No trickle...
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In American schools?
Normal public schools?
Economics is an elective, only available at fairly good schools, usually only taken by overachievers.
Most US Public schools don't even teach the basics of taxes or finances as it applies to an average person who is going to like, work a job that is taxed, buy a car with a loan.
Our education system has been intentionally destroyed by Republican
s for decades, the result is that roughly within +/- 2 years of when I graduated college... US average adult literacy rate has been plummeting.The average US adult now reads at a 6th grade level, average math skills are also terrible.
Uneducated people are easier to lie to and trick.
What does nth grade reading level even mean? Why doesn't it get corrected to an average of what is actual? In the context of adults I can understand, but I think I've heard things like Xrh graders having an average reading level as Yth graders. But if the average reading level of Xth grades is something (like some amount of words), why isn't that what an Xth grade reading level is?
I hope that makes sense. Like if you everyone how their school experience is and they all believe they had a "worse than average" experience, clearly about half are incorrect.
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Because it's inherently unstable.
The modern mortgage is only 100 years old, and it's caused crisis after crisis. They happen faster and faster too, with larger and larger bailouts to keep the system afloat
The debt system only works if you have infinite, ever accelerating, the rate of acceleration ever accelerating, growth. There's no new markets to expand into, we're running up against physics
You can't build a modern house without thousands of man hours, making a savings approach impractical? Then don't.
Build differently. It's that simple. Our ancestors figured it out for 100k years, then for a century we went crazy with it, and now it's all falling apart
You can't tell me there's no better way.
I love watching YouTube videos of 5 people building a house in a year just on weekends using Earth bags. A team of Amish people can build a house in days. I watch ones where one person builds a house. There's a guy who built a castle by himself, stone by stone
The man hours are so expensive because everyone has to pay interest on the debt, and the practice of borrowing from the future means every step of the process money is being siphoned off
wrote last edited by [email protected]Build differently. It’s that simple. Our ancestors figured it out for 100k years
Yes, it is an option to revert to living in houses with earth floors, and no electricity, plumbing, or running water. My family has a cabin like that (sans the earth floor). I love staying there, and could probably build one in a year with a friend or two.
It doesn't really scale well though, so cities are out of the picture. Besides, it goes against the premise of something that works without drastically altering society. While there were large cities in earlier times (e.g. Rome around AD 0), these were largely built by slave labour. In earlier times, cities were also famous for offering terrible, cramped living conditions for common people, and disease was rife, due to inadequate waste management and clean water supply.
So yes, our ancestors "figured it out for 100k years", in the sense that they figured out how to build cramped, disease ridden cities using slave labour (alternatively near-slave workers). It's not feasible to house the modern world population on dispersed farms (the "Amish" solution), we need towns/cities.
In the end, the solutions you're pointing to would work for a far smaller global population, but not today. Even at 1700's level populations (roughly 7.5 % of the current), you would need to accept 1700's level living conditions. Whether we should drastically reduce living conditions in order to reduce the cost of housing and infrastructure is a fair debate to have, but a completely different one than the one at hand.
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That's not how forests work. At all. I don't even know where to start on this
If you want a real response, ask me tomorrow. I can speak on this matter for days, but I'm done essay posting for tonight
If that essay is about the forest, then don't bother, that's just analogy and i simplify and leave out a lot of thing just so i can explain it.
And if you can't bother with a real respond, why not just respond tomorrow instead? Or don't respond. Instead you demand me to just ask again tomorrow? You aren't my superior you know.
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What does nth grade reading level even mean? Why doesn't it get corrected to an average of what is actual? In the context of adults I can understand, but I think I've heard things like Xrh graders having an average reading level as Yth graders. But if the average reading level of Xth grades is something (like some amount of words), why isn't that what an Xth grade reading level is?
I hope that makes sense. Like if you everyone how their school experience is and they all believe they had a "worse than average" experience, clearly about half are incorrect.
wrote last edited by [email protected]What does nth grade reading level even mean?
Very broadly, a lower grade of reading level means:
Less broad vocabularly,
Less ability to use and comprehend more complex grammar and sentence structure,
Less critical analysis capability,
Less ability to understand context and domain specific, different meanings of words,
More reliance on nebulouy defined, vague slang vocabulary.
In the context of adults I can understand, but I think I've heard things like Xrh graders having an average reading level as Yth graders.
This means that say, a typical 8th grader now has reading/writing abilities on par with a 6th grader.
In other words, kids keep failing classes and getting passed onto the next grade anyway, instead of being held back, or sent into some kind of 'catch-up' or 'remedial' classes to get them up to standard.
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Teachers and the education system broadly have, you know, rubrics, standards, lists of concepts that a kid is supposed to be taught in each class and grade.
This is how 'grading' works, the idea is that your test is supposed to evaluate how successful the student was at learning, how succesful the course was at actually teaching the student new concepts.
The main problem is that we underfund teachers and schools, and also punish teachers and schools when they actually do the right thing and refuse to pretend a kid has learned things they haven't.
So, the result is, kids don't learn.
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::: spoiler Semi-relevant rant about smart phones in the class room
Another recent contributor to this is just pandemic levels of kids on their phones in class, all the time, not paying attention.
What you should do is something like ok, if I see your phone in class once, it gets taken away for the rest of the class, two times, the rest of the day, 3 times, you have to surrender your phone to the office when you get to school and get it back when school is over.
But students and parents literally respond like feral zombies when you propose this, despite this being the norm throughout the proliferation of cellphones, and early days of smartphones.
There's nothing stopping you from using a phone responsibly. Set it on vibrate, if you get an actual important txt or call, ask to step outside the class and take the call/message.
Schools also have landline phones for emergencies.
Another thing is that short form video content addiction does actually cause brainrot, it is real, its been shown in numerous academic studies.
Lower attention spans, lower impulse control, less control over emotions, and shortform video content platforms in particular also spread misinfo and disinfo like wildfire.
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If that essay is about the forest, then don't bother, that's just analogy and i simplify and leave out a lot of thing just so i can explain it.
And if you can't bother with a real respond, why not just respond tomorrow instead? Or don't respond. Instead you demand me to just ask again tomorrow? You aren't my superior you know.
You're arguing with an idiot he advocates for returning to a fuedal society elsewhere in the thread.
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You're arguing with an idiot he advocates for returning to a fuedal society elsewhere in the thread.
It's crazy. They claimed they work in finance, but the lack of financial and economic knowledge coming out of their comment is saying otherwise. It's either someone is trolling or had too much red pill that they see only black and white.
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It's crazy. They claimed they work in finance, but the lack of financial and economic knowledge coming out of their comment is saying otherwise. It's either someone is trolling or had too much red pill that they see only black and white.
I think they're just lying on the internet. "Debt is the ultimate evil and the cause of all of society's problems also fuedalism was good" is some serious high schooler shit. It's the perfect combination of complete lack of knowledge of the subject beyond a very surface level and an absolute conviction of their ideas that almost always comes from just being very young. Either that or they got into some bizarre fringe ideology where this is taught but I am not aware of one with this belief system. At first I thought it was some weird leftist thing since this is Lemmy after all but given the complete lack of knowledge of the writings of Marx and Lenin (who did not reject all of classical economics in favor of their ideas) I am really not sure.
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I mean even in nature, like tree, everything is a competition. In a forest if you are a tree and can't outgrow or even catch up with everyone then you're fallen behind and risking being covered by everyone else, eventually you'll become weak and susceptible to termite and disease. Your example kinda fall apart, yeah?
Same in business. It's really about sustainable growth and able to catch up, and also secure your own stability in the market. What if your machine broke down and it's very expensive to repair or replace? What if your current equipment can't catching up with the demand? What if your landlord wanted to sell the shop and you wanted to secure your location instead of moving, which also cost time and money? All these require a huge investment up front if you don't take loan, and in business, these might take up a large chunk of available fund that can otherwise used for something else, or even as emergency fund if there's market downturn.
To say it's immoral is to say the forest is sinful.
Okay, so a forest is a living thing in itself. It's a super organism. It grows organically, slowly expanding outwards. In the depths of the forest, trees fall occasionally, creating an opportunity for new trees to complete for the sunlight. They don't just compete by growing, the forest also gives them nutrients through the mycelial network and chokes out threats. Natural systems form around these cycles
That's great. I love forests
What you're describing, is chopping down all the trees and replanting them. But that's a farm, not a forest. It leads to weak trees with shallow roots, it leads to a weak forest prone to landslides where a natural forest would have held firm. It doesn't have the ecosystem that would have naturally grown along with it, and would have enriched the soil and made the whole thing even more stable.
It produces a lot more wood, but it's all weak and overextended
I think that's a great example of what I'm referring to.
If anyone has access to these tools, everyone must use them, or someone else taking that shortcut will outgrow them and put them out of business. It's a race to the bottom, everyone must extend themselves to their limits to compete, and so the whole system is always one bad storm away from disaster.
I'm saying that's bad. It's unstable and produces worse results by any metric but growth
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If that essay is about the forest, then don't bother, that's just analogy and i simplify and leave out a lot of thing just so i can explain it.
And if you can't bother with a real respond, why not just respond tomorrow instead? Or don't respond. Instead you demand me to just ask again tomorrow? You aren't my superior you know.
Yeah, sorry that was rude. But I do think it's a pretty good metaphor and I wanted to follow up on it
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Ok, now you're just splitting hairs. But I will concede the word debt means more than what I'm using it for
But there's a difference between "I did this for you, and it's expected you'll reciprocate later" and a formalized version of this
I don't know how to put it into words yet, but the merchant of Venice is about the idea I'm circling around. Reciprocity is one thing, selling the future, which is always uncertain, is another
One of these things is the fabric of community, the other is evil
You're the one splitting hairs. I made sure you meant all forms of debt several times, and now you're trying to redefine what you mean by debt now that you've been shown to be wrong.
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It's crazy. They claimed they work in finance, but the lack of financial and economic knowledge coming out of their comment is saying otherwise. It's either someone is trolling or had too much red pill that they see only black and white.
I definitely don't work in finance lol, I'm sure I've never said that in my life
I'm a programmer who's had to learn far more about accounting and debt vehicles than I've ever wanted to know
I'm just sick of people tell me I don't know about economics because they took a few economics classes in college, and then refusing to actually make any points
I took micro and macro too, I understand the propoganda. It's just bullshit. The world hasn't worked like that for a while now, if it ever actually did
You can find plenty of economists who can explain exactly how we got here though
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Build differently. It’s that simple. Our ancestors figured it out for 100k years
Yes, it is an option to revert to living in houses with earth floors, and no electricity, plumbing, or running water. My family has a cabin like that (sans the earth floor). I love staying there, and could probably build one in a year with a friend or two.
It doesn't really scale well though, so cities are out of the picture. Besides, it goes against the premise of something that works without drastically altering society. While there were large cities in earlier times (e.g. Rome around AD 0), these were largely built by slave labour. In earlier times, cities were also famous for offering terrible, cramped living conditions for common people, and disease was rife, due to inadequate waste management and clean water supply.
So yes, our ancestors "figured it out for 100k years", in the sense that they figured out how to build cramped, disease ridden cities using slave labour (alternatively near-slave workers). It's not feasible to house the modern world population on dispersed farms (the "Amish" solution), we need towns/cities.
In the end, the solutions you're pointing to would work for a far smaller global population, but not today. Even at 1700's level populations (roughly 7.5 % of the current), you would need to accept 1700's level living conditions. Whether we should drastically reduce living conditions in order to reduce the cost of housing and infrastructure is a fair debate to have, but a completely different one than the one at hand.
So there's just nothing to be done then?
Come on. Just try to think of ways things could work differently
In cities you have the city build the big buildings. The one organization with both the pile of money and incentive builds new housing. Hell, the city can just hire the workers directly, why not. Give them a budget and have them go around building and maintaining the infrastructure. You don't need investors, you don't need permits, you're already the city
I'm not saying we go back to monke, I'm saying everyone needing a mortgage to buy a house is insane and not some natural consequence
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So there's just nothing to be done then?
Come on. Just try to think of ways things could work differently
In cities you have the city build the big buildings. The one organization with both the pile of money and incentive builds new housing. Hell, the city can just hire the workers directly, why not. Give them a budget and have them go around building and maintaining the infrastructure. You don't need investors, you don't need permits, you're already the city
I'm not saying we go back to monke, I'm saying everyone needing a mortgage to buy a house is insane and not some natural consequence
Again, I can agree that the government being solely responsible for construction of housing could be a decent idea, but then we're no longer operating under any kind of free housing market.
You could argue that the housing market should be 100 % regulated (I'm not necessarily opposed to this idea), but that again breaks the premise of not drastically changing the society. We're talking about whether loans are a necessity (or even a positive thing) in our society as it exists now.
Further,
Come on. Just try to think of ways things could work differently.
Honestly: Why? In a decently regulated market where exploitation is largely prevented (e.g. what we have in the Nordics) seems to work pretty well. I can acquire resources now through a loan, and use those resources to be better off in the future. Private companies can take out loans to build housing and industry, and pay them back later. This benefits everyone, because we end up having decent housing, industry that otherwise could never be built, and more companies paying taxes.
I just don't see where in this picture the idea of loans becomes a "big bad wolf" that is inherently negative.
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Again, I can agree that the government being solely responsible for construction of housing could be a decent idea, but then we're no longer operating under any kind of free housing market.
You could argue that the housing market should be 100 % regulated (I'm not necessarily opposed to this idea), but that again breaks the premise of not drastically changing the society. We're talking about whether loans are a necessity (or even a positive thing) in our society as it exists now.
Further,
Come on. Just try to think of ways things could work differently.
Honestly: Why? In a decently regulated market where exploitation is largely prevented (e.g. what we have in the Nordics) seems to work pretty well. I can acquire resources now through a loan, and use those resources to be better off in the future. Private companies can take out loans to build housing and industry, and pay them back later. This benefits everyone, because we end up having decent housing, industry that otherwise could never be built, and more companies paying taxes.
I just don't see where in this picture the idea of loans becomes a "big bad wolf" that is inherently negative.
You could argue that the housing market should be 100 % regulated (I'm not necessarily opposed to this idea), but that again breaks the premise of not drastically changing the society. We're talking about whether loans are a necessity (or even a positive thing) in our society as it exists now.
Oh... No, this is fundamentally impossible without drastically changing the system. All our money is just made out of debt, when people stop taking loans it's deflationary. If everyone paid off their loans today, the money goes poof
As for just keeping the Nordic model? I mean, you guys are widely held to be the best system currently...But you're still just holding the wolves at bay. You're not immune to the same forces, from my understanding you had a more communal starting place, were already developed, and have fought to stay where you are, but even despite all that there's been erosion around the edges
Beyond that, at the end of the day, a system based on debt creates exponentially growing boom-bust cycles. Fractional reserve banking is just insane, it's using a powder keg as a candle
Maybe the small loans with tight regulation juice things up and don't cause too much harm... but IDK, I just think any other option would be better. Hell just print the money and give it as grants, don't gamble and borrow from an uncertain future
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You could argue that the housing market should be 100 % regulated (I'm not necessarily opposed to this idea), but that again breaks the premise of not drastically changing the society. We're talking about whether loans are a necessity (or even a positive thing) in our society as it exists now.
Oh... No, this is fundamentally impossible without drastically changing the system. All our money is just made out of debt, when people stop taking loans it's deflationary. If everyone paid off their loans today, the money goes poof
As for just keeping the Nordic model? I mean, you guys are widely held to be the best system currently...But you're still just holding the wolves at bay. You're not immune to the same forces, from my understanding you had a more communal starting place, were already developed, and have fought to stay where you are, but even despite all that there's been erosion around the edges
Beyond that, at the end of the day, a system based on debt creates exponentially growing boom-bust cycles. Fractional reserve banking is just insane, it's using a powder keg as a candle
Maybe the small loans with tight regulation juice things up and don't cause too much harm... but IDK, I just think any other option would be better. Hell just print the money and give it as grants, don't gamble and borrow from an uncertain future
Now it actually seems like we agree on some stuff! I largely agree with what you're saying here, and it seems much more nuanced and less extreme than "loans bad, go back to monke", which was kind of my initial impression.
I guess we just differ on the base idea of how to finance what you could rightly call "gambles" on the future (buying equipment or property to start a business, funding an education, etc.). I think that with proper regulation, which prevents both banks and individuals from taking too much risk, and prevents exploitation, loans are a sustainable and reasonable way to do this. You seem to disagree that it's possible to regulate a debt-system to the point where it becomes sustainable, and therefore think we should try very hard to change the premise that debt is required to run our economy.
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Now it actually seems like we agree on some stuff! I largely agree with what you're saying here, and it seems much more nuanced and less extreme than "loans bad, go back to monke", which was kind of my initial impression.
I guess we just differ on the base idea of how to finance what you could rightly call "gambles" on the future (buying equipment or property to start a business, funding an education, etc.). I think that with proper regulation, which prevents both banks and individuals from taking too much risk, and prevents exploitation, loans are a sustainable and reasonable way to do this. You seem to disagree that it's possible to regulate a debt-system to the point where it becomes sustainable, and therefore think we should try very hard to change the premise that debt is required to run our economy.
Great!
So with your example of buying equipment... So you're now saddling your business with debt. Why wouldn't you get a second loan when you pay off the first one? You take another loan to open up another location, and once that's paid off you could open up two more.
But uh oh...One of the stores was in a bad location, but you're still on the hook for the loan. Now you're dragging the good, successful businesses down for the next 30 years
But uh oh... You're too old to manage all this anymore, so you sell it to an up and comer. But they took a loan to buy it, which the business has to pay back
But uh oh... Your success exploded, and because you took all this investment you're now required to become publicly traded. Your shareholders demand you become as big as apple or die trying, and if you refuse they boot you out and put a consultant brained CEO at the helm
That's how it works in America. You have to grow at an every increasing rate if you ever take the money, and the end result is always enshitification. And it happens fast - in my lifetime we went from zero national debt to $40 trillion, we've had 3 boom-busts, homes are up like 10x, and what happens? People are financing a single meal over several pay periods and going further into debt.
On the flip side, inequality is growing exponentially. Because basically everyone, at every stage of doing anything, has to add in the cost of interest
I just don't see any upside beyond "this is the way things are done". I also don't see a path between here and a different form of money without a total economic crash, but I think that's inevitable regardless, even the world bank is coming up with alternatives
But I think the first step is we treat debt as immoral. It's what got us in this mess, even if they exist in some form we should treat the concept as shameful
