I do diversify (not precious metals or crypto though). Real estate, cash, bonds, stocks. (I could use more international index funds, but see below.)

Still, my sense is that there won't be any safe havens. It will be global, it will be stocks, everyone will be poorer so real estate will be unsellable, inflation destroying cash holdings…

Serious question (I am no scholar on history), where were the safe harbors during the Great Depression?

My ignorant notion is that there were none. But if you held on to your stocks for a couple decades, you did fine … just not during those two decades though.

Real estate ETFs are worthless, they contain all the risks of a real estate investment with none of the upside (leveraging with non recourse debt, 1031, potential property tax incentives, etc).

Here's some pro-argument: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/n8llws/commen...

San Francisco public schools -- it was in the national news. Details of the theory associated with it include Stanford.. endless numbers of heavily slanted retellings, few primary sources. lots of obfuscated Board votes

It's not a strawman argument because he's arguing with people who cite "wealth inequality" on its own as a justification for riots. There isn't any limit or objective quantity attached to the argument - it's phrased in such a way that it can only be interpreted to mean absolute equality. Otherwise it'd be expressed differently, something like "if the gini coefficient is >X then rioting is OK, if it's <=X then violence is not the answer".

Obviously, people don't make that argument, and the implication is that they don't really want to be tied down to any actual existing real world situation. By extension there's no level of wealth inequality they would accept. Then one must wonder why not? Perhaps they just enjoy watching the left riot. Alternative explanations welcome.

Out of curiosity I looked for the house that couple is selling. Believe it's this: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/30206-Telluride-Ln-Evergr... Notice the price history. 83k in '97, which is about 170k now. Being sold for a 10x profit. Sigh.

> there is simply not enough resources, land, high paying jobs for everyone to achieve a comfortable life

On the contrary, (in the US) I think there is at least enough land and resources (including food) that a modest haircut on the ultra-rich would go a long way for the lower-middle classes.

> Society seems to be self correction mode by not having nearly as many babies recent years.

An interesting factoid from the Roman Empire is that in their later years there was a major fertility collapse to the point that various laws were passed in order to try to motivate fertility in various ways, and they ultimately failed.

I don't know what to take from that yet, if anything, but I think it's obvious that we've similarly entered well into an 'end of empire' type era, and fertility rates have also again collapsed. So again, I think it's simply interesting to ponder.

> I often think about why this is happening now without invoking the default "evil rich people" hypothesis.

What do you mean? In the French protests, the "evil rich people" hypothesis is very present. Every other protester was brandishing "tax the rich" placards.

>I often think about why this is happening now without invoking the default "evil rich people" hypothesis. I think it's because world population increased so fast in the last decades that there is simply not enough resources, land, high paying jobs for everyone to achieve a comfortable life.

You got it exactly backwards. Population growth meant lots of children that consume but don't produce anything. This generates demand for workers who produce but don't consume (e.g. parents). Now that population growth has stopped, there are no more new consumers and the existing consumers are saturating, because they already have everything they could possibly want, with the exception of high priced things like housing.

Rising house prices increase the obligation to work for money, but they don't generate demand for more work. This leads to demand saturation.

Rich people do not generate demand, because they invest their surplus only when they expect to obtain an even greater surplus, which means they increase supply, which leads to even faster market saturation. You can't invest your way out of saturation unless you are okay with negative returns.

Communism is wrong, because its appeal lies in the fact that people hate their bosses. It literally tells you employment is the problem even though there have been historical periods after wars where markets were not saturated and the demand for labor was high. Employment was objectively good for workers during those times.

To this day communists do not have a theory that explains why there is a structural demand deficit for labor. The obvious answer is the one I laid out above. There are people who provide more labor hours to the market than they consume labor hours from the market, leading to an accumulation of labor hour credits (some people call it money) and the corresponding labor hour debit (some people call it debt). The communists would object to this by invoking their reserve army of labor theory, but that doesn't actually explain anything, it just shuffles around who gets hired. The argument is that competition between workers leads to employers only hiring the most productive employees that are necessary to supply the total demand for labor, but if the total demand for labor is equivalent to the supply of labor, there wouldn't be a reserve army in the first place. A critique based on competition leading to exploitation decides who wins the game of musical chairs, but it doesn't tell us why there is a shortage of musical chairs to begin with.

Obviously, the problem is the duration difference between the labor hour credit and the debit. You can hold labor hour credits at no cost, which is a free lunch. Holding labor hour debit means paying a fee and having a deadline each month, but the true duration of the debit is equal to the credit that created it. The demand for free lunches is infinite, which artificially inflates the holding period towards infinity and since one persons credit holdings are another persons debit holdings, debit is increasing towards infinity as well. This is what allows the labor demand deficit to grow over time.

The solution to this problem is to reject neoclassical economics with its automatic assumption of equilibrium and to build institutions that encourage equilibrium formation. The truth is that it's not only communists that hate equilibrium. Capitalists hate it as well.

> If those at the top are too perversely rich, it doesn’t matter wether those at the bottom may still be doing well at the moment. Human nature dictates that the rich will concentrate power and use it to dictate terms to everyone else, to pervert justice, and concentrate ever more money and power.

This is accurate except that it's missing the most important part: The mechanism by which this operates is large organizations, i.e. megacorps and governments. The power vested in the CEO of a huge conglomerate is independent of their personal wealth. A corporation owned by Wall St rather than the founder is at least as likely to engage in rapatorial behavior. Any proposal not effective to break up the power concentrated in large organizations is a sham.

And government spending works the same way. Most of the federal tax dollars collected go to the likes of Lockheed and UnitedHealth and affluent retirees, not the poor or middle class working people. It's actively counterproductive to shovel more money in those directions. It's funding the people who capture the government. Attempting an increase in government revenue when that is where the existing money goes is a plan to make the problem worse. Prove that you can cause the existing money to go somewhere else before you ask for more.

People keep proposing to take money from "Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos" because they're an unsympathetic excuse to divert even more public money to Northrop Grumman and the AARP, and then in the actual bill most of the money comes from doctors and engineers making six figures rather than ten. But the thing it actually needs is to have less public money going to cronies and more aggressive antitrust.

None of that is correct.

If the market cap of Google is a million dollars and a sandwich is $5 and then tomorrow the market cap of Google is a trillion dollars because they wiped out all their competitors and took over the market, the price of a sandwich is still $5 because it's quite unrelated and not affected by the number of search engines or mobile operating systems. Larry Page isn't going to personally eat so many sandwiches that it affects the global price of sandwiches no matter how much money he has. Moreover, necessities generally have elastic supply -- even if demand increased, we could just make more of them rather than raising the price -- unless you cause artificial scarcity (as we do with housing), in which case that's your problem independent of billionaires.

What the consolidated market does affect is that market, e.g. the price and quality of phones and phone apps. But that has nothing to do with what proportion of the company's shares is owned by what number of people. It's just as much of a problem if it's a publicly-traded company whose largest shareholder owns less than 1% of it. And the problem goes away if the market is competitive even if there exists someone who has billions of dollars as a result of owning a fractional percentage of a million different companies -- although that usually isn't what happens anyway because the primary driver of the existence of billionaires is "market consolidates enough to cause one company's market cap to exceed a hundred billion dollars", not "someone invests a thousand dollars each into a thousand separate companies and every one of them beat the market by a huge factor without any of them becoming a megacorp".

Companies are mostly doing layoffs because interest rates went up and using AI hype as cover. The anti-inflationary force is the higher interest rates. And if AI was actually lowering the cost of that sort of thing then you still have to contend with the Jevons paradox.

Meanwhile the hype is causing things to be converted to "AI" even when it isn't any more efficient, which lowers labor demand (suppresses wages / increases unemployment, bad) and increases power demand (higher electricity prices, bad) and to the extent that hype causes adoption of inferior solutions, lowers efficiency (worthless AI customer service, bad). Some of the AI stuff is useful but the hype is causing folly.

Migration isn't particularly deflationary, especially with respect to housing prices since the new residents then increase housing demand, which is fine when construction isn't constrained by zoning but bad when it is, and right now, it is.

Most of the outsourcing that can reasonably happen already has, in large part because the US housing market (and therefore cost of living) has been out of whack for a long time, which makes US workers less competitive despite what would otherwise be various countervailing advantages. Things are made in China because they fit on a container ship, but that happened decades ago. Nurses and landscapers and firefighters and plumbers are still domestic and that isn't likely to change.