Of Two Minds

What does it say about our “prosperity” if we can’t even afford to equal the purchasing power of the minimum wage paid 50 years ago? It says the 1% got the mine and the bottom 90% got the shaft. Given the rising prosperity we keep hearing about, shouldn’t we be able to provide minimum wage workers the same purchasing power they enjoyed 50 years ago in 1970?

That the era of stability has ended and a new era of increasingly chaotic volatility has begun is not on anyone’s radar as a possibility. The standard debate about the future of the economy is: which will we get, high inflation or a deflationary collapse of defaults and asset bubbles popping?

Change the incentives, and the outcomes change. Ecologist Howard Odum provided a profound insight into human expansion, stagnation and collapse. He argued that humans are wired to maximize power output (i.e., consumption) rather than maximize efficiency.

If you wanted to design a system guaranteed to collapse in a putrid heap, you’d make moral hazard ubiquitous and you’d make the system 100% dependent on a hubris-soaked faux savior. For the past 22 years, every time the stock market whimpered, wheezed or whined, the Federal Reserve rushed to soothe the spoiled crybaby.

The Fed sees itself as trapped by the incompetence and greed of the other players and by its own policy extremes that were little more than expedient “saves” of a system that is unraveling due to its fragility and brittleness.

We can also posit a general rule that those who inherit wealth and succumb to FOMO are eventually less wealthy while those who are wealthy and take a pass on FOMO / hoarding at the top of the manic frenzy increase their wealth.