Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
-
yes, reality has a dystopian bias
-
In my skin it even says tap for article
That's a pretty weird tattoo..
-
"Nearly as"????
Having enough money to get the education NEEDED to work in today's world (or enough money to have the ability to get a position based on influence) has A MASSIVE influence on your quality of life.
Having one of those gets you to an equivalent position to "working your way up the ranks of a company", except you get there YEARS earlier and with less effort.
-
Please tell me I'm not the only one who thought that was something other than a pacifier when I first glanced at the image
-
Inheriting is more important than working and has been for some time now.
I made all of my money by working, but my success is to some extent related to being born to parents that paid for my college provided I made decent grades in high school.
-
ah, feudalism
-
I think for most Americans, they are considering it a win if their parents saved enough to retire and have their affairs in order. Just knowing you won't have to do some bizarre financial trickery to handle your parents retirement housing and end of life care is a huge relief, to say nothing of having anything left over to inherit when they're gone.
-
Don't worry, insurance companies already have a solution to take away the inheritance for you. It's called reverse mortgage, where the insurance company give monthly payments to your parents, and when they die their house is transferred to the insurance company to be sold to Blackrock or Vanguard.
-
"becoming"?
-
Yup, my wife's grandmother got suckered into it. Three story, Victorian era house, located blocks from the beach, easily worth over a million dollars and it'll go to whatever bank instead of to her family that's already supporting her financially. Thanks, Tom Selleck...
-
"Becoming"??? Brother... Be serious
-
Retirement housing can be planned for? Per-month it's more expensive than a posh high-rise down-town!
The price can be explained; I'm just saying "retirement housing" is easily beyond what any mortal can pay.
-
You can always educate yourself.
We have the best library in the history of mankind right at our fingertips, and most college courses are just walking people through books.
-
Did we really need an article to know that? It's basic math.
-
So still inheritance, just consolidated, going to another nepo baby.
-
The Economist nearly spelling out the truth there.
-
Our system survives by creating economic slaves. For instance the mortgage acts as a gatekeeper in the fiat system, by locking up an inelastic good in a form that can only be unlocked by completing the payment obligations. Housing rises in price to max out the metaphorical bucket of whatever interest rates allow for debt accumulation, and property ownership is controlled by one's ability to secure debt. This ensures that the financial system has a steady stream of obligations that help sustain the flow of currency, which helps drive aggregate demand.
The goal is to create a 2% inflation, as calculated by an index that excludes housing appreciation and investments, you require ever growing money supply. Money supply is grown via debt accumulation, this then funnels down into foods and services, excluding substitutions and hedonic adjustments, deriving a 2% inflation to a dynamic basket of goods. Housing works well for this because housing is finite and demand in inelastic; prices can rise faster than fundamentals, and it is therefore a liquidity sponge.
We need a liquidity sponge because for every person who saves money someone else must have a corresponding debt. Since the gold standard ended debt now has to grow, to create the new money supply to pay past debts. The money you spend at the grocery store is somebody else's debt, its somebody's mortgage or bank loan, that you acquired by working a job to produce something that the newly issued currency desired.
If the next guy doesn't take out debt, say because prices are falling, then the entire scheme unwinds, and we get a crisis. That money owed has already been spent several times, until it ends up in an equity, unmortgaged home, or bond, and outside of what the CPI uses to hold back money supply growth. If debt isnt taken out then rates will keep falling until someone is encouraged to borrow, in which case debt is securitized into a new supply of money, which creates the windfall that can be spent on consumer goods to derive a 2% inflation.
If debt does keep accumulating you can extract the cantillon effect, as long as the next guy in line takes out debt past debts are inflated away and your past debt is paid off. As people realize this phenomenon they are then willing to sign up for ever larger debts, and you get a bubble in asset prices, because we treat promises of future money the same as present money. So in my opinion its the monetary system that is the main cause of the growing wealth inequality, and the farther we get from the gold standard the worse it will get.
. I'm using Alexandrite
