So yes, I fully agree with you. This hits the young people the hardest because they are the ones to own the least, on average. But more in general, everyone who is not part of the elite owning those companies and their preferred stocks is suffering.
It's almost a cliche "owners vs. workers" class war at this point. But for some reason, everyone in the US expects to enter the owning elite within years - no matter how ridiculously improbable that is - so nobody is willing to stand up for the workers.
To your point, who deserved to capture the value here? Well there was an A/B test to clearly show what caused the boost, and a simple trail from my research (done on my own initiative) to the team's implementation to the revenue, so we at least knew that this group of people was collectively responsible. Nobody got raises, bonuses, or anything. If we had captured that value it would have had to multiply our comp many times over. So why should I have ever gone above and beyond in the first place? Meanwhile my manager repeatedly complained to me that I only worked 9-5.
This early experience was formative in my workplace opinions. Go figure.
Speaking more broadly, these kinds of misaligned incentives are probably doing massive damage to the economy, in terms of lost productivity and innovation.
A huge chunk of the people who should be productive and be innovating literally don't have an incentive to do anything above and beyond keeping their job. It's all adversarial and extractive instead of cooperative. On both sides. Employers won't pay workers for the value the workers provide, and in return workers surf HN and reddit all day.
Meanwhile, apparently there's some kind of epidemic of "bullshit jobs." Again, go figure.
This is often what a lot of people mean when they claim we've hit "late stage capitalism": it is possible the paperclip maximizers have already "eaten the world", turned everything to paperclips, and all that is left is "bullshit jobs". There's no reason to incentivize innovation because everything is already paperclips.
I now work 8 to 5 only and do much less.
Our call volume dropped noticeably. I told my manager why. He was pissed, and asked how we were going to justify headcount if our call volume was dropping.
Lesson learned. [edit: the ambiguous lesson is intentional. I stopped trying, but he kept everyone employed. So... lesson learned :)]
Coming in twice an hour late and being ridiculed about it is ridiculous. This is professional life, not some strict grade school.
I've had to work under many executives like this and it's pretty annoying. They can't be reasoned with.
Oh and the faster your people work - the worse it is for people who rely on headcount for their job. They can't justify a larger headcount if everyone is working efficiently...
However just because you increased revenue with you test in no way means you deserve to capture the value of it. You didn’t do it in isolation. At the very least the reason you were able to increase revenue by a third was because there was a revenue and a customer base to start with. You didn’t create that, that was given to you to leverage off of. I assume you had infrastructure and tooling support as well. So at the very least that increase revenue should be distributed amongst other employees that build the foundation in the first place.
Maybe the A/B test would show no change. Maybe it would show a slight loss. Do you still expect to be paid your salary for the work that went into that? If you do, you shouldn't expect to capture all the upside.
Imagine 5 teams set out to run $100K experiments; 4 teams fail and 1 team creates a $1M gross win. On net, $500K of value was created. The company can't weather the losses from the 4 teams and pay out 100% of the upside ($900K) of the 5th experiment to the 5th team.
I believe that they, via management, believe that the aggregate of what you and your colleagues do is contributing to the overall enterprise value, even if your individual contribution is much smaller than a penny per share.
The fact that some engineers can shirk and ride on the efforts of their peers does create a tragedy of the commons possibility, but the most appropriate solution there involves strong local leadership, rather than the conclusion that RSU grants are ineffective.
Whereas banks and sales teams have long given bonuses because it's tractable to assign value to individual contributions, I think bonuses are the generally preferred incentive when tractable. Making partner is roughly the VP-level equivalent of RSU grants where company performance starts being tied to individual performance.
Where this becomes a bit more evident is that RSU refreshes are almost always based on performance review, like bonuses.
I see RSUs as a cheaper/more flexible compensation for employers and a tax reduction strategy for employees (both worthwhile in their own right).
Many of these people eventually end up working at companies that _do_ have such systems. Anecdata: a friend of mine recently found a clever hack that increased ad revenue on a major product by some fraction of a percent for one of the world's largest internet companies. His bonus that year was equivalent to a down payment on a nice house.
My brother is an industrial engineer. His job is literally "make processes more efficient."
As in, "This month, I increased the yield efficiency by X percent, saving the company Y millions of dollars per year in perpetuity"
It'd be great for him if he got some sort of commission off those gains, but he is paid pretty well to do what he does, and he enjoys the work.
Increases in efficiency are great for profits, but they are also the reason prices of things come down over time.
For that specific example, it's because there was no risk on your end for developing the product. To capture it's value the IP would have needed to be developed outside the company and licensed to it. But that's way more risky.
> So why should I have ever gone above and beyond in the first place? Meanwhile my manager repeatedly complained to me that I only worked 9-5.
You shouldn't have, at least, not there. Clearly they had no clue how innovation happens and how to create an environment where the type of people who innovate ends up.
I suspect it works this way because to put it into software architecture terms, the trust is a microservice delivery model prerequisite, so people can loosely couple as needed to efficiently work on blockers. I find it ironic that many laypeople see the US military as a rigidly stratified, top-down command and control organization, but speaking to many military members, I find the amount of trust (once earned) placed in startlingly young and junior members far exceeds most commercial organizations. Despite all the military war stories of ineptitude and incompetence, I don't think it is a coincidence that compared to the average commercial organization, the military is still perceived by many to "get 'er done".
This is fantastically difficult to achieve because it requires a from-the-top commitment to developing human, empathic leadership on top of management (which is already a difficult to master skill set by itself). It takes enormous emotional guts and vulnerability to be in that kind of leadership; I know it would challenge my personal limits for sure, possibly even break them. This takes decades of continuous work without interruption through top leadership succession evolutions.
My point is that there are places where your contribution to the overall success is more directly related to what you are paid, however many people don't want to work at those places because it involves significantly more risk.
Let's say you have a nearly 100% chance of making $50k for the next 10 years for a total of $500k. Alternatively you can take a 10% chance at making $5 million total over the next 10 years. The reason that there is potential for a larger payout in the second job is because you are taking a greater risk. If you were working at a company where someone else was taking the risk, then the rewards likely flowed to those people.
For many young people, their first job gives them some data points about what they are actually capable of delivering so they can choose to work at places that trend toward rewarding contribution (startup, self-employed, etc.) or at places that don't (like your company) based on what type of performance they are capable of providing.
So companies are effectively driving their employees towards creating future competition, as that seems to be the only way left for inventors to capture the value they create.
Or future complimentary product/service. A company that runs call centers doesn't wanna make call center software but if they can buy call center SaaS (or whatever) that makes them more efficient they're happy and the guy they're buying from is happy.
It's unfortunate that the only way to capture the value of my innovation might have been "well, just be an owner instead of a worker."
Capital was the foundation for Marxism's development, not the final stage. It's more a case of critique of laisez-faire imperialist capitalism, than anything else.
Please remember that I was responding to a comment, not making an abstract statement that communists never give out awards. The grandparent had said that it would be good if communists and socialists were more generous with awards than capitalists, and I was making the case that it would be antithetical to the typical communist ideology.
In Soviet Russia you worked for people. At Amazon you work for the Machine.
Your offhand comment is pithy, but ridiculous on its face.
First, in most companies it's very hard to say who exactly managed to increase the profit. Is it you who came up with the idea? Is it your boss who picked this specific idea out of fifty other ideas you came up with last week? Is it the QA team who managed to catch the bug which would've erased all the profits? Is it HR who hired you among other candidates?
Second, no, the remaining is not $460k. In a Big Greedy Corporation I work an average annual cost of employee in "primary" location is around $200k (pre-covid). It includes office space, technology, infrastructure, salary, taxes, fees, insurances and so on.
Third, that's the premium the company gets for the risk. Intern will get his salary no matter what. The company makes a bet though. You want to own part of that risk? Build your own company.
Also, the company probably only has to pay those $40k to $200k in salary costs for a few years, but the benefits derived from the work might outlive it. There's nothing stopping anyone from firing an employee just because they previously made a massive contribution to the company's financial success. Why keep the cow if you can get the milk for free?
So it might even be the full $500k in pure profits after the 2nd year.
* Does it require a big capital investment? the company provides that.
* Is it risky? The company gets a risk premium.
* Does it need a bunch of specialized resources? the company needs to provide those.
* More subtly, is it net-new or incremental value? Providing a company with something that boosts what they already do isn't evaluated on the incremental increase because you can't realize them without the previous baseline.
There are countless factors measuring value-add, making it extremely hard to allocate back to a single cog in the machine - unless you're a startup with very few cogs, hence they're responsible for all value (or costs).
If you want to be evaluated based solely on your individual contribution, put yourself into a situation where this is possible, i.e. do it all yourself. Otherwise join the broader team and take the benefits and costs that comes with that.
What if the advancement is in the wrong direction in the market? Like Windows Mobile was. You could have built a great system that delivered a few hundred million in sales, but two years down the road it cost the company a few billion in costs. Do you get to pay back your share?
I'm not advocating here for the work to be uncompensated - it's just when you get a risk shield, you also lose the payout shield.
Maybe a better culture of coop's would be a better solution.
If someone who can consistently deliver great value to a company is let go, they can go elsewhere and provide their value as a consultant or employee. You seem to think the company has no competition and doesn't need to compete with other businesses in the marketplace. I think you are also overlooking the fact that most interns are hired to see if they will be good to bring on full time. Some of them turn out to not provide substantial value. If an internship is how you are demonstrating your value to an employer, then your contribution is being average across all the interns that don't contribute anything or much of anything.
It isn't that we need to decide exactly who contributed proportionally and how much of the profits we get. We're really just reaching for something that increases wages faster than raises.
And really it highlights the issue that not only is it hard to get fair profit-sharing, it's also hard to get market-competitive raises.
But of course a company is going to say it's hard to decide who gets how much, because they have an incentive to pay their employees as little as possible, regardless if it's through base wages, raises, or profit sharing. There always seems to be an excuse.
not sure if you misspoke or I don't get your point
>> fair profit-sharing
"Fair" is just a trigger that one side uses to put the other on the defensive. Companies by their very nature a designed to share profits with their owners, i.e. legal shareholders. If you want profit sharing guaranteed join an employee-owned cooperative or alternative structured org.
If I can't get raises that keep up with inflation or competitive market rates, I'm going to try and argue that I should seek other options for making more money. One of those options would be profit-sharing. Another option is job hopping, which tech enjoys as a luxury.
I was with you until your last line. You don't have to build your own company - you can simply go after a job at a company that understands how beneficial it is to align the incentives of its owners and employees.
There plenty of ways to give workers a piece of the pie: there are full-on co-ops (at one end of the spectrum), and there are more watered-down implementations like stock options, ESPP plans, etc., all of which allow the worker to take on some of the risk and share some of the gains.
Plenty of companies also distribute simple profit-sharing bonuses, which (arguably) don't require the employee to take on any risk at all.
They are too large to give new employees significant stock options, yet too small to pay FAANG-competititve rates. So you're starting with less salary and no stock. If you now have an egomaniac boss who thinks his own personal brilliance is always the cause for the company's got fate, then there's a good chance he will just take credit for your invention and your bonus is gone.
And in slightly larger companies, chances are someone in the management chain will take credit for it and get the bonus. There's a reason why in most companies, you can never talk directly to the upper management: Middle management has strong financial incentives to prevent that.
Because of the guidelines of this community:
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Plenty of risk for the employee though!
Not every job has the potential for such things. "Good work" is different than profitability. A factory line worker can be the hardest working and best worker on the planet, and not increase company profits more than a few dollars an hour. That's the point about how we now value work differently. We place value on work that has direct and immediate impact on the bottom line. We don't value the hard work that goes into just keeping the doors open from day to day.
I chose to argue the way I did, because it is much easier to start at that end of the spectrum. If highly skilled highly productive employees who contributed massively to the company's bottom line cannot extract a fair share of the value in exchange for their work, then it's easy to convince someone that less skilled labor has these problems, too.
What is the definition of fair share?
When you are shopping for something, how do you determine what the fair price is to pay?
If I buy a car that enables me to earn $500k per year, do I owe the seller of the car more than someone who buys the same car to earn $50k per year?
If a significant part of the population work more than one job, try actively to reach this sort of life, and hardly achieve it, then something is broken.
I don't which policy will make us closer to this sort of fairness, but that's the only bottom line that interests me.
It’s government policies that impact all businesses that get us closer to that fairness. Any single business that chooses to pay outsized amounts for their COGS, including labor, will get crushed in the larger market. There might be some like Costco and Apple that can afford to pay more, but they serve middle upper class customers and have a unique product.
For everyone else, people will choose to shop at the place that sells bread for 50 cents less.
Two-thirds of people who file for bankruptcy cite medical issues as a key contributor to their financial downfall.
While the high cost of health care has historically been a trigger for bankruptcy filings, the research shows that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has not improved things.
What most people do not realize, according to one researcher, is that their health insurance may not be enough to protect them.People are paid what it costs to replace them, not the profit they generate. The less replaceable you are, the more of the profit you get.
Price (pay) is the intersection of supply and demand, and nothing else.
That is why factory workers in the US got outsourced. That is why when deciding what you are going to sell for the rest of your life, you should go for something that few others are able to sell.
And everyone does this, it’s not some evil business plan. No one pays $5 more for the same loaf of bread. Everyone I know pays the least amount they have to. Creating a floor for that is the government’s job, not an individual business (and it can’t anyway, since it has to compete).
Nothing makes the CEO happier to know that you believe it is the employee's fault their jobs got outsourced, and not the fault of the CEO who wanted to maximize profit at the cost of millions of good paying American union jobs that actually helped families, communities, and created the 'American Dream', all so they could afford the status that brings when they show their new multi million dollar sailboat at the regatta. The job that was outsourced still needed to be done, someone still had to do it.
American Dream cannot exist in a world with limited resources. It only existed in a rapidly expanding resource pool - taking lands from natives, creating new tech, freeing up resources by killing millions of people or digging up stuff from the ground.
As such - it's not CEOs job to maintain your job, specially when those CEOs are pushed by your own pension fund managers to move your job somewhere more efficient.
And finally - global poverty has dropped significantly because of that outsourcing. Ignoring that is literally being the "they toork R jerbs" South Park charachter.
Returns to owning land and housing (rents) have gone up. That has come at the expense of both returns to labor, and returns to all other kinds of capital (stock ownership, etc.). This is obvious. Stock market returns aren't what they used to be. Banks are making 4% on mortgages, versus 8% back in the day. The country is awash in 0% financing for cars, refrigerators, etc.
There is increasing inequality in how labor income is distributed. CEO salaries have gone up, programmer salaries have gone up, but secretary salaries have stagnated. But that's a separate issue than returns to capital ownership going up.
Also: https://wolfstreet.com/2015/11/04/corporate-profits-are-the-... Under "This is a new America" you can watch corporate profits grow and grow.
But both your source and my source are 5 years old already. A lot has changed since then.
You can't have your cake and eat it too; get all the reward without any of the risk.
But let’s assume we can attach a net dollar amount to each job and the company let’s go people that don’t contribute as much as they cost. Even in this case the company still loses out from the intern. That money still need to come from somewhere, most likely from profit derived from other employees.
The point is “the intern increased the company’s profit by 500k annually but only gets paid 40k” is not the problem it’s made out to be. That 500k wasn’t created out of thin air. There were other employees in supporting functions that made it possible. That extra 460k goes to pay for them too, as well as for the employees that aren’t as productive. Those are the risks the company takes on.
I think a really good example is a story from Google. An intern changed the compression of the Google logo on the search page and shaved off a few bytes. Since Google serves that page billions of times, that saved google a 10's of thousands of dollars a year, and was literally minutes of work. If the same intern did the same work anywhere else, it would have been almost worthless.
It's because of this that I try to work as little as possible, preferably remotely. I claim to the company that I work 8 hours, in reality I work between 4 to 6 hours, and if I'm really quick, simply 2 hours (happens rarely).
That's how I keep my "profit", and if I meet expectations it's good enough for me. I don't think they'd be happy once they find out.
The idea there's some large gap between value provided and value paid is unstable and completely unsustainable.
As for owning stocks, pretty much everyone can. Robinhood has $0 commissions and sells fractional shares. There's no reason why people can't buy stocks.
What about the people who don't or can't do good work, though?
Your comment is all about better compensation for what amount to elite software developers. And elite software developers are already well compensated. Maybe not as well as they should be by your calculus, but still "well" in comparison to the people the grandparent comment was talking about.
Even this pandemic, sadly, creates opposing interests. Younger people need workplaces to operate. Older people are more susceptible to the virus. Since the stock markets are fine, retired people don't generally have financial interests at stake.
Total value of U.S. stock market is $35T and given the traditional 4% "safe" withdrawal formula, it is about 7% of GDP or 10% of overall income, as profits. About half of it going to the top 0.01%.
Problem maybe is that there are no highly paid jobs available for unqualified young people anymore.
And the work indeed is more bullshit than it used to be! I'm afraid we cannot turn back the clock on this one, so we have to find another way.
eyes UBI
At the end of the day it’s more important that people can meet their needs, and if UBI does that, a lot of people will be able to improvise some interesting things to apply themselves to, which I think will be great for them. But a lot of people will also sit on the couch and watch TV all day, feeling there’s no point to life. We’ll have all kinds of new and unforseeable second order effects.
I also worry that the fundamental problem is not so much income but cost of living. The way things work today, any amount of UBI that you pay but just drive up the rent. If we don’t significantly increase housing supplies to meet demand, I don’t see how we can break that loop.
I think the remaining work will be such more meaningful that it will be net dealienation. I think less stress and more free time begets curiosity, so I think it's fair to say people could get a lot out of work than they do from their current drudgery.
In the long term, think large amounts of leisure time but ones does "tours of duty" in each of the core industries that power modern society as part of liberal education of how society functions.
> I also worry that the fundamental problem is not so much income but cost of living. The way things work today, any amount of UBI that you pay but just drive up the rent. If we don’t significantly increase housing supplies to meet demand, I don’t see how we can break that loop.
See https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/universal-basic-income-... for the results of some modeling. Rent in absolute terms and as a portion of income went down!
That has a lot of implications, and none of them good IMO.
As for a real job, well, let's say that in Spain, it's complicated
Massive Caveat: I've not lived in Spain for over 20 years though I have friends and family
This seems like an obvious place to look if you're looking for reasons why 25-30 year olds don't have much money.
I won't argue that one, but where do you draw the line with
> have no real job yet
I would argue that as long as you are working, you have a real job.
Probably the best would be to track both 25-30 and 18-30 and see how it changes.
If you're working nights in a warehouse while you finish your degree that will get you into an industry with nearly six figure starting salaries then I would argue that you're not "working yet" you're just a student with income.
Or what about blue collar workers who aren't going to school, and are at that same warehouse? Are they not working at a real job?
That being the case, I think that the study would be best off tracking those 18-30 who are living individually and are not attending school. Thoughts?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/most-americans-dont-have-the...
This is money for when you lose your job for instance
Your appetite for risks and circumstances determine how big it should be (a good rule of thumb is six months worth of salary) but there are countless stories of people trying to be clever with their emergency funds and storing them in ETFs or riskier investments only to find that when the need comes, their fund is not enough and get in financial distress.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
These people struggle to pay rent each month let alone think about "investments".
Sure you will lose a little bit, like 2 or 3% a year. But if you have nothing saved then what will you do in case of an emergency? such as losing a job?
That is exactly how social classes are distinguished in Marxism: "[T]he class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live"
It's not working class wages haven't risen, they have. But, the costs of housing, healthcare, education and many other necessities have risen at a much faster pace, particularly in cities. These rises in cost are of course profits to someone so the economy is "booming. But it's become so distorted that it's becoming increasingly hard to keep up for the lower wage earners with no end in site. Of course the owners of assets don't see the problem. Their properties and stocks are appreciating nicely. And the fed has been encouraging this.
Now, one argument might be that if this wasn't occurring that low wage earners would be even worse off with no jobs and and there may be some validity to that point of view but the inequality of this isn't just an abstract ethical problem at this point but rather a system threatening problem. I don't know that there is an easy fix either. It often seems trying to fix one problem with rent controls, wage floors, progressive taxation etc. results in other problems. But the increase in costs of housing, medical care etc. while wages grow at a much slower rate isn't sustainable imo.
Tech corporations are essentially empty shells; their market caps are not based on the value that they create for society but on the rate of money printing by the reserve banks of the world.
Because tech corporations are not subjected to free market forces like everybody else, they eventually lose their ability to create new value (and the kinds of people who join these companies and stay there do not have a value creator mindset). Indeed, if you compare the price of S&P500 companies relative to most stable-value commodities such as gold, it would seem that the S&P500 hasn't grown at all in the last 5 years. However, S&P500 correlates strongly with the growth in M1 and M2 money supply. This indicates that the growth in nominal price of stocks in the past 5 years is entirely artificial.
Young tech workers cannot compete with corporations because the playing field is not even. If your competitor is getting free money from someone, how can you possibly compete with them in any market?
This is why all young people in tech these days are eventually absorbed into corporations. Whether through employment or phony acqui-hire. It's also why big corporations like Google used to buy up startups and then kill the project immediately afterwards. It's mostly phony money transfer with hidden motives and it's not related to value creation.
Could you elaborate on your statements about tech market caps being dependent on reserve bank printing money?
Also, what does it mean that tech companies are not subject to the same market forces as everyone else? They are in direct competition with the next software firm - they seem to want to overcome this by building a pervasive tech ecosystem that forces users to be dependent on their software.
All currencies of the world are free-floating and not backed by anything and reserve banks keep constantly printing new currency and injecting it into the economy either via 'loans' through regular banks or through government contracts (since the Fed gives the government free money to pay for employees and big corporate contracts like the $10 billion one they gave to Microsoft recently).
For the past 10 years, we've had a situation such that interest rates have been at 0% and reserve requirements by banks have kept getting lower (since COVID19, they're 0%). This allows regular banks to print as much money as they like; whenever a bank makes a loan, they just type new currency into existence into someone's account. Also, the Fed has been buying toxic assets (such as bad corporate and mortgage debt) from the market (again using money that they just 'printed' into existence and backed by nothing).
This has created an economic situation with a lot of hidden inflation; most of it ends up inflating stock prices because corporations and their shareholders use bank loans to buyback their shares from the market; this causes artificial high demand for the stock and drives up the price (this is why corporations today have such low P/E ratios and pay low dividends relative to share price).
A lot of the buy orders on the market today are backed by debt (either which the corporation took out themselves to do buybacks or that of insiders or third-parties who have an interest in seeing the stock price go up).
Insiders understand that if interest rates can stay at 0% forever (which is what MMT advocates are promoting), then they will always be able to keep borrowing more money later to pay off their old debts because the stock price will always go up... And if the next generation comes along and starts doing the same thing (buying corporate stocks using debt), then each new generation ends up paying off the debts of the previous generation.
Note that this scheme works even if the financial instrument has nothing of economic value behind it. It's also why cryptocurrencies have been able to hold up such good valuations in spite of people paying for electricity to mine Bitcoin. They just restrict the supply, borrow money from banks, buy the asset, then in the future, someone else will take a loan to buy it and further drive up the price (and you'll be able to pay off your debt).
Banks do require collateral to give loans, but the problem is that a lot of the collateral these days is intangible and so people can just claim that the market price is the true value of the collateral... Which creates a vicious cycle and allows people to take bigger and bigger loans.
And the reason why corporations are not on an even playing field is because their executives and employees become wealthy from constant stock appreciation (fueled by collective debt) and then they invest in each other's businesses and award each other big contracts which keeps the currency circulating between themselves.
Echo chambers created by social media today help to prevent money from flowing between different classes of people. The big money tends to stay within the corporate sphere and is secured by a large network of venture capitalists and investors who only invest in people within that corporate sphere.
Any flow of money out of the corporate sphere can pose a major threat because it could pop the bubble when people realize how much more value they can get on the outside for the same money.
Perhaps a more pertinent question would be: How long can this continue?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
(As an aside, the IRA and 401(k) were introduced in 1973 and 1978, respectively- a great way to trick the public into thinking that runaway cash valuation was a valuable move for America.)
Many people don't think it will continue for long, which is why everyone's buying guns, I guess.
With ZIRP it can continue for a long time.
Political intervention will come sooner. Keep your eye on the 2024 election, as that's predicted to be the first election where Millennials and younger will be the majority of the electorate.
The government can't just keep giving corporations a free ride using free fiat credit and expect the currency to retain its value and reputation. The only thing holding the value of the world's currencies right now is coercion by governments.
But the system always seems to open up opportunities for contrarians and dissidents to make a profit by going against the flow. The stronger the coercive force is, the higher the risk, the bigger the opportunity - There will always be people willing to take risks, no matter how big because the rewards are always proportional.
25 % of people in the uk have < 1k in savings
I wouldn't say that. I am 24 and I have some pretty incredible tools in my pocket right now that someone in 1991 couldn't have even dreamed of. The problem is, instead of owning a good car or having an apartment to live in, I have the pinnacle-of-technology swiss-army knife of information processors (smart phone, macbook pro, desktop computer) within reach. That is where I think the value of things have changed over time. It went from the opportunity to _have_ to the opportunity to _learn_
If the library didn’t have it, you could hit a small book store, whose specialty was romance novels for local farm wives.
Basically, anything you would actually want would be special order, hoping the book dealer knew what you were talking about in the first place.
(Ironically, an actual Swiss army knife can provide the first 2 better)