In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane.
"There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."
A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important.
It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation increased, society seems to have trended in the exact opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most, younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves.
In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to predict what follows.
Well, keep in mind students at UCLA at 1967 were probably among the most wealthy in the country. A lot more average people at UCLA nowadays. Of course being financially well off wouldn't be the most important thing if you were already financially well off.
I wonder what would be the proportion of answers between different society economic levels.
What we know so far though is that many of the traditional values were bound to the old society structures, based on the traditional family.
The advent of the sexual revolution, brought by the contraception pill, completely obliterated those structures, changing the family paradigm since then. Only accentuated in the last decade by social media and the change in the sexual marketplace due to dating apps.
Probably today many young people would just prioritize reputation (eg followers) over wealth and life philosophy. As that seems to be the trend that dictates the sexual marketplace dinámics.
The paradox is that the general principles of the market work, but the market is invisibly dysfunctional in its details.
It is generally true that higher income jobs are allocated to higher productivity workers, but it does not follow that high incomes imply high productivity and vice versa for low incomes.
If you combine the above with a disequilibrium market where supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor, then from a naive perspective it would appear as if the unemployed would deserve their unemployment.
After all, the most productive members are all employed and rewarded for their efforts. The unemployed are just lazy (voluntarily unemployed) and incompetent (society is better off without them). Any form of punishment is seen as justified and not some structural failing of the system.
The problem is that if there is a labor market disequilibrium, there will always be unemployed people and even if you think the productivity ranking is a good thing, it just means that if one of the "lazy" people suddenly becomes "hard working", they will just take the place of someone else and nothing has changed other than that the standard for laziness has risen.
Even if people notice that the system is fundamentally broken, they realize that individually, they are either a beneficiary of the system and therefore don't see a reason to change it or they don't have the ability to change the system and rather focus on taking someone else's place.
This will result in an artificial Darwinian rat race where people see each other as competitors to defeat.
This is my explanation for why immigrants make a good scapegoat even though immigration doesn't affect the rules of the game at all.
Here is an analogy via a game of musical chairs. There is the perception that more immigrants means more players competing for chairs. This is a naive interpretation that looks obvious. What is being forgotten is that each player is bringing a new chair and the number of missing chairs is a percentage of the number of players. The truth is that having more immigrants means you can take their chair away for yourself. So immigration is not causative here. The problem is that there were never enough chairs to begin with no matter how many people are playing the game.
> We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years
Still haven’t gotten rid of work for work’s sake being a virtue, which explains everything else. Welfare? You don’t “deserve” it. Until we solve this problem, we’re not or less heading straight for feudalism.
Or maybe the artist was inspired by the connection of the Phrygian cap with psychedelic "liberty cap" mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata), which are distributed widely across Europe and associated with elves, fairies and various other wee folk?
I happen to know a person who experimented with eating dried caps and I don't think there exists a process that actually makes them harmless. Unless of course you're isolating muscimol, but I don't think that should count as eating the fungus.
While liver damage is mitigated by the fact that the organ in question regenerates, nerves don't.
When kids say (as one does in this essay) that AI will do the writing for them in the future anyway, so there's no point in learning to write, they have a point. But there is a second function of writing, which is to strengthen parts of the mind. Maybe in the future there will be "gyms" for developing these mental muscles in the same way we have fitness centers at a time when physical labor has become much less common in the past?
Those gyms are called schools. The only thing that's changing is how we evaluate students.
AI can now write essays, summarise texts, solve maths problems, and generate code.
Students can do most homework with a prompt, so traditional take home assignments no longer test understanding. But a quick chat can reveal what a student really understands.
So you can light a fire with a lighter, but you won't graduate if you can't start one with sticks. It's up to you.
>While these actions were not a breach of any regulation, SEBI said that the “intensity and sheer scale” of their intervention, and the rapid reversal of their trades “without any plausible economic rationale, other than the concurrent activity in and impact on their positions in the BANKNIFTY index options markets,” was manipulative.
I don't get the basis for regulatory action if they weren't in "breach of any regulation." Not a fan of financial skullduggery, but it does seem important for government agencies to play by explicit, non-arbitrary rules. (Or maybe this article just got it wrong?)
"market manipulation" in general is hard to define. The working definition in the US is something along the lines of "placing orders in the hopes that the price of the security will change in response to those orders existing, with no intention of actually executing the orders". There may be some specific regulations about specific types of market manipulation that are more clearly defined, but oftentimes not. There's lots of grey area, because the definition of market manipulation makes it seem like any order that's canceled instead of executed might be market manipulation. But in fact a majority of orders do get canceled before they trade!
So the real difference between market manipulation and a canceled order is just intention, so regulators have to make judgment calls sometimes.
> "market manipulation" in general is hard to define. The working definition in the US is something along the lines of "placing orders in the hopes that the price of the security will change in response to those orders existing, with no intention of actually executing the orders".
No, what you defined is "spoofing" - a much narrowed subcategory of market manipulation (which itself is gray, as you note). Market manipulation is broader and basically amounts to intentionally trying to affect the price of the security - even grayer.
In finance, regulation has two major flavours: prescriptive (specific) and "in spirit" (broad). US is mostly prescriptive, but the Howey test is a good example of "in spirit". Singapore is basically the inverse. Both can work well.
Honestly, there's a good case to be made that it doesn't matter. A government has every right to say "don't manipulate our market and try to fuck our economy" and not need to specify every tiny little loophole, especially to foreign companies. The fact that they must be reactive means they are always behind, and guarantees their country will be screwed and untold damage done before the problem can be addressed.
There is absolutely zero illusion that Jane Street is acting in good faith. They know what they're doing is wrong.
After all the manipulation, all the crashes, all the exploitation - maybe it is appropriate to just say "I don't care if we wrote it down, we've had enough of this shit".
In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were.
I don't want to be pedantic or prescriptive, but it's "imminent" not "eminent." (The wrong word got introduced upstream in this thread and was taken up by multiple commenters.)
