Tens of thousands of civilians are now largely stranded in the middle of one of the war’s deadliest battles. People in one city key city are now largely on their own. Those who have escaped describe harrowing scenes.
Improving communication across distributed teams
Abortion Didn’t Feel Like an Option. Neither Did Motherhood. At 19, Merritt Tierce found herself unexpectedly pregnant and facing what felt like an impossible choice.
Thomas Piketty’s Case for ‘Participatory Socialism’ The economist argues for universal inheritance, worker ownership and other policies to close the wealth gap. ......... Thomas Piketty, I think one of our most requested guests. ....... the world’s greatest chronicler of economic inequality. .........
cross-national data sets, showing the extraordinary amount of income and wealth that has flowed to the top 1, and even 0.1, and even 0.01 percent of the population.
....... a transformational intellectual figure. ......... Piketty thinks that we can have much more radical policies than most economists or politicians buy into, that could really build a far more equal world. I mean, we’re talking here a universal minimum inheritance of around $150,000 per person, worker control over the boards of corporations, massive levels of wealth taxation. He’s really putting forward solutions proportionate to the size of the inequality problem. .......... the two centuries — two centuries and around starting at the end of the 18th century, with the French Revolution, the U.S. revolution, to some extent. And I look at the broad evolution of political equality, social equality, economic inequality over this period. And yes, I see a long-run movement toward more equality, that did not come naturally or smoothly. It came out of major political mobilization, social struggles in some cases, sometimes major crises. ............ the construction of new institution, of new legal, educational, fiscal, social rules of the game, that have transformed our societies in, I would say, a very positive manner, that have made them both more equal and more prosperous. ......... in America when we think about inequality, we tend to focus on income statistics. And you argue that wealth inequality is the more important measure to focus on. .......... the equality or inequality of capabilities as Amartya Sen would have said. .......... when you have no wealth at all, or even worse, when you have negative wealth, when you have only debt, you need to accept everything, basically. You need to accept any working condition, any wage. Because you need to pay for your rent, you need to take care of your family or relatives. And you cannot really make choices. ............ You can wait a little bit. You can try to create your own business. You can build your own home so that you don’t need to bring in a wage and rent every month. And you can start different kinds of projects in your life. ........... income is important, wealth is important, but there are many other indicators, including access to political participation, to participation to decision making in companies ......... the data we have on wealth and property for the late 18th century and the 19th century is probably better than what we have today. First, because at the time, you didn’t have tax havens, you didn’t have progressive taxation. So people did not have a strong incentive to try to hide their wealth. And in fact, it was quite the opposite. Wealth and property was very often at that time a way to establish your political rights. And indeed, you have a political system which are very often based on property in order to grant you voting rights. .............. Sometimes we imagine we live today in a world of big data and big transparency, but in fact, some private companies accumulate a lot of big data, which sometimes we would like them not to accumulate on ourselves. But in terms of public statistics, and public information about who owns what and how this is changing over time, we actually live in an age of big opacity. And it takes a lot of energy to try to combine the relevant information for the recent period. .......... Let me say, we are in the social sciences, we are not going to have a mathematical formula. ........... there’s been a long-run movement toward more equality, both of income and wealth ............ this movement toward more equality in terms of income and wealth really starts only after World War I and World War II, during the 1940-1945 period. There’s really not much going on in the 19th century and pretty much until World War I. ............. if you compare the situation today with the situation in 1910, 1914, we live in a more equal world, in terms of equality of wealth, and especially equality of income. This movement has been of limited magnitude, in the terms of the concentration of wealth is still very large . .............. If you look at the distribution of wealth today in the United States or in Europe, what’s really striking is that the bottom 50 percent of the population basically owns almost nothing at all. ............ in the U.S. it’s going to be 2 percent of total wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent. In Europe, it’s going to be 4 percent .......... The top 10 percent would own over 70 percent of total wealth in the US and around 60 percent in Europe. .......... The bottom 50 percent maybe would have 20 percent of total income, rather than 2 or 4 percent. ............ if you look at Europe in 1900 or 1910, the top 10 percent would own 90 percent of wealth, rather than 60 percent today. ............ this middle 40 percent who are in between the top 10 percent and the bottom 50 percent, at the time were almost as poor as the bottom 50 percent. They would own between 5 percent and 10 percent of total wealth. ......... It’s as if you have no middle class ............ the movement toward less inequality really starts after World War I, World War II, following large transformation of the social systems, the fiscal system, the rise of progressive taxation, the rise of Social Security. So some of this political movement, of course, started before World War I. ........... You can certainly make the case that in the U.S., the Great Depression was an even bigger impact on the political landscape and social landscape than the war. You have countries like Sweden, which World War I, World War II did not have such big impact on, such a large importance as in other countries, and which still had this movement toward more equality, and to some extent, even more so than the others. ............ the only force is stronger than those protecting great inequality of wealth are wars, plagues and total societal collapse. And it’s a pretty grim conclusion. ................. average income per capita has been multiplied by 10 over the past two centuries. ....... the big rise in per capita income or life expectancy. ......... the fact that you can live your life until age 60, 70, 80, rather than dying at 20 or 30, is a major positive transformation. The same thing about access to culture and literacy. The same thing, to some extent, about access to purchasing power. ......... the true source of economic prosperity is equality, or at least a relative equality in education. ......... the time when the United States has a maximum economic prosperity and maximum economic dominance over the rest of the world is also the time between 1930 and 1980, when the top income tax rate, as we know, on average was about 80 percent. ............. Not only this did not damage American prosperity, but in fact, this was a period of time with the maximum U.S. prosperity with respect to the rest of the world, with the biggest gap in terms of productivity between the United States and the rest of the world. Why is it so? Because the US at the time was the educational leader. And you need to wait until the 1980s, ‘90s, to get convergence of other Western countries on the U.S. educational level and also convergence in productivity level. ...............you want to have broad access to education
........ you want to have 100 percent of the population going to primary school and then 100 percent going to secondary school. You need this very broad access to education. And this has been the true source of prosperity. ........... Like, how did it not happen? How did this fear and this seemingly logical outcome not come to pass, that the bottom 55 percent didn’t vote themselves a much larger share of the top 10 percent’s wealth? ......... the U.S. becomes a new old Europe of the world and has a form of inequality today, which I think is close, in a way, to Europe, during the Belle Epoque period, which very entrenched economic elite and political system, where there’s a private financing of political campaigns ............. Makes it really difficult to change the system, and particularly the economic and tax policy. ......... What makes participatory socialism different from conventional social democracy? ............ have a minimum inheritance for all. So that’s not instead of Social Security, basic income, a free education, free health. This comes on the top of all of this. ............ you want to have everybody at age 25 who should receive, say, 120,000 euros, which in the European context will be about 60 percent of average wealth, which is currently about 200,000 euros per adult. ........ People who are in the top 10 percent, who today receive an average about one million euro, will still receive 600,000 euros after the progressive tax on inheritance and wealth that’s paying for all of this. ............. when you propose concrete policies to move in this direction, many people, especially people from the top of the distribution, get completely crazy, and say, oh, what you’re going to give money to these poor children, that they’re going to do terrible things with the money, as if wealthy children always made good choices with the money they receive. ................ equality of opportunity is unbelievably difficult to achieve and nobody’s even really trying. .............you could just redistribute the flow of inheritance each year.
......... in my proposal will be closer to 120,000 euros or $150,000, which could be paid for by a tax of around 60 percent of all inheritance. ........ I propose to pay it partly by progressive tax on inheritance, but mostly by progressive tax on wealth. .......... the progressive wealth tax is a better instrument than the progressive inheritance tax ........... if you make a large fortune at age 30 or 40, we are not going to wait until you are 80 or 90 before you contribute to the public finance of your country. So it’s much better to have an annual wealth tax to contribute to redistribution. ............ it will be smaller, for instance, than the cost of a total health care system or total education system or pension system. ............ I’m really trying to look, OK, what happened in the past, what will be a logical next step if we just continue the evolution of what we’ve seen in the past. ........... If anything, this decline in the share of total wealth going to top 10 percent and the corresponding increase in the share going to the next 40 percent has contributed to a much faster economic growth in the 20th century than in previous centuries. ......... if you look at the three decades after Reagan, 1990 to 2020, the growth rate of national income per capita in the U.S. was only 1.1 — 1.2 percent as compared to 2 percent, 2.5 percent in the period of 1950 to 1980, or 1950 to 1990, which itself was not particularly exceptional. It was the same — 1910 to 1950, it was about 2 —2.5 percent. 1870 to 1910, around 2 percent. ........... the post-Reagan period, 1990-2020 has been particularly bad in terms of growth rate of national income per capita, which at the end of the day is the best economic measure we have of the increase in productivity and this should reflect innovation, et cetera. ............ since the incomes of average Americans were actually not growing as was told before, then people like Donald Trump had to come with a different narrative, typically saying, OK, this is the fault of the Mexican, of the Chinese, of the rest of the world, that has been stealing the hard work of Americans. ............ I’m not saying you want complete equality. I think you need income gaps of maybe 1 to 10. Some people would say 1 to 20. My reading of the historical evidence I have is that 1 to 10 or even 1 to 5 is probably sufficient to get the right incentives. But certainly, 1 to 100, or 1 to 200, or 1 to 1,000, this is completely useless. ............ co-determination or co-management, which is the fact that workers’ representatives have a significant voting rights in the board of companies, even if they don’t hold any share in the capital stock of the company. .............. the way it works in Germany is that worker representatives can have up to 50 percent of voting rights in the board of large corporation ........ And 70 years later, nobody wants to change that in Germany and Sweden. Nobody could change that. ........... what people have seen is that not only this has not destroyed the capitalist system, the economy, otherwise we would have noticed it, just like for progressive taxation under Roosevelt, but in fact, this allowed for better involvement of workers in defining the long-run strategy of the company. And workers, in a way, are investors in labor in the company. And sometimes, they are more serious and committed long-run investors than many of the short-term financial investors that we see. And so getting them to be involved in defining the long-run investment strategy of the company can be good. ............... it should be extended to other countries. This should be extended to firms of smaller size .......... there should be a maximum, maybe 10 percent or 5 percent of voting rights, that a single shareholder could have in a very large corporation. ............ undermines the right wing argument against it, because Germany has grown great. It’s a very innovative economy. They have a great manufacturing sector. In many ways, a model. ........... the minimum inheritance and the progressive tax on wealth, which you don’t have in Germany .......... a system of true real access to high-quality education, which we don’t have in any country. ............. the idea is to go further in this direction by first extending this 50 percent of voting rights to all firms, small and large, and also to put a limit on the power of individual shareholders. ......... I want to finance redistribution through progressive taxation, not through money creation. ........... the good news is that the wealthy are very wealthy. .......... you look at the billionaires today, the wealthiest people have $200 billion or so. 10 years ago, they had 30 or 40 billion or so. And 10 years before, they had only $10 billion or so. ......... the invention of the modern property system during the French Revolution and how complex the discussion was at the time. ..........the fact that with the world economic system, you need some kind of world politics.
........... you need to have some form of democratic federalism to think about global regulation of capitalism, global taxation. In a way, it’s one of the biggest challenge ahead which we have, which is that if the lower income groups voted for Brexit or also voted against Europe in every single referendum we’ve had in Europe, including in France in 2005 and 1992, you cannot just say, oh, OK, this is because these people are nationalists or racists or whatever. ........... we have to make federalism something like social federalism. It must be to the service of a better redistribution of wealth, of a more equitable distribution of income, of common progressive taxation of the multinationals, high wealth individuals. .......... And if we don’t transform not only Europe, but more generally the organization of our world economic system in this more equitable manner, I think we will confront enormous difficulties, especially as developing countries in the South are going to have to pay partly for the damage that we have created with global warming in North America and in Europe. ......... China will be, in the end, able to propose to countries in the South alternative ways to finance for their development strategy. ........ we are really at a time where if we don’t think of another form of organization for the world economic system, things can turn really bad#10 Lessons from #CampHustle
The Stock Market Is Plummeting. Welcome to the End of the ‘Everything Bubble.’ The financial journalist Rana Foroohar shares her long view on what’s going on with the economy. .......... we’re officially in a bear market. The S&P 500 is down about 22 percent roughly from its January peak, inflation is really, really high. A recession is very possible, mortgage rates are rising pretty sharply. A lot of analysts think the housing market has already peaked. Crypto, whoa, crypto has just been hammered. Crypto markets lost $200 billion just over the last weekend, woof. So we’re seeing valuations collapsing across asset categories, stocks, houses, crypto, it’s not obvious that these should all be correlated. ........... For a decade or more it has seemed stocks only go up, home prices only go up, investments only go up. The big problem that investors had was what to do with all this money? The big problem that a lot of companies had was what to do with all this money? They began stockpiling these huge hoards of cash. And a lot of companies and investors and startup C.E.O.s came out looking like geniuses for a while, but it is easy to look like a genius when you can borrow money for nothing, when investors are trying to give you money for nothing. .......... Rana Foroohar is a columnist at “The Financial Times.” ........... her argument is that loose monetary policy has been the economic equivalent of a sugar high, that has kept markets and portfolios looking good even as the fundamentals of the economy have been eroding. ........ for the last decade, actually decade-plus, the price of pretty much everything you could buy as an investor has been rising. And I believe that large swaths of that are a bubble, and you can call it the everything bubble. ............. if you look at how gold prices were rising in the Weimar Republic and compare it to crypto until quite recently, very similar, boom-bust .......... the Fed has been manipulating the price of assets, certainly for the last 15 years or so following the financial crisis. We saw even more of that in Covid because it was a way of uplifting the price of assets and making people feel a little richer in the midst of a global downturn that could have been catastrophic, it was in many ways, in a human sense. ......... if you go back decades, we have been manipulating the economy in a way that is fundamentally disconnecting Wall Street from Main Street. .......... So business cycles and by that, what I mean is boom-busts, so recoveries in which the economy is growing and then recessions in which there’s a correction and some weaker parts of the economy, companies, et cetera being weeded out. Those cycles used to happen every five years or so. ........... We are officially in the longest business cycle expansion since records were actually tallied in 1854 right now. So we’ve been in an expansionary cycle for over 10 years actually. We’ve seen some hiccups because of Covid but we’re stretching out the time that the economy is growing, growing, growing because nobody wants the music to stop, right? .......... what you’re doing is creating this kind of saccharine high, where asset prices are growing because that’s really all the Fed can do, it can lower interest rates, it can make credit flow more easily. Rich people have most of the money in the economy, they tend to use it to buy more stocks and more houses. And the price of those things go up. ............ But the Fed can’t do what policymakers can do, it can’t change the story on Main Street. It can’t build a new factory. It can’t re-skill all of us to do better jobs that are higher up the food chain. It can’t change that story. ............. stock prices are up, housing is up, things are booming. But nothing at the ground level is really changing. .......... Ben Bernanke, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke going to Congress month after month after month after the Great Recession, and basically begging them to spend the easy money he was creating. Basically saying, listen, we can create money we can do quantitative easing, we cannot build a road. .............. We cannot build a bridge. We cannot invest in decarbonization technology. Use this money for something. And then for the most part they didn’t. ............ the Fed created a bunch of money and the political system didn’t take the handoff. And so all that money simply pooled in assets .......... And so you have an entire financial system, not just a political system, that is locked into a very dysfunctional way of doing things. ............... Harvard is a hedge fund with a small university attached to the side of it. .......... My intro chapter was actually about Apple, which is not a financial company except it kind of is. ............ share buybacks are when a company goes into the market and buys its own stock, which has the effect of artificially elevating prices because it cuts the number of shares, prices go up, that’s really good for the top 12 percent of people that own over 80 percent of stock but it really doesn’t again doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t build a new factory. Doesn’t create a new iPhone. ............ So investors like Icahn are tweeting to Tim Cook, you got to do this, you got to do this. And then he does it, he’ll go out and use those low rates to borrow tons of money in very cheap corporate bond offerings and then use the proceeds to give it back directly to the, I’ll say the top 12 percent, really if you look at the bulk of it it’s the top 1 percent the top 0.1 percent. Which again, it’s literally just making the rich richer. ................ Jack Welch ... He cut workers, he cut investment. He turned the company really into a financial firm. .......... And this is a model that’s actually been repeated widely in the rest of the economy. There’s some great stats actually by a University of Michigan scholar that’s looked at the way in which companies today get about five times as much of their business from doing financial things, you know, lending to allow people to buy their products but really kind of using debt to paper over weak consumer markets and low income. .......... what quantitative easing is, is they pump that money into asset markets. .......... when you pump up asset prices you’re essentially rewarding the top 12 percent of the population that owns 82 percent of the stock, and probably more housing wealth than that. ........... retail C.E.O.s have for a decade or more been coming to me and saying, we’re really worried about this because they can see that if you don’t have a middle class that is big enough to support an economy, if you’ve only got 12 percent of the people that have all the wealth, that does not a healthy economy make. ........ corporations have really certainly since the 1980s been able to fly 35,000 feet above any of those issues of distribution in the nation-state because companies are global. ............ very cheap to employ a Chinese worker as opposed to American one, even cheaper to employ a robot. Which are now disintermediating Chinese workers. ......... if you look at a chart, for example, that would have say, the numbers of G.D.P. growth of America, and how companies are doing. And how your average household is doing. In the 1970s those lines would be pretty similar. ............ We are not getting a trickle-down effect. None of the statistics show that. ............ a cheaper TV, even if it’s $100 cheaper, $800 cheaper, it doesn’t make up for the fact that all the things that make us middle class, education, health care, housing, have been rising at multiple times core inflation rates for decades now. ............ Way before Covid, way before the financial crisis, the price of housing, education, health care, these things were all rising faster than anybody’s wages. So that’s one reason why a lot of us haven’t been feeling wealthier despite all this money sloshing in the economy. ............. My poor mother, a schoolteacher, I mean, thank God she’s got a pension still. She went into tech stocks pre-1999, lost a third of her retirement savings. ........... unpacking who the real investors of Bitcoin are a lot of the people really making money are a concentrated type of the usual suspects. ........... Professionals have been getting out since really 2018 or so but little guys are getting in because it’s the tail end of the cycle. And the Fed in its best efforts with a good intention has been trying to smooth things out. But really what it’s been doing is making things that have no value look like they have a lot of value until they don’t. ........... What’s the real cost of a product? What’s the cost of a product, say a t-shirt in Walmart, if you’re not using cotton harvested with concentration camp labor in Xinjiang? .......... What’s the cost of something if you actually have a real price on carbon, and then you have to tally in how much it costs to tote it over tens of thousands of miles from the South China Seas? What’s the cost if you have proper environmental and labor standards? ......... Covid hit, suddenly nobody’s in restaurants but yet everybody’s lined up at grocery stores. There are food shortages, producers are dumping milk and meat, wait a minute, what’s happening here? Well, we have two highly concentrated supply chains, one for restaurants, one for grocery stores. They don’t talk to one another. Big food, a handful of companies have gotten monopoly power and use highly toxic and very hard on the land industrial farming techniques because that’s how you get cheaper prices. ........... I grew up in the rural Midwest, I saw this play out in Indiana. It was toxins in our water. It was health care, I mean, don’t even get me started on the cost of obesity and all the kind of disease and health problems that come from that model, that neoliberal, neoclassical model of cheap is everything. When you see the real cost of things, cheap is not cheap. ......... meat should cost what it costs to be raised environmentally, sustainably and humanely. ............ And so what happens now is that you have a pandemic and the Fed goes into unbelievably easy money mode. I mean, they do things as you can read about in Adam Tooze’s work, that they’ve never done before, right? ............. The amount of money they’re printing, the way they’re buying things. I mean, this is truly uncharted territory. .............. whenever you have a crisis there’s always a trigger, there’s always something that seems small that happens, and then it just explodes and the shrapnel of everything that was wrong starts to go everywhere. And so our trigger this time was Covid. ............ So Covid hits, we start to see supply chains breaking down. That paradigm of efficient but cheap suddenly disappears. ............ putting all that money into the economy really did create a housing boom, and a housing prices rise that is going to be a problem and is a problem for anybody who wants to buy a home. ........... now a housing market that is so out of control, that even a lot of middle or even upper-middle-class people that I know are saying my God, we can’t get on the housing ladder period ............. one reason that a lot of labor leaders supported all that quantitative easing and that kind of post-2009 monetary you know saccharin high that we’ve spoken about, was that they keep waiting and waiting for everything to trickle-down and just when it’s about to trickle-down to them is when the moneyed classes, the investors and the policymaking classes, decide oh, there’s a little too much risk now for us, let’s pull the plug. We’ll stop the music, you can stop dancing now. And they’re like, wait we just want a drink. Like mice looking for that little dropper. ............ the labor left that has supported some of the easy money policies has been doing the best they can for working people within the context of a totally effed up system. ............. we have a gridlocked political system in which you can’t get through those very basic, very smart investments in education and the caring economy, and highways, and all the things that we did at certain times in our economy as a society that created broad-based shared prosperity. And that’s where we’ve got to get to. ........... and I remember that one of our mainstay charts for just years, is we would go to the government website that tracks real interest rates, real rates at which the government can borrow, Treasury rates. And they would be at the 5 and 10-year frame negative. And we would like sit there pounding the table, that the market is basically paying us in inflation-adjusted terms, to issue Treasuries so that the government can spend money. .............. we could have functionally been paid to decarbonize the country. We could have functionally been paid to upgrade every school into a palace. We could have functionally been paid to build a lot of things that would have generated returns for a really long time. ................ when we look back we won’t just look at this as a bubble, we’ll look at it as a miss. That there was a period of easy choices when we could have made great investments. And now we’re going into a period of hard economic choices, where it’s going to be a lot harder to make investments that are still needed. ........... not even a window. It was a huge door. It was like a bridge that was being lifted up and come in, make this happen. And it is closing very quickly and it is going to make a huge difference to our lives. Not today but in absolutely in 10 years, 100 percent in 20 years, or 50 years. It may look a lot more like an emerging market country in America because we didn’t make these decisions. .......... one of the things I find interesting about crypto again as a metaphor, as an ideology, as a concept, is that it really is on some level, the financialization of everything. It is a whole new way of structuring the internet, built on how you would structure a currency, then how you would trade the currency, then how you would verify that the currency is being traded and that ownership of the currency was validated. ............ it’s like the only way to imagine escape from capitalism is more capitalism. It’s very strange. .............. one thing that’s always been interesting about Trump’s 2016 run to me, I’ve always loved a line he had, he said I’ve been greedy my whole life. Now I want to be greedy on behalf of America. ............. the 1930s when we had the beginnings of really of our current monetary system, of our current system of global capitalism. Which was invented in Europe in the ‘30s and ‘40s by a group of economists and policymakers and thinkers that were trying to figure out OK, how do we take really super polarized societies that have been just completely torn apart by war and connect them together? ............ I really do think we’re at a turning point where the paradigm is going to break. ........ if you look at where the growth is in the world, it’s mostly in Asia right now. And this is definitely going to be the Asian century. ......... Asset increases everybody loves. Price increases, that’s the end of you. .......... There’s of course, an amazing opportunity right now for the U.S. and Europe to come together on climate change standards, and maybe even put a price on carbon, which would just immediately knock out Chinese mercantilism because it would actually help us to tally the cost of cheap labor, child labor, long supply chains, that take up too much energy to tote cheap stuff to us to put in Walmart or sell on Amazon, all of these things are happening. ........ there has been a tremendous multi-trillion-dollar run-up in housing wealth over the past couple of years. At the same time, it’s not a rarely held asset, the home ownership rate is about two-thirds. .......... At the same time, there’s a housing shortage, at the same time, there’s been a huge investment coming in from private equity and other kinds of more financialized investment firms buying up a lot of homes. ......... it turned out that a big private equity firm had become the biggest landlord in town. And in fact, Blackstone’s Invitation Housing, they have spun it off since but it was — it became the country’s biggest homeowner. So you have a remote private equity firm that is the landlord of the country that can raise rents at will, that actually was able to buy up cheap houses on literally on courthouse steps after the financial crisis in ways that even big banks couldn’t do because they were not as highly regulated. So you get that investor class starting to actually like be your landlord, own the little pink houses that are part of the American dream. .......... you have that now happening in multifamily housing, you have private equity buying up trailer parks, and raising the rents ........... there should really be limits on that kind of investor-led housing. There already are limits in fact, in many European countries. ......... It’s funny, I’ve been hoping for years to be able to buy like a small cabin somewhere in the Catskills and I couldn’t. I was priced out of the market during Covid. I watched these things that literally look like meth shacks were suddenly doubling or tripling in prices. ........... pandemics and wars sometimes fundamentally change things. And I do think that they are changing the geography of work in this country. I think that you are going to see a more permanent move South and to the West to the mountain regions, to places where taxes are lower or property prices are lower, and there’s less density. ............. you suddenly see the rings that are two or three hours outside the main urban areas housing prices just skyrocketing. So suddenly the Catskills is like Aspen, you can’t afford to live there and work there. ....... what will be the effect on the consumption economy, which is 70 percent of our economy as people consumer spending amongst Americans, what happens to that when our home values are suddenly half of what they were? .......... Maybe I don’t need that new gadget, what do I really need, I need to heat my home, fuel my car, I need shelter of some kind. Everything else is maybe dispensable. ................. Although I’ll say one thing, which is that in the markets where the super-rich control most of the real estate, like Jackson Hole, Nantucket, I think they may stay in the clouds because you do unless you see real — God, corporate lobbying, dark money limits and tax reform, you’re going to have a class of American oligarchs that are — they’re living in the clouds.
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