zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.

Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".

>>rchaud+592
this is private capital. yes, we are in an era of big projects and big capital deployment. is that synonymous with centralized autarky? i don’t agree

>>whimsi+Ba2
This is an amount that would be a meaningful change to most US states' gross annual economic output that we're talking about, and a few people control it. Sounds pretty centralized to me.

The fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars to throw at something that may or may not work while working people can pay the price of a decent used car each year, every year to their health insurance company only to have claims denied is insane.

>>lenerd+hb2
Free movement of capital and the ability to identify promising projects and allocate our resources there are why our society is prosperous and why we are able to devote more resources towards healthcare than any society that has ever come before us.

This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are public companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on healthcare each year.

>>whimsi+Xc2
Is that why I, and a lot of other people my age, have a lower standard of living than my parents did at the same point in their lives?

The "free movement of capital" only ever seems to move the capital one direction: up to the people who needed the labor of others to reach such wealth.

>>lenerd+0h2
The large majority of people do not have a lower standard of living than their parents at the same age. My dad’s family could not even afford shoes for him and he lived in Europe.

I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but you should not assume your experience generalizes.

>>whimsi+Zh2
Mine lived in America. Where the story in the article is taking place.

This is, in fact, a generalized experience: [0]

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn...

>>lenerd+vi2
> This is, in fact, a generalized experience

Your article is from 2019. We're now "wealthier than previous generations were at [our] age" [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...

>>JumpCr+rj2
it’s also turbocharged by the number of people that are descendants of immigrants

>>whimsi+Jk2
> turbocharged by the number of people that are descendants of immigrants

It's divided by whether you own real estate or equities.

Immigrant homeownership is starkly lower than native-born Americans' [1].

We're probably going to see a surge in that disparity, now, given the immigrant workforce that builds and renovates houses is in the process of being gutted. That increases the value of existing stock.

[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/research/fi...

>>JumpCr+Nl2
exactly my point - if you were to subset to people whose parents were native-born US and compare their wealth to that of their parents at same age, it would be absolutely higher. it looks closer than it is because of immigration and we aren’t comparing to the parents in their home country

>>whimsi+xm2
What I find interesting is that children in of immigrants greatly outperform children of non-immigrants when compared by household income. That is to say, the have higher economic mobility intergenerational income growth.

>>s1arti+so2
nothing about that is surprising and is exactly what you would expect when people move to places with more efficient talent markets, especially from pseudo-feudal societies that still existed in lots of the developing world in the 20th century, and that's before you get into the selection effect.

my dad was basically expected to work the farms his entire life and school ended at the 3rd grade where he grew up, he moved to the US and became a chess master & went to one of the best colleges in the country. impossible where he was from and really shows how stupid and zero-sum-minded old world elites are compared to the US/anglo culture.