It always blows my mind a bit when people talk about the productivity gains of the future coming from cutting-edge "sci-fi" technology.

I've seen with my own eyes the insane productivity gains some knowledge workers can get simply through the use of hacky-but-effective domain-specific Python scripts. We're talking one person producing more benefit than an entire team by an order of magnitude.

I'm sure there are other tried-and-true technologies that simply aren't rolled out widely enough and constitute a massive amount of economic low-hanging fruit (especially in the developing world).

I'd push for them before I look to the stars for the next miracle technology.

Reminds me of "93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs":

https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/

I saw some similar things in the accounting department at my previous employer, and on the flip side I've met many people who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time doing steps that a computer could do, but worse.

I think the important bit is to have tight integration between the person writing the code and the person with the domain-specific knowledge that the code is performing - ideally they should be the same person.

As we move away from seeing computer programming as a specialised skill for a class of elite engineers and towards something just generally useful like reading and writing, I can see this yielding huge dividends economically.

That’s not meant as flattery, it’s just pointing out that the efficiency gains of universal computer literacy will not be realized.

> will not be realized.

Not quickly, but give it a few decades. In particular, you will probably have to wait for another generation of teachers.

Exactly this. Not everyone can work for Google (or even for a B-grade software firm!), but in many instances all you need to do is string a couple of libraries together in order to get order-of-magnitude productivity gains.

I disagree - we spend years from age two teaching literacy. It's a skill that needs practise, but it's a relatively new invention that has enormous benefits. Software is too.

(Mind blowing fact: The walls of jericho were built 2,000 years before writing was invented)

We had a data hunting that would go out into supermarkets and collect data, but oftentimes with errors. Supervisors would sift through all of them and spend 4-5 hours a day removing/fixing/joining faulty entries.

I saw that, wrote two Python scripts to automate it (~2 weeks from start to deployment). All that workload automated immediately, and to my knowledge it's still in use today.

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“You’ve just done in two hours what it takes the three of us two days to do.” My college roommate was working at a retail electronics store in the early 2000s. Occasionally, the store would receive a spreadsheet of thousands of product prices from other stores. A team of three employees would print the spreadsheet onto a thick stack of paper and split it among themselves. For each product price, they would look up their store’s price and note all the products that their competitors sold for less. It usually took a couple of days.

“You know, I could write a program to do that if you have the original file for the printouts,” my roommate told them, when he saw them sitting on the floor with papers scattered and stacked all around.

After a couple of hours, he had a short program that read a competitor’s price from a file, found the product in the store’s database, and noted whether the competitor was cheaper. He was still new to programming, so he spent most of his time looking up documentation in a programming book. The actual program took only a few seconds to run. My roommate and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day.

This is the power of computer programming. A computer is like a Swiss Army knife that you can configure for countless tasks. Many people spend hours clicking and typing to perform repetitive tasks, unaware that the machine they’re using could do their job in seconds if they gave it the right instructions.

If only that was what actually happened when people took initiative in this way...

I worked at an international company with its own terrible email marketing system.

I wrote my own email builder based on their templates that allowed me to visually build emails and then just copy and paste in the code!

I also wrote a Ruby script that iterated over a CSV/Excel spreadsheet file supplied on a regular basis to generate HTML page, which I then pasted into their horrible CMS!

The previous person in my job used to have to do all those things manually and it took forever!

The key win for me was convincing the head of IT to enable WSL on my work supplied Windows 10 Laptop!

Having access to Linux made everything possible!

I've seen many shops where the amount of code for dev and QA tools significantly exceeds whatever product they ship.

There was a whole team of people doing this job and this one script got through what a whole team of engineers were doing in about 30 seconds

What about the camp that is worried that paper wealth doesn't revert to norms? I mean, if a person doesn't already own a house, then inflated prices work against them.

While some metropolises such as Tokyo seem to be set up well for providing housing at a wide range of price points, others such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles do a much worse job; there are some people who regularly commute 2-3 hours each way from these metro areas because this is all they can afford, yet the job markets in the Central Valley (near the Bay Area) or the Inland Empire and Antelope Valley (both near Los Angeles) areas are rather anemic at best. For many of these people, the choice isn't between a condo in Fremont versus a single-family house in Tracy. Instead, it's an apartment in a place like Stockton or Modesto versus moving outside of the orbit of the Bay Area; that's how bad the housing crisis has gotten for many people.

The chief cause of this is zoning regulations and other policies in the Bay Area and Los Angeles that discourage denser development, thus encouraging sprawl further and further out; hence, the "drive until you qualify" phenomenon. The normalization of mega-commuting has social and environmental consequences.

Yes, there are cheaper metro areas, but these cheaper metro areas tend to offer fewer job opportunities compared to the more popular metro areas. Part of what fueled the social divide between "blue state" and "red state" America is economic opportunity being increasingly concentrated in a handful of coastal metro areas, while these opportunities have largely failed to trickle down to much of rural America and the Rust Belt.

What's needed are two solutions: 1. Change the zoning policies of certain metro areas in order to accommodate the demand through densification instead of sprawl. 2. Find ways to encourage the economic development of areas outside of the coasts.

> there are some people who regularly commute 2-3 hours each way from these metro areas because this is all they can afford, yet the job markets in the Central Valley (near the Bay Area) or the Inland Empire and Antelope Valley (both near Los Angeles) areas are rather anemic at best.

Just move. If you don’t, I find it hard to be sympathetic. Family w/e you can make it work. This is peak American bullshit to drive 2 hours each way to work and if you are putting up with that it’s on you.

I don't mind doing a long commute once or twice a week, especially when I have flexible work hours, but anything more often than that becomes draining.

Disclaimer: I grew up poor and I have relatives who lived in public housing; the environments they lived in were very rough, not only in terms of the quality of housing, but also in terms of living in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Now, I'm not saying that public housing has to be that way; I've heard good things about Singapore's public housing.

The only thing that Americans might hate about it is that they are universally 30 story concrete apartment buildings that Singapore is selling to its citizens at affordable costs. If you want detached, that is the private market and will cost a lot.

Maybe an "opportunity" that doesn't provide a living wage isn't actually an opportunity at all?

- The Amtrak San Joaquins train (https://www.amtrak.com/san-joaquins-train) connects Stockton with Richmond, where passengers can transfer to BART.

- For those headed to Silicon Valley, the Altamont Commuter Express runs from Stockton to San Jose (https://acerail.com)

I'm looking forward to the California High Speed Rail project being completed. This will make a commute from places like Merced, Madera, and Fresno much more feasible. Currently it's possible to drive from San Jose to Fresno in less than three hours; the bullet train will likely cut the duration of this trip by half.

I agree with you; it would be nice to see some nice transit-oriented developments spring up around train stations in the Central Valley.

(at least in my experience of like everyone I know).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/housing/bloc-1a.h...

What is the problem again? Rich people getting less rich? Imaginary number of net wealth getting lower?

incredibly convenient to just dismiss those people who lost wealth this way, and claim that the "truly wealthy" is to be blamed.

- retirement plans often rely on equity from real estate, and so do some nursing home admissions

- as per 2008, when people have more money remaining on a mortgage than the underlying asset (home) is worth, some of them will declare bankruptcy

- when rich people suddenly have a lot less nominal cash, they can't fund their businesses by liquidating assets, so they cut costs, and then those costs have to find new jobs, which can take years and is hugely disruptive for everyone[0]

Overall there's an argument to be made for doing it anyway, but there are pretty clear downsides to causing an economic crisis, even if the economy eventually reaches a better equilibrium state.

[0] note that I'm not supporting trickle-down economics, just warning about the disruption that suddenly changing the distribution of wealth will cause

If we can come up with a consistent policy scheme(taxation and incentives) which can undo land ownership as being a sure-fire way to build wealth(maybe a land value tax?) then it's perhaps not so bad to have a nation of renters.

I think people are biased towards assuming the first one whereas the are structural reasons relating to Ray Dalio's long term debt cycle argument why the latter is more likely at this specific moment even though historically the former happens more than the latter.

These investments may be overvalued and if prices change, owners will find they're not as wealthy as they thought, but they'll own the same thing.

Also, what does it mean to say that wealth is "tied up" in real estate? Prices going up doesn't change anything real. The effect might be more resources going into construction and renovation, though.

Debt and financial derivatives backed by inflated asset prices might be the problem, as in 2008. Those income streams might be less solid than they look.

It seems to me that wealth isn't being lost. It's being transferred to those wealthy, smart, or lucky enough to have invested in real estate.

Real estate is a seniority system.

However, sometimes the transfer is via inheritance and sometimes it’s by selling property. I wonder to what extent retirement could be considered to be funded by real estate sales? It’s certainly something people do: sell the house and move somewhere cheaper.

If paper wealth takes a shit the people that will be impacted will be retirees and the wealthy, not your average joes.

I think that in the fullness of time, it will be seen that today’s high asset prices were directly and unambiguously a consequence of extremely low interest rates and the creation of money by central banks and nothing more than that. When returns on lending are low, investors have to switch to riskier asset classes in order to generate the returns that they need to service their future cash flow requirements. For example, pension funds have to generate a certain amount of cash flow to cover their future pension liabilities, which are fixed and unchangeable. When central banks make money cheaper by lowering interest rates, pension funds have to shift to classes of assets that generate higher cash flow, even if that means taking on more risk. They don’t really have a choice in the matter.

There is a positive feedback loop here. Low interest rates cause large investors like pension funds to shift to riskier assets. This stimulates the risk appetite of retail investors, who pile in when they see the trend of increasing prices in these riskier assets, such as stocks and houses. The increase in asset prices reduces the effective returns on those assets, forcing pension funds another large investors to shift to even riskier things, like venture capital. Rinse and repeat.

I suppose nobody can say for sure that there hasn’t been some kind of long-term shift in global economic growth because of changes in technology, but it sure seems to me like cheap money is a more reasonable explanation for all of the craziness we have been seeing in the past year or two.

I'm not so sure - it depends on how heavily leveraged buyers are and what % of them have used price increases to secure more capital. If your home has significantly appreciated in value but you haven't taken equity out of it, it could be said that you were leaving money on the table but only if you knew of a better investing opportunity. If you just let the property appreciate and didn't securitize that gain, a decline from peak values doesn't hurt because you have no loan to service.

This source [1] also says HELOCS or 2nd mortgages are only 8% of owners, 1/2 of what they were in 2009. But that was 2018 maybe pandemic upped the %.

So to get another 2007 meltdown this thesis would be that a lot of people would have to lose their jobs first. Interest rates going up wouldn't matter if they make the same (or more) money.

But could argue collapsing real estate values would cause weak job market.

[https://www.socialexplorer.com/blog/post/once-viewed-as-easy...]

The problem with this is in what the Fed does with the new money. They currently use it to buy back government debt, which goes to the rich, i.e. existing bondholders. What they should do is to give it out to all citizens equally, which is the opposite of screwing the poor.

By magical means of course.

Inflation is a sneaky way to give the poor a wage cut. How else do you suppose the fed is supposed to be able to increase employment using inflation?

Edit: down voted, ok here is a citation from an economics Nobel laureate:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

> when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation would lead to lower unemployment

By its very nature, giving laborers inflation-matching pay raises counters the explicit, intended policy effect of using inflation to increase employment. Or, your employment model could be relying on "let's use increasing prices to light a fire under people's asses to get them to look for jobs". Which, if you ask me, as a neoliberal programme is far crueler, far more pernicious, than any slash-public-services scheme that fiscal conservatives dream up.

Suppose we print a bunch of new money and hand it out to everybody. Now people have money in their pockets and want to spend it, so demand goes up, so prices go up, and we get inflation.

But most goods and services have elastic supply. We can make more of most things given higher demand. So companies make more of stuff and have to hire more people to do it; unemployment goes down. Hiring people is supply and demand again. Demand goes up, wages go up.

Then, if you stop printing money, the demand (in real dollars) goes back to the original level once prices and wages have both increased. If you continue to do so (i.e. a constant rate of inflation), the extra demand is sustained by the continuous infusion of money.

Now suppose you do the same thing, but instead of giving the new money to individuals, you give it to the rich, or to borrowers in the form of low interest rates. They use it to bid up housing prices. Then people have to work more to afford the same house or apartment, which lowers unemployment. This is obviously bad and screws the poor.

The most important thing is who gets the new money. It needs to go to individuals, not borrowers, not institutions.

Government by its very nature must generally give out newly created money to the wealthy (handing out money to the public directly does not get low income housing built, or highways, or military bases, or warships, or scientific research... To "get shit done" you must give it to already-wealthy contractors), and by its current construction, the interest payments to create that money goes to banks. Now if you want to argue that "government maybe should not be doing a lot of that shit", perhaps you do have a concrete proposal for reducing the wealth divide.

Why?

Last year they sent everyone a check. They could do that.

Sure, they can do that sort of thing from time to time to make people like you happy, but the primary spending of government, as in, "to do shit", cannot be structured like that.

Are you arguing that 100% of government spending should be stimulus checks?

I'd be down. Count me in on your reform program.

In a bout of inflation, not all prices increase at the same rate at the same time; this is known as the Cantillon effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon).

The rich own assets, they financed these assets with debt. Debt becomes less burdensome with inflation, increasing their equity.

At the same time, lendors lose with inflation. But who are the predominant lendors now? Life insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, household / nonprofits, state and local govts., etc.

All of these institutions seem to be an aggregation of middle-class / poorer people vs. elites.

If you're Elon Musk you own Telsa. You're main source of liquidity is likely cash from a revolver[1]. During inflation, your debt becomes relatively smaller to your Tesla equity. Your net equity becomes larger.

I think this just leads to more inequality, more corporate control, and weaker labor bargaining power.

We'll see - hope its ok.

[1] form of debt, where Elon is the lendee and is using Tesla stock as the collateral

This is a pretty bold statement given that it is the opposite of all conventional wisdom, and historically those concerned with the poor have argued that inflation is a way for the rich to rob the poor. For example, the "misery index" in the 70s was the sum of inflation and unemployment, because it tracked how much wages were falling and how much unemployment there was.

So this "new economics" that says inflation is good for the poor is pretty stunning -- is it something you figured out on your own or do you have a reference for statisticians or economists making this case?

> Statistically, the wealthy have way more cash than the poor, while the wage-earning population will get increased income along with inflation.

Let's take a look at what is going on:

Over the past year inflation is up 6.2%, so let's deflate:

    - real SP500: +25% 
    - real bonds: -7.8% (PIMCO total return)[2]
    - real wages: -1.2% (using BLS data)[1]

Now definitions of "rich" are always arbitrary, but if you are rich you have most of your wealth in the form of assets -- stocks, bonds, etc. If you are poor, most of your wealth is your future labor - wages. That's another way of saying that the rich make money from passive income while the poor have to work.

So inflation reduces wages but the effect on passive income is mixed. Stocks go up and bonds go down. A typical wealthy person will own a mix of stocks and bonds and will generally own more stocks than bonds, so on balance their holding of equity protects them and their wealth still increases. But that's not true for the poor, who have only their wages.

This is why conventional wisdom about inflation mostly hurting the poor is correct, and the galaxy-brain takes that inflation helps the poor and hurts the rich is incorrect. Wealthy people can shield themselves from the rising cost of consumption while the poor cannot.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.htm

[2] https://www.pimco.com/en-us/investments/mutual-funds/total-r...

Also the elephant in the room is that property taxes are a derivative of your net worth, not your income. So if paper wealth (due largely to RE) continues to outpace income then we're in for a big hurting soonTM.

This is the hilarious part about critics against a wealth tax - we already have a wealth tax. I live Texas and people are about to have a brutal wake up call when they can't afford $10k/year in taxes because their $200k ranch they bought 5 years ago (and cost them $40k down) is now worth $500k.

Note - I have mixed feelings about the proposed wealth tax. The proposed implementation was misguided.

I do have a friend that has 100% service-connected disability... And Texas has a 0% property tax for veterans with that categorization. He's thinking about moving

But probably better if they didn't have zoning.

Climate change and sealife collapse is getting pretty serious for SE Asia and I don't know what to believe about India water supply.

These price fluctuations matter for people who either want to invest into real estate or withdraw previous investment, not for people who want to live in their current house.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but this is a terrible strategy. In a perfect world it cuts the interest payment a lot, but the risks are significant.

a lot of everyday people will tell you that just won’t happen. that governments perceive the risk of falling home values to be so large that they will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening.

That is one of the causes of high asset prices. Another is that cheaper debt allows more people to borrow money to buy assets.

> If paper wealth takes a shit the people that will be impacted will be retirees and the wealthy, not your average joes.

If paper wealth drops average joes will also be affected. Employment depends on consumer spending, and a big drop in asset prices can have a significant impact on spending through wealth effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_effect)

One camp is the "this time is different" camp and the other camp is the camp that has been proven correct (eventually) in every historical instance of an asset price bubble. It should be noted that the first camp ALWAYS has a very good argument (usually involving technological change) about why this time is in fact different, but it always turns out to not be different.

>Some of the smartest people I know are either in one camp or the other, [...]

And you believe them?