Steam for BTC.

But then a thing happened: the value exploded, and new people started hearing about this amazing new asset growing in value. Crypto became not a coin, but a thing to hoard and sit on, waiting for the price to get higher still.

In this situation, using it as a money is stupid. That pizza somebody bought for 10000 BTC was a terrible loss to the buyer -- they could sell the 100BTC for $634 million today. They shouldn't have bought a pizza, they should have just kept their money in a wallet and done nothing at all with it for a decade.

Given that usage pattern, ability to process transactions doesn't matter. The ideal is one buy at the bottom, and one sell at the peak, possibly years apart. Fees don't really matter, because the transaction is enormous. Paying $5 to move $10 is ridiculous. Paying $5 to move $634 million is a rounding error.

And since Bitcoin was made to be deflationary this pattern of usage is more or less guaranteed. Using it as money is always silly because any newcomers to BTC increase demand and therefore the competition for the supply. And over time, some BTC gets lost, which adds to that as well.

[geitir]

And then 100 years from now it will be worth $5 because no one will care

[imtringued]

The real problem the US, Japan and EU are facing is that the system is way too stable and resilient, the COVID stimulus should have created enough inflation to bring the economy back to a normal state yet it completely failed to do so.

The last 20 years were marked by the corporate savings rate increasing, meaning companies are not investing. This could be related to China and various other factors but it is clear that the Fed and the government has done enough to help corporations, they are doing so extremely well that they don't need any more help. The mistake from the start was that the government didn't help citizens enough. It didn't create enough jobs or it didn't return those excess corporate savings to the population forcibly. The reason why wealth redistribution is popular is that excess savings are zero sum, for the corporate savings rate to go up, either total investment has to go up (it hasn't) or the household savings rate has to go down. There is a similar dynamic with rich vs poor.

The corrosion you speak of doesn't exist. The system is way too stable, far more stable than should be possible, that's the real problem. Your dollars, by that I mean the dollars corporations and therefore the wealthy own, aren't losing value fast enough.

[cmrdporcupine]

> we've decoupled money from value.

Since when was it ever coupled?

[svachalek]

The whole economy feels like nonsense now. There's a massive overabundance of both capital and labor required to meet actual needs, so we keep creating ever more useless games to play with capital so that we can create more capital that the world doesn't need or actually use. In the meantime, massive portions of the population are struggling to make ends meet. I don't know where this ends but it can't be good.

[pbourke]

You are seeing one response in the various relief and reform proposals put forward by the Biden administration. Biden is following FDR’s blueprint of first relief then reform in response to a crisis. The refundable child tax credit alone has the potential to sharply curtail extreme poverty.

Whether it works or not is to be seen. You can look at both Biden and Trump as the end of the arc of neoliberalism that began with Reagan. The same broad moves seem to be happening in other peer nations.

[ClumsyPilot]

Exactly, even a blind should be able to see that we spmehow have broken the system

[benjohnson]

Your great advices pays dividends much further down the road too - focusing on work and creating value is also good for your children. Sadly, there’s been many children that took decades to get out of their entitled mindset caused by easy money from their parents or the government.

[the_gipsy]

Culture is the best inheritance you can give your children.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Did Visa create no value in society with plastic payment cards? If crypto is valueless, payment processors are valueless too. It's unfortunate that Visa gets a 2% tax on the economy, but the convenience of plastic or a public/private keypair unlocks more economic growth compared to a world with only paper cash.

[thinkingkong]

Yes. If you read up on the history of the credit card industry they solved the incredibly huge problem of small businesses extending loans to individuals.

[whateveracct]

Visa has a more compelling and proven value proposition than crypto

[Ekaros]

2% is entirely up to local regulation. EU has capped it to 0.2% or 0.3%. Which I would guess that cash doesn't do too much better.

[mercutio2]

Interchange fees are a small fraction of credit card costs to merchants. The EU only capped interchange fees.

[sigstoat]

> on the economy

a 2% "tax", on retail sales, at best.

b2b, c2c, and large dollar b2c generally don't go through visa.

calling it a "tax" is nauseating. you get something from visa, and you can choose not use them, if you'd like. it's the rare place that won't take at least a few other alternative payments, including cash.

it's a rarer tax yet that you can choose not to pay.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Semantically, would 'haircut' be a preferable term to describe what's occurring? Visa isn't some government-mandated thing, so I agree that 'tax' is overloaded, but it isn't meant literally. Given the nearly omniscient use of plastic payment methods, that's why "tax" is used: everybody pays taxes.

[wallacoloo]

> it's the rare place that won't take at least a few other alternative payments, including cash.

Yes, and when you pay with an alternative, that’s when you get hit with the 2% credit card tax. Because you and the credit card user both pay the same price, but the merchant has to raise prices by 2% to cover fees caused by the latter. The credit card user is reimbursed for the fees they created via cash-back programs, while the cash user has to just swallow them.

[nscalf]

That's really nice in theory, but in the real world money IS a proxy for time and value creation. Having money is the same thing has being able to create value, and gives you freedom to create value at your own pace however you want.

Crypto as an asset class is only working the way it is because there is a separation between perceived value and net present value. The same way fundamentalists value companies by expected earnings and angel investors look at the TAM, crypto is blowing up in large part because people are starting to believe in the story that crypto is pinned to.

At the end of the day, you probably should have some skills to fall back on and not depend on an asset increasing in value, but if you have enough assets, that is your skill.

[w0de0]

> Our job in life is to engage in value creation.

That's grim! It's not my job in life.

[polypodiopsi]

The cycnicism in me insists that the the ones saying this also make money in finance; and feel that the purpose of life for everybody should be to create value - of course with an implicit exclusion of themselves; because their purpose in life is obviously to ENJOY. (The latter of course is a silent narcisitic thought that can only dwell in the privacy of the ego, and is not allowed to enter public discourse)

[anonporridge]

Finance people tell all kinds of stories to themselves about how they're actually adding value to the system with their activities.

[Invictus0]

Value doesn't have to be money. You can be nice to someone and that adds value to the world and counts as value creation. If all you do is suck value out of the world then I would argue you are a bad human being.

[w0de0]

I refuse to accept that my life must fulfill some utilitarianism of nebulous “value,” I would sooner ascribe to a Calvinist predestination than accept that framework for living.

This suffers from a fundamental problem. If the creation of value is the ultimate good, and we are obligated to maximize that good, we could do a lot better job at it than smiling some dopamine into our neighbor as you suggest. We’re all irredeemably evil for not doing so.

[fullshark]

That's how the gov't views you, as an economic unit = labor production.

[w0de0]

"The government" is a massive institution inclusive of multiple separate power bases, agencies, motivations, responsibilities, and bosses. It doesn't view me as anything; parts of it view - if "view" is the right verb - as variously a citizen, a suspect, a taxpayer. Always a datum, sure, but the important metadata varies.

[qznc]

Value creation is only one part. The next question is how much of the value you create, you can capture for yourself.

Nurses create a lot of value, especially during a pandemic, but they receive only a tiny part of it. Competition can force you to give most of the value you create to your customers.

[polypodiopsi]

I'd argue that this is also an systemic issue, that can not exhaustively be thought about on the level of just an economic model (of supply and demand), but has to be scrutinized on a broader scope. (Epistemic, historical, sociological, psychologically etc.) Reproductive labor (actual birthgiving as well as carework, sustaining the potential to work in the bodies), has for the most time been thought to be just given by the "nature" of women. Even early Marxsim excluded reproductive work, as the precondition of all productive labor from its aspirations.

[beiller]

The problem is that economy and technology shifts. Not so great when you are a cold fusion developer today as an example. So it is required to hedge against that isn't it. You need to ensure you have a future by saving for retirement. I've been saying "it will eventually collapse" for what seems like forever now. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent - to borrow a cliché.

[i_haz_rabies]

What skills can you guarantee (or at least say with high confidence) will be valuable in 20 years? I can't really think of any except maybe "soft skills" and whatever skills allow you to build a large network.

[throwaway0a5e]

There is no skill that doesn't require upkeep over 20yr.

Everything that was valuable in 2001 is still of about the same value now. But the mechanics who didn't want to diagnose electronics and the accountants who refused to learn computers and the programmers who only wanna write php have seen their skills reduced in value because they did not maintain currency.

Being responsible for the work output of other people and doing your job somewhere unpleasant or dangerous pretty much always increases your pay.

[rubicon33]

This is so hard to do in an industry that also heavily rewards specialists.

I've been regularly asked by my employer to change role to help some other part of the business. Whether it was switching from mobile to server, server to front end web, or switching frameworks / tools within those domains, I always made the switch.

The problem is that now I'm a jack of all trades, and a master of none.

[throwaway98797]

Redine yourself as a problem solver vs. just a tool box.

“I’m a master generlized problem solving machine, how can I be of service?”

[rubicon33]

Yes, well, I can't help but look around at people who have chosen to specialize and see how much quicker they climb into leadership roles, and getting to work on mission critical features.

If you're the jack of all trades guy, you'll always be asked to cleanup, or take care of small feature requests. When the company needs the big guns for a mission critical feature, you will never be called.

This is an important point for people to realize. There's risks at specializing for sure, but there's also a lot of risk to being a jack of all trade.

[throwaway98797]

Despite the semi trolly comment history on this profile, i was able to climb the ladder by knowing ONE thing extremely well and then being a generlist in everything else.

Granted i climbed the ladder in mid size non-hot companies so may not be applicable.

Im currently a consultant in my trade and I appear to sell this ONE thing but in every case i end up solving problems as a generilist.

Is there a chance that you can claim that you are already an expert in one the things you do? sometimes other people’s bar for expertise is lower than yours.

[prewett]

How diverse are the experiences you are generalizing from? Companies are different, so you'll need to sample from lots of different ones. You can also try talking to your manager about what your career goals are and what needs to change to get there. It sounds like you might just need to be in a team / company where your skills and matches the mission critical features, so you could look for transfer opportunities. Or if you don't care about the "leadership" route, you can opt out and try contracting / consulting. Every client wants a different set of experiences, so jack-of-all-trades is more likely to hit on multiple skills.

[throwaway_4253]

Maybe this is a bit out of the spirit of the question, but I think of a lot of "domestic" skills this way, like cooking, cleaning and home maintenance, and knowing specialized dressing and hygiene. This stuff requires considerable time and effort to be good at, and you wind up paying a lot to get someone else to do it for you. Covid has forced me to actually live in my apartment (instead of just sleeping and showering here) and I've increasingly learned that the housewives of yore were actually a lot like managers and process engineers - they constantly need to take inventory and think ahead in order to efficiently keep ahead of all the entropy added in regular life.

It might also be considered a "soft skill", but there are some communication skills I think are really valuable in a technical space; like knowing which diagram to make which will most effectively summarize the complexity of your system and is appropriate for your audience. The tools for constructing that drawing will change, but the activity of sketching for communication isn't going anywhere.

[goodcanadian]

Plumbing, electrical, basic construction skills, most trades, really.

[vsareto]

Skills around software and IT - not just developers. There might be a lot of churn within that industry, but if you can solve problems in those industries industry with any tools, you're going to be valuable. It might take longer to find a job depending on the current times and your own retraining speed, but it will be there in some form. Nothing is likely going to make all software and IT workers obsolete like automation does to factory workers.

My evidence is that we still have a lot of legacy and technical debt around, and it's likely to still be there in 20 years, so even if you don't work on the cutting edge (which may now have stratospheric requirements for entry like a PhD and Github projects and 8 rounds of interviews), you can still take legacy work.

Security and defense (physical and IT/software) will also likely be around forever.

[DC1350]

I’d love to believe this, but dev and IT people are not paid exceptionally well in most of the world. That says to me that the high salaries are a consequence of social structures and the current economy, not that the skills are super valuable. It’s proximity to money that actually matters.

[sgerenser]

Developers are paid pretty well in most of the world, usually well above median income for the country. Just because they’re not paid at 90-95th percentile incomes as in the U.S. doesn’t mean they don’t have valuable skills.

[anonporridge]

Also, you'd better believe that a tsunami of smart, motivated young people are coming through the education pipeline to pump up the labor supply for the IT/dev sector.

Maybe the demand will increase fast enough to keep salaries from dropping in real terms.

[c22]

Welding?

[Ekaros]

Welding is probably bit multi-modal. Traditional stuff isn't likely going away, but already there is already advanced robots for the job. Though it's unlikely they will be entirely AI controlled.

[c22]

No doubt a lot of "assembly line" welding operations have already become highly automated. This is, however, already the area requiring lesser skilled and more easily replaced workpeople. I was thinking more about on-site and craft-associated welding which I imagine will continue to be highly valued until extremely portable and versatile high-DOF robotic manipulators become commonplace.

[polypodiopsi]

Its also getting payed for grinding through your body (like a lot of trades but welding especially.)

[c22]

A fair point, though a lot of office jobs aren't too kind on your body either.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

People (at least in the developed world) already have created all the value that they need. They have enough food, safety and shelter. Majority of the effort now goes into creating virtual goods. If you’re planning to be alive in 20 years, you’re better off making sure you hire robots with good work ethics.

[electrondood]

The bizarre part is that the speculation does create "value," in terms of appreciation. But it's a Ponzi scheme, and whoever cashes out before everyone else has the same idea wins.

[naveen99]

Appropriate Capital allocation is value creation.

[Dracophoenix]

The same could be said of the US Dollar (or anything really). All value is speculative until proven and changes in those speculations can't be stopped. What's worse in the Dollar's case vis a vis crypto is that the divorce between "real" value and "created" value is determined by a tiny group of institutional bankers and their government liaisons. Reality, much less work ethic, won't change their minds. If you think that crypto is akin to a religious sect, then the Fed is a financial Vatican slowly collapsing in its importance while denying it all the same. Rid yourself of the fallacy that holding on to value is hoarding lest you believe that what one does with one's wealth should be determined by others.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Our job in life is to engage in value creation.

I don't think there's any non-tautological way in which this can be simultaneously true and not an oppressive imposition by capitalism.

[isoskeles]

Even without capitalism, you have a duty to create value for the people around you, and you might expect the same of them. There are exceptions for the young, old, and infirm.

[m3ta4a]

In no world where there is a "duty" to provide value am I going to be found happily providing value. In this world, in my experience, your statement is simply false. If I happen to provide some form of value it is from my choosing to, not to satisfy the demands of some formless "duty".

[isoskeles]

The "duty" is to satisfy the demands of existing within a community of people, where able-bodied freeloaders are never welcome. But I can understand nitpicking over semantics. Replace the word "duty" with whatever you want.

[m3ta4a]

Nonsense, a different word doesn't suddenly make it universally true. It could be a guiding philosophy, something like "to live a good life provide value to your community". But it is in no practical way a rule.

[groone]

It is a universal rule as if you don't do that, you are part of the problem and are creating a drag on the society, reducing the value for everyone to use and enjoy. Your argument sounds like You want to see the society to fail and collapse.

[groone]

If you are not creating value that means you are consuming value created by others. The total value created for everyone to enjoy shrinks. Society just cannot sustain itself without people who create more value than they consume.

Who is going to create all the value consumed by rent seekers, financial engineers, thieves, scammers, corrupt or bloated government? People who create and provide more value than they consume.

[m3ta4a]

When capitalism ceases to encourage food expiring in a landfill rather than feed the homeless, I suppose.

[eli_gottlieb]

That's the tautological branch of the dilemma, yes.

[the_local_host]

> Even without capitalism, you have a duty to create value for the people around you

I don't think this is true. This is one of these work ethic corollaries that helped build wealthy societies when productivity was proportional to people's effort. But it seems to grow more obsolete by the day.

[isoskeles]

Do you think that early hunter-gatherers shared their food with people who did not participate in acquiring food?

Without capitalism, we could regress to the most primitive version of civilization and still require contribution to the tribe. The alternative is to go off on your own (and at that point, there are no "people around you" to help). Less primitive alternatives, as different political-economic systems, usually still require you to contribute through taxation.

[andrepd]

> This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary value, think they’ve “won” or accomplished something real.

As opposed to rent, property speculation, the stock market, etc?

[onlyrealcuzzo]

2% of the world's wealth is tied up in crypto (and it's growing quickly). If it does implode, that'll make The Great Financial Crisis look like blip.

At this point, I can't imagine financial regulators doing anything to stop it.

[mytherin]

What will actually happen if the crypto coins collapse in price? What tangible effects will there be? Very few people's salaries are paid in crypto, crypto isn't backing people's mortgages, and outside of the rare (and newsworthy) cases, people are not investing extreme amounts of money into crypto that they cannot possibly afford to lose.

I have a hard time imagining what actual tangible disasters will happen if crypto currencies lose their value overnight besides some speculators losing money and some mining centers closing.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

What will happen is 2% of the world's "wealth" would disappear - which would almost certainly spill over causing a much larger decline.

From 2007 to 2008, for example, global wealth declined about ~10% [1].

There's not much room left for central banks before we officially enter banana town. If cyrpto implodes, it could easily be worse than the financial crisis - which means, regulators have an interest in it NOT imploding.

[1] https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/g...

[pbourke]

In no way, shape or form would a crypto implosion be anywhere near the financial crisis in impact. It’s just not systemically important. It’s essentially “phantom wealth” not underpinned by any economic reality - even more unglued from reality than esoteric derivatives.

[AnimalMuppet]

No real damage (except to those holding it) unless enough people have bought crypto with borrowed money. That's where it can cause damage to the overall economy.

[lazerpants]

The Wealth Effect is a real consideration here. During 2007 people cut their spending considerable because their houses went down in value, even if they were not, at that time, trying to sell their home. You would see the wealth effect work similarly if cypto assets were devalued.

As an example, I have 5-20k in crypto assets on any given day. My wife and I are also shopping for a new couch. If my crypto assets evaporated we would not be shopping for a new couch, nor would we be going out for dinner tonight, despite the fact that I am not spending down crypto assets to fund either of those purchases. The psychology behind it is that people adjust to a certain amount of "savings" and will adjust purchasing to get back to that level if their savings changes quickly and substantially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_effect

[pbourke]

60% of Americans (roughly) own real estate. It’s by far their largest asset. What proportion of Americans own crypto and how much of their net worth does it comprise? That would show you how significant the wealth effect would be.

[waynesonfire]

there is this concept termed "too big to fail" -- we're seeing crypto start to find it's way into ETFs.. and then 401Ks.. and then ops.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/a-new-crypto-etf-is-here-yo...

[Ekaros]

Is there even any significant amount of debt backed by crypto? As otherwise it is just money that some have spend and others have gained... Ofc, there are some energy producers that will be hit and some manufacturers. But I wouldn't be too worried about later, they should be able to pivot to other chips in current market.

[pfisch]

Now do gold.

[cblconfederate]

Tbf, the same holds for stocks. It's a game where everyone wins, currently. This obviously never ends well.

[yks]

Wealth is a human's worth under capitalism and arguing against riches of any kind while the number goes up is a philosophical attack on what we believe in as a society. At best you're looked at as an idiot, at worst you're the enemy that threatens the system. Fortunately, this too shall pass.

[sjg007]

I mean the crypto folks bought in at the right time? It's like finding oil under your land. For some reason you bought into it and that's takes some type of skill.

[beckingz]

Or just luck.

Plenty of people have also lost money on crypto and oil speculation.

[acheron]

For some reason my friend bet on 26 last spin and won, that takes some skill.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

> because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary value, think they’ve “won” or accomplished something real. This doesn’t work long term, and will eventually collapse on itself like all false religions.

Explain to me the value of Daddy's Money and Landlords. No, seriously, tell me about it.