Some good mentions on Inside Job (2010).
He beats the the European Union is a failure drum pretty well.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVxaTC7Qp44 The Global Minotaur: The Crash of 2008 and the Euro-Zone Crisis in Historical Perspective (2011)
- youtu.be/vNhkYXhYSSs?t=368 proposes that there is something missing from utility maximization, citing a lotus-Eater Machine idea
- the American stock market gives 10% / year, which is about 2x over 10 years. It has been the sure-fire best investment on a 10 year horizon for many decades, and should serve as your benchmark.
- risky diversified invesments (e.g. ETFs that track a market index) are basically the best investment if you can keep your money in them in the long term (10 years)
- risky invesments can gown down for a while, and you cannot take your money out then. This effectively means risk is a form of illiquidity
- investment funds have taxes, which eat into your profit. The best investments are dumb index tracking investments (like an ETF that tracks the stock market) that are simply brainless to manage, and therefore have lowest taxes. No fund has managed to beat the market long term essentially.
- when you are young, ideally you should invest everything into riskier higher yielding assets like stock. And as you get older, you should move part of it to less risky (and therefore more liquid, but lower yielding) assets like bondsThe desire to buy a house however complicates this for many people.
This is a good concept. For the ammount most people save, having a simple and easy to apply investment thesis is the best way to go.
- www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/on-the-floor-laughing-traders-are-having-a-new-kind-of-fun/238570/ On the Floor Laughing: Traders Are Having a New Kind of Fun (2011) by James Somers> describes trading as a kind of game.
The financial industry does not serve society nowhere near its magnitude. It serves only itself. It just grows without bound.
Dude took down a bank.
Good documentary about it: Nick Leeson and the Fall of the House of Barings by Adam Curtis (1996).
One is reminded of Annie Dookhan.
Ciro Santilli once talked to a man who had been working on high-frequency trading for the last six years.
He was quite nice.
Ciro asked him in what way did he feel his job contributed to the benefit of society.
He replied that it didn't contribute at all. It was completely useless. More than that, it so completely useless, that it was even pure. A bit like advanced mathematics, but not even providing beauty for anybody outside of the company, since everything is a closely guarded trade secret, unlike mathematics which is normally published for the vanity recognition.
And so, Ciro was enlightened.
A great mind can work in the most useless branches of finance, without the desire to improve the world, nor make it worse. Not to compete, nor be afraid, nor anxious. A Sand mandala.
Only being. Being, in the exact fraction of moment where bid meets ask.
To Ciro Santilli, a key observation is:
The rich are more easily able to avoid the harm than poor and middle-class people [...] they are more likely to have large amounts of non-cash assets to shield themselves from inflation.Clearly the rich will be much, much more shielded by keeping large parts of their wealth in shares... from this point of view, it is insane to print money!!! Tax the rich instead...
Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
Ciro Santilli's main approaches to reduce it:
- OurBigBook.com to make education more efficient
- free gifted education
- more granular electronic voting
One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.
We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.
But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.
Ciro Santilli is against all affirmative action, except for one: giving amazing free eduction to the poor.
Notably, Ciro is against university entry quotas.
Grew tremendously since the 1990's, likely linked to the Internet.
www.cbpp.org/wealth-concentration-has-been-rising-toward-early-20th-century-levels-2 shows historical for top 1% and 0.5% from 1920 to 2010.
TODO why is it so hard to find a proper cumulative distribution function-like curve? OMG. This appears to be also called a Lorenz curve.
This is some fishy, fishy business.
Social inequality
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