Assuming the title to be accurate, what is a good way for the working class (90%+ of all humans) to save and succeed in this current environment?
Finding pockets of self sufficiency, or at least ways to prevent falling down to the bottom.
Universal basic income helps this by making sure everyone has at least enough to live on.
Homesteading and community gardens help this by making sure you at least have some basic amount of food available to you.
Building walkable cities helps.this by allowing you to avoid or reduce the expenses of a car.
Building resilient cities that leverage adaptive reuse help this by making it cheaper to start new small community businesses that keep money local.
The solutions aren’t in the system of money we choose, it’s in building small sustainable ways to provide for basic needs, even in a small way.
Gold and silver.
Just store infinite money tokens in a magic Orb. Lol. That’s quite easy
As an aside, I’ve often wondered what would happen if everything was automatically adjusted for inflation.
So like cost of living inflates, but then income is adjusted and bank accounts are modified to be their true value before inflation.
Would this patch things up to be effectively 0 inflation? or (more likely) would this cause an absurd runaway effect?
The issue here is we actually don’t know how much inflation there is because we can’t measure the quantity of fiat, which is why there are dozens of “inflation measures” which just study different baskets
But yeah, if inflation could be measured correctly and everything automatically updated (wages, costs, etc) then I’m not seeing an issue logically. But at that point it’s just a fixed supply of money and prices adjust up and down, irregardless of currency type. That sound reasonable?
That it would spiral into more inflation, making your money worthless. Which is exactly what happened in Italy with the Lira
Has crypto failed?
Yes
But also no.
yeah, it succeeded in scamming a lot of people for their money
BTC 130% up last 365 days. 10% up last 30 days
But seriously if everybody would use crypto, the up and downs wouldn’t matter. The value/pourcentage is only VS Fiat.
Newsflash: currencies shouldn’t wildly fluctuate in value. The fact that people use it like a stock market investment, (and an idiotic one at that, since there is no underlying business), is exactly why it has failed to be a currency.
It fluctuate vs the Fiat value, not with itsleft. The supply of BTC is determined, not like the printing machines we got now.
Nothing’s value fluctuates with itself. Money supply is controlled through interest rates in modern economies because it works better than directly controlling the money supply. Your comment betrays an unsurprising lack of understanding of the most basic concepts of economics. You’re just parroting some talking points you’ve heard from techbros.
No, you think economics is a physical science and it isnt. It works like it does bc its been made to work that way. It could work differently.
Also Bitcoin isn’t the only way cryptocurrency could or does work.
What does the term “wildly fluctuate” mean? In 50 years of USD fiat, gold vs USD has gone from 35$ to ~2000$ per ounce. That seems pretty rapid to me, since I can still talk to living people who experienced it
At least BTC has historically gone up, whereas fiat goes down, although only a few years of data for crypto compared to thousands of fiat, so maybe crypto will do the same as well
what is a good way for the working class (90%+ of all humans) to save
Gonna sound like a dangerous lemmy communist, but vote for parties who want to raise wages and join Union to defend your rights. The main problem is that most working class struggle to finish the month without a negative bank account, once it’s solved, saving become possible again
You sound like a decent social-democrat to me
But if their savings is in fiat, and its stated goal is loose value 2-3% annually, then the working class could never retire unless they make every economic investment choice correctly their entire life to have beaten inflation
Which isn’t always plausible to do in a country lacking social safety net, public healthcare, etc.
Yeah, hence why I’m looking for ideas
The title isn’t accurate, so I can’t assume it is.
Fiat currency works precisely because the planet is finite. What you’re thinking of is a currency that’s tied to a finite resource, like a gold standard. Fiat currency works precisely because monetary supply is able to be increased to keep pace with both the population and economic growth. Likewise, fiat currency can be removed from the economy when the economy shrinks (although this hasn’t happened before).
Gold isn’t finite, its supply increases every year and is the main reason for the stability in prices. Obviously this can’t continue forever, hence the finite resources on the planet
Two things you’re assuming is fiat can be evenly distributed with population growth and at some point the issuing body will reduce excess supply, neither of these things are common practices and rarely happen
Gold is the definition of finite. There is only so much gold in the world–by which I mean the 3rd planet revolving around the sun in the solar system that we both reside in–and the only way to make more gold actually makes radioactive gold. THe fact that we haven’t discovered every last atom of it doesn’t make it any less finite.
Sure, theoretically it’s “finite”, but we do discover more every year, so to us, in 2024, it is not finite. Different infinities exist, yes
Different infinities of a particular finite resource do not exist though. Yes, we discover more every year, but that does not make it an infinite resource. If a country was dumb enough to link their monetary supply to a resource, and then their economic growth outstripped their domestic production of that resource, they would experience deflation, id est, the money you have now would be worth more tomorrow than it is today. Periods of deflation, while rare, always have a catastrophic effect on economies, because no one wants to spend money when the value of that money is increasing. People tend to hoard their money when that happens, which rapidly leads to recession and then depression.
So other than some good or a country’s clout, what do you suggest is a better alternative for a store of value?
Your core premise is, again, flawed. You want a good way of storing ‘value’–which is a nebulous concept to start with–and then condition that premise on not using a fiat currency. Fiat currency is the best way of storing that value, and using that value at some point in the future. You could invest in stocks, bonds, money market accounts, or real estate, but that’s all still based on a fiat currency of some kine.
Value is vague on purpose, since it means that something retains its “essence” tomorrow as good or better than today. Otherwise humans would not even be able to feed themselves since the only reason I can have food in the winter is because I have something to exchange for food from places that have figured out to grow or store food. It also would be a terrible place if we worked very hard today and our returns depreciated rapidly, because there will be times when we can’t work
Sure, stocks and bonds have historically held some value, but is near impossible to out perform base inflation and has gotten worse the last 20+ years. Physical land and tangible long term goods have held up, but difficult to use for trade, hence currency
So you’re just very pro fiat?
I’m too lazy for this just read Superimperialism
Good advice, thank you for sharing
it’s a really good book also the author’s podcasts with radhika desai begin with a good primer on it
Fiat can work fine on a finite planet, most money doesn’t even take up physical space anymore, just bits in an account ledger database. Ideally in the future governments will make sure their currency is backed or based on labor time, and nothing is technologically preventing that, nor is crypto-currency required for it.
The issue here is according to the Fed, the stakeholders get a 6% return, which is supposed to outpace inflation. So if the ones closest to the money printer get more every year, while the rest lose money due to inflation eating it, it doesn’t matter if it could theoretically work, it leads to an accumulation to the class system at the top while the lower classes must continually work forever since their savings are worth less every year
Socialism. The problem here isn’t with currency, it’s with capitalism.
I have socialism at home and fiat is still an issue
Do you have socialism at home? Because if you’re in Europe, no, you don’t.
Do you have fiat money at home? Because if you’re in the Eurozone, no, you really don’t, because you don’t have monetary sovereignty.
Looking at their post history, they’re
. Not even close to socialism lmaoEvery time I see the flag of France, I am reminded of this TNG scene.
How is a lack of national monetary sovereignty relevant to whether or not a currency is a fiat currency? The euro isn’t backed by anything, it’s as much a fiat currency as any other.
It is fiat money, it’s just that it’s not theirs, meaning their country’s government. It’s the unelected, undemocratic private bank cartel that has control of it.
Most central banks are run by unelected civil servants appointed by the head of government or a similar position/body. By this logic, the US dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi, and British pound equally do not belong to those countries. The ECB is just subject to the heads of 27 governments instead of one.
In the case of the US, the Federal Reserve is our “central bank,” and it too is largely the cartel of US private banks. But it doesn’t create new money—bank loan-created money notwithstanding—the Treasury does. And the system is intentionally made more complicated & opaque than necessary so that almost no one understands how it all works. So in practical terms you’re somewhat correct. But the US government isn’t as under the neoliberal thumb of the private banks as Europe is, at least when it comes to printing money for the military-industrial complex. Why the [US] Government Has Infinite Money
Haven’t you seen how every time this has been done it leads to dictators and coups and massive starvation?!
Yeah, it could be a faulty system or we just keep trying it in states that have enemies that don’t want it to succeed. I’ll have to do more research from more modern thinkers, because yeah capitalism isn’t sustainable without heavy regulation since humans are human…
why have money when you could have a moneyless classless societyA moneyless society that scales up to billions of people is unlikely to be possible
Postcapitalist alternatives that use currency to facilitate trade between actors without social ties seem much more plausible
@asklemmy
The only way for a working class person to have any financial security is to join or build a strong union with other working class people. The rich/powerful/elites will always be able to crush us if we don’t work together
Barter. Learn a tradable skill. Build a group of friends.
But also save money.
Good advice, thank you for sharing
Realize that all forms of currency are ultimately a grift to allow a class of violent weirdos to claim ownership over the fruits of our labor and that we could actually just share things with each other without commerce
I can see this point, but how else do we store our spent engery? I personally don’t want to be working when I’m 90 and the current only option is I have enough saved up something-that-holds-value long enough that I can pay for food and taxes (assuming I can own land)
I understand the frustration, but we are sadly dealt these cards and must play or… And there isn’t much another option
100%. We all play the game because if we don’t we die. The metaphor you see all the time is that the reason were all swimming in this sea of capitalism is because if we don’t we drown. Our participation is not representative of consent I don’t really know what we do in the short and medium term but long term we need to kill capitalism
Buy jewelry, gold and silver coins, gemstones, rolls of silk, fine pelts, expensive spices like vanilla beans (avoid saffron though, its perishable), fine porcelains and maybe a rare painting or two. Put it all in a big wooden chest with a big iron padlock on it, and bury it in your backyard. Then draw some sort of cryptic map to it in case you die unexpectedly, or forget where your backyard is or something.
Also traps, lots of traps - something fancy like blowpipes shooting darts when an intruder steps on the wrong stone of a floor puzzle, maybe even a large an perfectly spherical stone that rolls towards intruders if the weight of your chest is altered.
There’s a series of documentaries about such things were a professor of Archeology - a Dr. Jones, if I’m not mistaken - illustrates their workings.
Good advice, thank you for sharing
