3335

I hope he’s not getting taxed on any of that income. Someone bringing such incredible value to the country needs to be protected.

3336

Apparently so, I’m no Pokemon collector but I saw a news blurb that said Target stopped carrying them because people were being assholes about it.

3337

It’s been a while stupid thing, yep.

3338

Not Pokemon, though I think maybe they do it for them as well, but the pack breaking streams onTwitch are nutty to me. I wonder if they run afoul of EU gambling laws.

3339

Mox Ruby!!! (whatever that card is)

3340

They can’t be taxing him, otherwise he would surely leave.

3341
3342

There was a weird scenario where the packs and cards were worth more than what stores could charge for them. Like a lot more.

So Walmart is selling them for let’s say $5 because of their agreement with the people that make them. Only supplies were super low and they were selling online for like $50. So… yeah, fights and such.

I pulled those numbers out of my ass, but that is my understanding of the situation. It’s a classic scalper scenario, but with trading cards and no oversight control at the places selling them. They aren’t locked in a cabinet, they’re just on the shelf and it’s a foot race and brawl between the people trying to get them. Like if you stacked PS5s up in a pile and opened the doors and let people go wild, only you could carry a hundred PS5s easily.

3343

Okay. That makes sense. I mean not the part where there are physical fights over them, but the part where they can resell them at higher prices.

I remember reading about them pulling from specific stores and that there had been fights, I guess I just didn’t realize the supply was that low. I mean GPUs are still hard to get and while there are bot wars online, I hadn’t heard of anyone pulling them from the shelves over it, so to speak. Yeah around here some of the cards are behind cases so you can’t grab them, and it’s been like that for a little bit I think.

3344

Even a 100% top marginal income tax rate won’t substantially impact these fortunes.

3345

I was listening to an interview with Tyler Cowen talking about the great stagnation and he mentioned that median male earnings in the US hadn’t increased in real terms between 1970 and just before the pandemic. I knew that there was a big wedge between productivity and earnings, and that most gains were confined to the high earners, but I guess I never mentally combined those two to arrive at complete stagnation. Sure enough wikipedia basically confirms it:

image

The table lower on the page gives median income in 1970 as $42,270 for men and $14,180 for women. By 2016 is was $38,869 for men and $24,892 for women. I guess the numbers for 2019 would be a bit better, but what a sorry track record for 50 years of technical advancement.

3346

When we talk about the differences between productivity and earnings, it does make me wonder what the source of those productivity gains are.

I would think that they aren’t due to people working harder now than they did in 1970, are they? I’d think that they’re due to things like technological improvements making it so that for a given amount of effort, we’re able to perform more work…or, perhaps even more, the effect of incorporating international supply chains, where we’re now leveraging labor from around the globe to produce stuff. In those cases, wouldn’t you need to take a look at the wages of those other international components, and see how they’ve changed over the same period, since the US labor pool doesn’t exist in a bubble?

3347

Of course some of the gains are due to that. The culture of salaried work has been one which demands far more hours per week of work than were demanded of anyone in 1970. ‘Management’ people — anyone not working for an hourly wage — are expected to work 50, 60, 70 hours per week.

3348

I think the median person in 1970 didn’t work any harder than the median person in 1920 or 1870, but they still made a lot more money in real terms.

Edit: I think your other points about global labour competition is definitely a factor. Also you can see that the average PERSON’s wage has gone up (with women and racial minorities making some gains). In both cases, you could say legal and traditional barriers that helped prop up white men’s median wages in the US eroded a bit.

3349

That’s probably fair, but like I said, there are a ton of folks around the globe who are now participating in the overall labor market, and a lot of THOSE people definitely had their earnings go way up. It seems like you’d have to include that global aspect of labor, which is relatively new (at least to the degree we leverage it today).

3350

I suspect computing and the internet account for some of it. Does it matter if people are working harder? An increase in per-person productivity should result in either a higher standard of living or fewer working hours. Neither has really happened. Why even develop technology if it’s not improving our lives?

3351

Related:

Council of economic advisers:

(Compared that to something the trump regime would release)

3352

Why do you think this? I don’t think that logically follows, at least not quite that directly.

If you look at it as an exchange between the employee and the employer, where the employee is selling their labor to the employee for wages, then I think this becomes less clear cut for a number of reasons.

First, if I’m selling my time and effort, from the supply side that doesn’t change by virtue of me having better tools that make that time and effort more productive. I’m still giving up the exact same amount of my time and effort, so the product being sold doesn’t really change.

Now, from the demand side, there’s a component that can support this, because they’re essentially getting “more production” for their dollar. However, we need to also consider that due to the increased productivity, the supply of that “production” commodity is greatly increased, which creates a negative force on the price of that production.

I think those two things combine that make the assumption that increased per-person productivity should increase the standard of living, incorrect.

3353

You have succinctly summarized the principle problem with capitalism. And yeah, making the argument for shared prosperity from a purely capitalist perspective is hard. The result of deciding that the owners of capital are solely due the fruits of productivity increases is inevitably burgeoning inequality, and its attendant social ills.

3354

Timex you are missing his point rather badly. Think about the word “should” in his statement.

Hint: some of us view markets as a tool to produce desired results, not an arbiter of winners and losers. In that context, the word “should” applies to the policy goal of making us better off, not a treatise on economic theory.