make money by doing stuff rather than having stuff, the latter of which is the epitome of economic rents.

Humanity as a whole? I don't think anyone has advocated that here, just a certain segment of the population in their later years. As for any living creature, I didn't spend any time doing anything productive over the weekend, and I think it was a good thing. In fact, I've been doing that every weekend for a long time, and I plan to keep doing it!

Doing enough work to survive is a fundamental part of life. Technology and society function to either make that work easier or lower the amount of work that needs to be done. Take either of those away and you're going to be spending much less weekends doing "nothing productive".

meta point is that this is why nuanced conversations on the (texted based) internet are a waste of time. You and the person you're quoting are not really talking about the same thing. In a conversation you would go back and forth and figure that out; on the internet that's not required.

The reason I responded to the parent comment was that it seemed to me like they were misinterpreting the person they were responding to; the original comment that started this thread was that people who only have wage-based income instead of asset-based income would not be able to effectively retire and would have to work for their entire life. The response to this was to argue that if people didn't work, then humanity wouldn't progress. I don't see why "humanity needs productivity to progress" implies "every human needs to be productive for every moment of their entire life", which is why I responded with both a direct answer (i.e. arguing that people should be able to retire is not arguing that people shouldn't be productive _ever_ in their life) and a tongue-in-cheek response (nobody actually is productive every single moment in their life).

It takes roughly a career to amass enough assets to retire on and that's with a slightly reduced standard of living in retirement.

Unless you want to assume population growth forever (seems unwise IMO) you need one average career to generate enough surplus to pay for an average retirement. So far, buying assets (usually a mix of real estate and fractional ownership of financial instruments that are ultimately backed by companies and governments) is the most efficient way we know to accomplish this goal.

To answer you first question/comment (because you are not as original as you think you are): That is why robust electorate, transparent public governance, and durable anti-corruption institutions are so important.

That is the point.

> And there's always intermediaries. And they always take a cut.

Should they not be compensated for their productive work?

> Maybe it's you that's not that original.

That is the point.

note the phrase "asset income being periphery", which implies an optimum. the ability to own one appreciating asset is great. owning two is probably ok in most cases. 90 is highly unlikely to provide a net social good.

Edit: sorry that was a bit snarky. The point is that there are other ways to ensure people have a reasonable lifestyle once their 'working days' are over. Those schemes are probably best to be tied in some way to contributions, but they certainly don't need to be simply a savings plan, they can be a means to provide social support for those that cannot contribute to the same degree as others.

again, that’s a logical leap that i was careful not to make. small-time investing can have positive externalities on an economic system; industrial, mechanized investing, not so much. if we didn’t try to turn everything related to money into a get-rich-quick gambling scheme instead of the (imperfect) accounting mechanism it was originated to be, we’d be much better off, pensions and 401(k)’s included.

And Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel in economics for her work describing the mechanisms used by real-world communities to effectively self-manage Commons: https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-princ...

offhand, i can't think of a practical and contemporary example of this though.

I'm not disagreeing with you re. what I'd rather see us move towards, but there's a whole lot of existing money and power entrenched in the idea that having money is a great way to continue having money.

Iron Law: During recessions capital always takes care of it's own and foists the losses onto the working class.

People buying homes in places that have only gone up in the last 40 years need to consider that that might keep going up for another decade, or they might be cresting the hill before correcting.

Homes going up is not the problem though. Yes, they've been going up for longer than 40 years, but back in the 1950's their growth was basically tracking inflation and wage growth, or even going down in value since they were seen an any other depreciable asset, just a place to live in till you die.

It's in the last 40 years that housing massively outgrown wages, as it became a speculatory investment vehicle instead of just being a place to live, plus the introduction of NIMBYISM regulations to restrict supply, and that's where the issue is.

How does one leverage to buy more real estate? Refinance one house to pay down the next one? I just went through a home loan process and this would never work because they look at total LTV and credit reports...

GSEs (Fannie, Freddie) let you lever up with a lot of real estate borrowing (~10 mortgages per person, with some wiggle room with creativity) before you have to go to a commercial bank to wrap the portfolio with a commercial loan or similar product.

All the money "made" from crypto was at the expense of other players(I refuse to call them "investors") who were left holding the bags, or at the expense of the environment (most of the large scale mining operations was done in areas of the world with cheap and dirty energy like China, Russia, Iran, etc.)

For example, some tech and semiconductor companies, because the whole world benefits from better compute (research for vaccines can be done faster; imaging for medical equipment results in better diagnostics; cars, engines and batteries can be simulated better and made safer and more efficient etc.) The whole world benefits.

"Investing" in crypto on the other hand, added zero value to society, or actually added negative value through the environmental damage being done.

That's not really what is at question here though. It's the concept of a pyramid scheme. The reason the stock market over long periods of time generally trends upwards is because new money keeps being added to it. It's as much of a pyramid as crypto is. That's just how the whole economy is though. Every generation so far has had more people than the last. It will be rather devastating to the stock market and economy whenever that stops being true.

Saving money is a smart idea unless you live in a communist state or a dictatorship, then your best bet is to spend as fast as you can or secure assets resistant to confiscation.

Maintaining liquidity is a smart idea unless you live in a world where the government decrees asset prices can never fall. In which case throwing everything you have into leverage is the best bet.

It's not an irrational bet that the Fed's hands will be permanently tied to a low interest rate environment. The more people who make that bet the more true it will be.

How is it plausible? I would say given the historical data, it is extremely unlikely. Not impossible, but near negligible probability.

People saying, “it’s different this time,” right before a economic crash is a cliche for a reason. I suspect that you could use the frequency of utterances to predict impending recessions / asset class corrections with extremely high accuracy.

Housing can return 20% per year until the end of time if the Fed wishes it to.

Will they this time? Who knows, but it generally pays to hedge a bit.