• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    I think this is lost on a lot of people. You used to have to physically store assets or money in order to have that money. You no longer need to. This breaking of money from physicality has second and third order effects that Keynes and Friedman just weren’t equipped to understand. Credit in large organizations or wealthy families approaches digitalization but it’s not actually the same thing as 90% of the country holding their money in digital accounts that can be fractionally leveraged by the banks.

    At the end of the day we need new big theories on the behavior of digital economies. MMT is a step in the right direction but we need more. Especially work on systems of distribution. We’re effectively in a post scarcity world but we insist on a distribution of basic goods that creates scarcity.

    • ToucheGoodSir@lemy.lol
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      22 days ago

      My sister works for the wealth management software fintech company Addepar that Peter Thiel founded as a quality control engineer :| this is a sentiment she has echoed. Specifically that we live in a post scarcity world, but governments/society have not caught up to that.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        22 days ago

        Alright, think about this for a minute. We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet. But even without war or closed borders there are countries where people go hungry. Purely for economic reasons.

        There’s enough housing in the US to house all of the homeless. But we don’t want to support rural areas so people have to move away. And we treat housing as an investment activity so instead of building to need, developers build to market. That means there will never be enough in the large metro markets because if there was, they would lose money.

        I can go on. The idea that capitalism is the most efficient system of distributing goods is fatally flawed.