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Re:Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe? by imtringued on Thursday January 14, 2021 @06:13AM (#25774983)
As others have pointed out, people don't actually want "a nice car, a big house with a view on the ocean, 100% organic food and access to top level healthcare and education." all at once. They want a "good enough solution". Some of them are fine with an apartment with a view on the ocean. Some of them are fine with a house without a view on the ocean. Some of them want organic food, a lot of people eat junk food or processed food and like it.

This is basically a strawman that you built so that you can easily defeat it.

Think of the most extreme possible scenario. An economy where no human workers are needed and only capital is needed to build robots that are equally good workers as humans. The rich will own a lot of robots and no longer be dependent on human workers. Here is the problem. Since everyone else is unemployed, nobody can afford to buy your products. It is actually possible to get wealthier by giving to those who have nothing in this scenario because although the rich own robots, the robots are effectively worthless if they don't do any work. You don't even have to give that money away for free, you can just lend it out.

Lending doesn't work in existing economies because it is very difficult to get access to capital if you have no money to begin with. It's also a chicken and egg situation because you need money in consumer hands to drive demand which then drives more loans. If you spend your loans wastefully then the money will arrive in consumer hands by mere chance. So in theory if you just print an infinite amount of money some of it will trickle down eventually. That's the idiotic policy central banks around the world are following instead of giving out just (emphasis on just) enough money to get everyone back to work.

>Giving more money to everyone is easy, everyone was a billionaire in Zimbabwe few years back. That did not make them "rich".

There is an easy indicator for when to stop. You can stop handing out money once you have reached the 2% inflation goal.

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