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a savings glut is the thing that Krugman has suggested, and is the thing which makes sense to me.

Which stinks because I hate Krugman.


Can you elaborate? Intuitively, no one I know has a "savings glut." If anything, people in my generation are saddled with debt.


Someone being in debt means that someone has an obligation on said debt, so "savings glut" means "debt glut",tautologically.


There is more money saved up than there are good productive investments available for it, in comparison to the past.

This correlates with a few things: - Inflation of the value of investment assets (high P/E ratios) - Low interest rates on bonds - Secular stagnation


That I can believe, but it seems a bit double-speaky to call it a savings glut, right? My untutored intuition tells me that its a glut of savings in a small number of people's hands.

People who don't have a glut of savings, or even significant debt, which is a lot of people, can probably think of a lot of good uses for that money.

Assuming this sketch is accurate, the problem is too much money in the hands of too few. Not a savings glut. To call it such seems like a nakedly political way of avoiding the real issue.


The thing that's glutted is the savings themselves - the number of dollar bills that have been scanned in and put in spreadsheets. That the spreadsheets are in the name of a small fraction of the population doesn't change the fact that there is a glut of the dollars.


Pretty sure it does - if you split that "glut" up evenly across the population of, say, earth, I'm pretty sure they would find more than "marginal returns" on its expenditure - perhaps not in the form of literal investments in monetary instruments, though. When its concentrated in the hands of a few, its marginal value is very small. The very wealthy aren't looking to spend that money on like actually useful things like health care or paying off their student debts or housing or education. They want to get returns.

The world would be a better place if that money was in the hands of more people.

If you ask non-wealthy humans, there is plenty of stuff to spend money on. It only looks like a glut if you're a rich person.


A lot of the things you are talking about are spending. I think the savings glut theory is specifically about the demand for saving and loaning money for investments vs spending and borrowing money to invest, and there being a relatively high demand in dollars for the former. If you’re proposing decreasing saving via tax policy (on people with a high propensity to save) and increasing spending via fiscal policy, I think that fits right in.

Aside from wealth inequality increasing net saving (since wealthy people save a higher percent of their income), the trade deficit may also be a factor, since it means overall foreign countries are saving dollars (if they were spending the dollars we pay them on US goods there would be no trade deficit).

Low interest rates are a traditional way to discourage saving and encourage borrowing but interest rates are already quite low (real negative rates are a possibility with some inflation, but it’s questionable if investments that only make sense under negative rates are actually good investments).


You and the parent are agreeing with each other.

There is a savings glut, but those savings are in accounts owned by large corporations and very wealthy individuals.


Can they though? What do you have in mind when you say they can think of good uses for the money?

The savings we are talking about here are really "funds looking for yield", in fact must be because Western monetary policy punishes cash saving through inflation. And finding great investments at scale is definitely hard. I doubt you know lots of people who can do it.

Bear in mind by this definition houses and corporate balances count as "savings".


You're kind of illustrating my point, though - the very language we are using to describe the problem hides the fact that there are a lot of people with a lot of demand for goods and services who can't access them because they don't have savings, and, in fact, have a lot of debt.

The framing of the problem as a "savings glut" reflects this fundamentally wealth and investment oriented way of thinking about economics.


The rich, banks and corporations have too much cash on hand and not enough to invest in.


> Nevertheless, the composition of audiences can still tilt toward demographic groups such as men or younger workers, according to a study published today by researchers at Northeastern University and Upturn, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital inequities

>One reason for the persistent bias is that Facebook’s modified algorithm appears to rely on proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender, said Alan Mislove, a Northeastern University professor of computer science and one of the study’s co-authors.

Hypothetically, let's say that the trucking company in the article used "people interested in cars" as a targeted group. It would come as no surprise to me if this group was > 80% male.

It may even be by another mechanism- facebook's algorithm may look at the profiles of individuals that clicked through on ads in order to determine who to show the ads to in the future. This is a good way to provide cost effective advertisement. This also may be done in a way such that a small fraction of these ads are still shown to $membersOfProtectedClassX, even in cases where said class is statistically unlikely to click on the ad. What small fraction is necessary to be legally unproblematic?

If Joe Schmoe creates a facebook ad to hire for a bricklaying job (a job which is 98% male), what percentage of those ads must be served to women to be legally compliant?


> facebook ad to hire for a bricklaying job

That's a straw man. The situation of concern is failing to advertise high value or high status products and opportunities to people who would be disadvantaged. So to stay with your analogy, if you have a job to hire a React developer (a job which is right around 90% male), but you don't show it to someone because their browsing history includes Pinterest but not Reddit, then you're discriminating. And that's a problem worth worrying about and trying to address. Likewise ads for vacation timeshares that go to Taylor Swift fans but not to Diddy afficionados.

Yes, it's possible that there may be some collateral damage in the bricklaying recruiting industry. And, sure, maybe that's something that needs some regulatory relief. But mostly I think you're just looking for an example here.


Who's to say today's bricklaying job is tomorrow's "high status" coding job?


Why is education supposed to be about learning just for the sake of learning? It should be purpose-directed.


Who should decide on the purpose?


The person getting educated, probably. Which for most people the purpose is to get a job.


The person paying.


Different strokes for different folks. Some people like living in dense cities. No reason not to build for them if they apparently enjoy it.


Considering that the sources you cite and the source your debate openent cites disagree on the facts on the ground, y'all have some work to do if you ever want to understand eachother.

The source cited by your opponent claims that 80% of job losses in the recession were for men's jobs. If you analyze your sources, they disagree with this claim. Respond to that if you care to make any progress.


I did. I welcomed him to find a source from later.


Living in a state that respects property rights has benefits. When you know that your state respects other individuals' property rights, you know it's less likely that they will trample your rights as well.

The case hinges on the previous landowner performing "public dedication" of the road by letting people use it. The concept of "public dedication" without the previous owners of the land creating any legal documentation, and possibly unaware of the legal consequences, that they are willingly performing public dedication of the road is absurd.


I wish I could find the resource I read but common law paths and easements have existed for a long time and it's not absurd that long-standing tradition can reflect intent or legal obligation. Domestic marriage after a certain number of years is one example.


Note that there is no common law marriage in California.

The question of whether this dude's property rights do or ought to trump public access to the beach is a detailed point of law, and, I mean, clearly is not as black and white as some posters are making out (neither side trivially prevailed in a summary judgment through the courts). But this subthread is not whether the case was decided correctly on its merits, but whether people who think that Khosla should be able to fence access to the beach through his property are deluded idiots who wrongly imagine that they will someday own beaches themselves, and are agitating for this particular wholly imaginary self-interest, or whether they might have other reasons to believe as they do.


The chart shown at macrotrends does not show total return (dividends included and reinvested). The investor would have broken even much earlier. January 1929 to January 1960 shows ~25% real return without dividends reinvested and ~499% real return with dividends reinvested.

https://dqydj.com/dow-jones-return-calculator/


Exactly this. You can't ignore dividends.

Based on this [1] calculator, you'd break event by 1940.

[1]https://dqydj.com/dow-jones-return-calculator/


Yes, but on the other hand, traditionally the point of dividends is that you don't reinvest them. You should still include them in returns though. But it seems unrealistic for anyone without perfect knowledge of the future to have reinvested every penny over 30 years including the depression, WWII, and the earliest, most paranoid part of the cold war and nuclear age.


One other bit about the mechanics of it-

If the two trailer hitches are not exactly level with eachother, whichever truck has the higher hitch has a big advantage.


Does this viewpoint help explain anything in a useful way? I do not understand why you would think of wealth this way.



So... I'm getting over 200,000 sqft of warehouse and office space. I'm planning on living there which will actually make it, by far, the largest private home in the entire US.

I need that much space for prototyping some of my inventions and intend to open the worlds largest Makerspace, hackerspace, and artist commune.


You also have to consider distance to the city center or recreational areas, lot size, neighborhood type, architecture, etc.


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