Good economic learning material that I can understand is surprising hard to find. Here are some resources I find that makes sense to me.
I’m trying to find more for other countries. Tell me if you know any!
As Yanis Varoufakis described in the book Talking to my daughter about the economy, trying to explain the economy in terms of economy models doesn’t make sense. In my case, I couldn’t understand the models anyway.
Criteria on media selection: independently funded journalism may be credible. wealthy individuals funded journalism protects wealthy individuals. So, media like Vox are ok. Still, watching any main stream media… the knowledge gain is for me negative.
Before you ask, why do I have such a page, I’ll tell you why.
Biggest tech companies by market capitalization:
Apple: app platform, sells hardware sometimes
Microsoft: leass out compute, sells user behavior patterns
NVIDIA: sells graphics cards
Alphabet: leases out compute, sells user behavior patterns
Amazon: leases out compute, ecommerce platform
Meta: sells user behavior patterns
TSMC: sells chips
Tesla: uh… hyped cars?
…
Netflix: provides entertainment
Putting morality aside, it is of my impression that ordinary families don’t purchasing power. Without learning about software, they can’t afford to choose the operating systems they use, on smart phone or otherwise. This dictates that if you don’t work for the business models (selling complex hardware or market capture), wage as a technologist is set by how well rest of the society can pay for your service.
so that kind of resonated with me, the idea that I cannot afford to not study the economy as a whole.
Search “wealth inequality, graph” in any search engine for now.
Taxing income is pointless, so I don’t talk about it here.
US bill: Billionaire Minimum Income Tax
this bill would require households worth over $100 million to pay a 20% annual minimum tax on their full income, including realized and unrealized gains.
!: taxing capital gain, phrased as “full income”.
A report commissioned by the Brazilian G20 presidency
prepared by Gabriel Zucman on June 25, 2024
proposes: individuals with more than 1000000_000 USD in wealth pay 2% of their wealth in tax annually
§2.1:
The baseline proposal made in this blueprint involves ensuring that dollar billionaires (about 3,000 taxpayers today) pay at least 2% of their wealth in individual taxes each year. The individual taxes taken into account to compute this minimum would be individual income taxes, wealth taxes, and economically equivalent levies. Payroll taxes, property taxes, corporate taxes, consumption taxes, or other business-level and indirect levies would not be considered.
!: property taxes would not be considered. I don’t quite understand how do you tax wealth without taxing property. Is it about threshold of wealth of individual families rather than based on property value?
The basic rules of capitalist society is as follows:
If you steal, you get jailed. If you don’t pay rent, you get evicted. Although with weak government, the enforcement power of the state is increasingly less so.
tl;dr, billionaires survive on the protection of the government.
With current trend of wealth accumulation, every country has a few options.
A bit of history of humanity, pasted here for your convenience.
In harmony with nature, low aspiration in resource accumulation.
I heard that indigenous Australians have done it after fighting each other and finding war pointless. Maybe we are on the way there?
The key is abundance in natural resources when related to population.
If your spawn point locates inside the control area of a ruler who cares about your living standards, you may live a relatively good life. Otherwise, your life is in jeopardy.
Maybe something else? I lack imagination in this aspect.
This section title is homage to Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Grey because the idea is partly inspired by that video.
While looking at some present time manifesto about workers should fight back against exploitation, I had the following thought: what if there is no one to exploit the workers?
Present time.
The current meta is to use mechanical slaves and digital slaves, then send the remaining tasks to humans in a low(er) PPI area. e.g. Japan outsource animation frame filling to Korea. Then, if it’s matter, transport it back. If it’s information, transmit it through the Internet.
Then, there is the “Bullshit Jobs” idea from David Graeber. I think the bullshit jobs idea and the humans need not apply idea are one.
So the joint argument is that with current automation level, some countries can have all workers work at most 1 hour per day, every day.
I think the argument checks out.
Some ideas I came across that made no sense whatsoever. They are listed here for completeness.