Lately I have been feeling like the economy just broke on a fundamental level over the past year. The vast amount of money sloshing around NFTs are a symptom. And this? This is another symptom.
The niche industry of "grading trading cards for collectible value" is completely overflowing. Prices for this service are skyrocketing because the demand far outstrips the availability.
Meanwhile we still don't have a minimum wage that is anything like livable. $15/h was proposed as a sensible raise ten years ago from the current federal minimum of $7 and inflation has not stopped in the intervening time - online inflation calculators say the modern number would be $18.22.
> Lately I have been feeling like the economy just broke on a fundamental level over the past year.
I've been thinking that recently too, although it's possible that I'm only now paying attention because I've finally become someone who has enough money to ask "what do I do with my surplus money?". That's not something I had to concern myself with 10 or 20 years ago.
Some folks will rightly point out that there have always been fads, but things feel quite outlandish these days with GME/Wallstreetbets, Bitcoin, NFTs, SPACs. The stock market as a whole has done well over the past year, but it's been outpaced by stuff that feels like people counting on a greater fool. But then here I am on the sidelines, avoiding the riskiest stuff, and of course a bit envious of their returns, so who's really the fool? Shrug
Something I wonder about is whether the inflow of money into all these "assets" is indeed driven by people with buckets of excess capital, or actually from people who could use the cash in hand the most. Anecdotally I know individuals crushed by student loans/HCOL who immediately threw their stimulus checks into crypto and meme stocks with the rationale that if they lose it all, a few thousand dollars would've made no difference on their debt anyways whereas getting on the next rocketship trend early could become a life-changing sum of money. I agree something is fundamentally broken if we've reached the point where we live in a casino economy, I don't know how long it can last and the long-term potential consequences are quite concerning
Those same people could always go to an actual casino with only negative expected value games so why spend any thought on it? It seems so incongruent to suddenly care when someone decides to play a positive expected value game.
The only consequence is that people still dont want to give random entrepreneurs their money if they dont have a certain pedigree. Thats the best way for money to circulate in the economy and people dont have the confidence in that to do it. So expect greater market distortions while the government still attempts to get people to do the one thing they dont want to do. People will rather buy bonds at lower and negative yields for capital preservation, or they will rather buy collectibles and crypto for capital growth. The macro trend is clear.
Economics tells us that the marginal propensity to consume is higher among low-income individuals than high-income individuals. So without delving into the details, I think it's reasonable to assume that a much greater percentage of investors in crypto/meme stocks/etc. are wealth(ier) individuals. Not to mention that those wealthier individuals just have a lot more money to invest in the first place, far and above a few stimulus payments.
> with the rationale that if they lose it all, a few thousand dollars would've made no difference on their debt anyways whereas getting on the next rocketship trend early could become a life-changing sum of money.
This sentiment has been trotted out before but if I get $1 worth of entertainment from a lottery ticket then it's not a tax on anything. Most people don't expect to win the lottery but the thought of "what if" is worth the money they pay. And the money seems to go to good causes in most states so I can't see how anyone could criticize playing the lottery unless you're doing it with money you can't afford to lose. This is all supported by very simple economic principles, as well. You might as well say a $6 Starbucks coffee is a tax on stupidity.
"Stupidity" (innumeracy, really) is a prerequisite for finding the lottery entertaining. The thought of "what if" is predicated on the idea that buying a lottery ticket meaningfully increases your chances of winning. You may as well fantasize about finding a bag of money in the street; it's cheaper and the expected returns are better. And as for "money you can afford to lose" - there's no threshold where money stops being money. Buying one lottery ticket is just as fallacious as buying a thousand; the only difference is the magnitude of the error.
On the other hand, if you do find the lottery entertaining - despite how irrational it is to do so - no amount of lecturing or calling you innumerate will change your mind. So you may as well buy the damn lottery ticket :)
$18.22 per hour would exceed the median wage in the majority of States. I think it is safe to assert that what constitutes a "livable wage" is much lower than this number ipso facto. Not everyone lives on the west coast. There is a lot of evidence that the locale-adjusted livable wage is much lower than the numbers often thrown around.
Per the US government, which tracks what people in different deciles actually spend on various things in surprising detail, the median US household has ~$1,000 in cash left over every month after all ordinary expenditures.
People consistently overestimate the cost of living in large parts of the US because they only visit the very expensive parts and imagine everyone spends money like they do. I have a long-time friend, a single mother with no outside financial support, who was able to buy a condo in a decent school district in a major midwestern metro on ~$15/hr with prudent planning. It took her a long time and it isn't in a suburb where bougie tech people would want to live but she seems pretty pleased with herself. I will admit to being surprised when she told me but she'd actually figured it all out within her constraints and was able to successfully work toward that goal on that wage. The way most people talk about it, this should be literally impossible.
I think this comment implicitly assumes that just because people survive on less than 18, it’s livable
That’s not necessarily true, since many people around or below the poverty line rely on government assistance to survive.
Also, the federal minimum is so low and our social safety net is so weak (virtually non existent), many people would be instantly screwed by any sort of drastic/expensive event. (Like unexpected illness or the loss of a job or a car accident.) Is a wage livable if you can’t live through times of trouble?
> People consistently overestimate the cost of living in large parts of the US
I'm sure there are parts of the US you can get by with less than $3 wage. I think out of the 600000 homeless people a fair share manages to do that without dying either. Doesn't mean you should.
> who was able to buy a condo in a decent school district in a major midwestern metro on ~$15/hr with prudent planning.
ok, sure but a lot of context is missing.
> It took her a long time
Is it paid off? How long will it take her to pay it off? If it is how did that happen? How much was the Condo. If not, what happens if she misses one payment?
Which is about right according to the 3x your salary equation.
Not sure what market that's in but my partner paid $150k in 2004 for a condo just ITP of Atlanta behind a run down shopping center in a gentrified neighborhood, the neighborhood still ain't great but the condo today it's worth around $250k which would require you to make around $40 an hour.
> Per the US government, which tracks what people in different deciles actually spend on various things in surprising detail, the median US household has ~$1,000 in cash left over every month after all ordinary expenditures.
I'm really not trying to be the "citation needed" dick, but I would genuinely love to look at the source for this. What I found from googling was a hodgepodge of unreliable information, or studies that are decades old.
EDIT - just went straight to the source, since articles linking the source couldn't find it.
It is a standard extract from the US Bureau of Labor & Statistics. Among other things, they collect statistics on how much each income decile actually spends on different things in surprisingly granular detail.
How are you calculating the left over income? Going to the BLS tables that Judgmentality linked to, specifically this one (https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/calendar-year/mean-item-share...) showing income and spending by decile from 2019, it isn't until 6th decile that after-tax income for the mean household is greater than expenditures. Everyone in the lower half of American income spends more than they earn. It isn't until 8th decile that after-tax income exceeds expenditures by more than $1,000 a month. Those numbers are $93,571 and $75,945 annually, for $1,468 excess. In 7th decile, they're $74,234 and $66,435, for $649 monthly leftover.
That BLS table contains all expenditure categories they track, including expenses which are not "ordinary" in BLS parlance, which is incorrect for these purposes. An expenditure is "ordinary" if the vast majority of Americans spend part of their income on it, regardless of how or how much people spend -- a lot of objectively luxury spending is classified as ordinary. In practice, ordinary expenditures captures every kind of reasonable living expense most people think of as typical for living in America, with no frugality implied.
The BLS calculates discretionary income by subtracting all ordinary expenditures from income in a given decile. Which is ~$1,000/month for the median household. Some of that leftover money may be spent on non-ordinary expenditures, like the odd expensive hobby or lifestyle flex, which is also captured in this table but is not included in the cost of living an ordinary life. I find this to be an eminently reasonable approach to inductively measuring the cost of an ordinary life without making a judgement if some spending is excessive or luxury. Spending money on a car is an ordinary expense, the BLS doesn't care if it is a Honda or a Ferrari, both are included.
This explains another apparent anomaly as well: ~35% of households have no meaningful discretionary income, yet only about ~15% (per Federal Reserve studies) have difficulty paying their bills. Because there is a substantial amount of luxury spending padding the ordinary costs of living, households in the 15-35% range have significant elasticity in how much they spend in some of these categories.
I assume the gp is referring to https://livingwage.mit.edu/. The fact that it is A) hosted on a .edu domain and B) is associated with MIT, is enough for most folks to blindly accept its outputs as some kind scientific truth. Folks love a good appeal to authority.
The calculator is pretty strange, though. A quick glance under the hood reveals that the calculator goes well out of its way to inflate the cost of living which is used to calculate the 'living wage' in a given area. They consider a mobile phone as a basic need, which makes sense. But when they calculated the cost of a mobile phone, they included the price of a new $200 phone every 2 years, and a plan that includes 10GB of mobile data per month! As a result, the expected monthly cost of a phone was ~3x what I pay. When pricing broadband internet, they said $60/mo was the lowest they could find in my area, which again was ~3x my own monthly expense. The transportation allowance was so high as to be roughly equivalent to the payment+insurance on a 1-2 year old Toyota Corolla. For the food allowance, they arbitrarily chose the 'second cheapest' FDA approved balanced meal plan price scheme, which added $60/mo in expenses for no reason whatsoever. That's where I quit investigating, but I would be surprised if those are the only living expenses which were so inflated.
I'm sorry but I looked a bit too and I findi your criticisms a bit unconvincing. The mobile plan may be a bit much but $60/mo is literally the cheapest broadband plan available where I live. In fact it's almost literally the only plan available unless you want to spend more.
I looked up both my low cost birth county in Montana and my current high cost home county in Washington. Both had a budget of about $5,000 a year for transportation. Which, ignoring all maintenance, fuel and registration costs would leave you with about $300 per month after meeting most state minimum insurance requirements and full coverage. That's the payment on about a $15,000 car financed over 60 months, if you have good credit. Not a beater by any means but honestly that's pretty much the value sweet spot in terms of getting a reliable used car. You could get more car by ditching full coverage but as Dave Ramsey says, "you insure the things you cannot afford to replace." Your sole mode of getting to work seems like a thing you probably can't afford to replace on minimum wage. Again, you can play with the numbers but I already threw your argument the bone of ignoring, fuel, maintenance and licensing costs. A nontrivial sum.
Regardless, I'm not sure why your argument takes as it's premise that a living wage should represent the minimum a person needs to get by in our modern world. Why is that the default standard?
Edit: When I think about it more, isn't that kind of the whole point of a proposing a living wage over a minimum wage? People proposing it believe that we shouldn't peg wages to the minimum a person needs but rather to some fulfilling standard of living?
> living wage should represent the minimum a person needs to get by in our modern world.
I think it depends on what we intend on doing with living wage as a measure. Typically I see it called out as a safety net minimum for what people should make. Frequently mentioned as a floor for minimum wage talks.
So if it’s a baseline then it should be the minimum. If It’s some median target then that’s different.
I don’t think it’s useful to have a median target because it’s so arbitrary depending on individual circumstances and desires.
The housing estimate seems quite high for my area as well, particularly for the single adult category. It was using a figure that I'd expect for a nice 1br in a trendy area. Someone under financial pressure would probably be renting with a roommate in a less nice area instead, likely paying a third to half the figure the calculator cites. I also agree on the transportation cost being way out of whack. For the adult plus one child cost they cite for my area, I could finance a new $40k car plus pay for insurance and gas.
The reality is basic unskilled labor is worth about as much as it has been. At the same time, multiple new industries have sprung up and computer/ai-aided workers are vastly more productive than ever. I think a higher minimum wage could be a good "forcing function" to eliminate more low-skill jobs. The problem is, the general population is always going to have some proportion of people who can not or will not do higher skilled work. Also, normalizing WFH/remote work might help to let folks diffuse to lower cost of living areas.
On the contrary, what this means is the same “unskilled” labor is now actually worth more because it is resistant to automation. People doing automation resistant work get to share in the productivity improvements of other sectors, and that is perfectly fair.
But what’s odd about your argument is that the federal minimum wage ought to be $12-13/hour if it had simply been adjusted for inflation since the late 1960s. So by that measure, we value “unskilled” labor even LESS than we did half a century ago.
If we had adjusted minimum wage for productivity growth, it’d be about $21/hour right now.
So I think we ought to have a nationwide federal minimum wage minimum of $12.50-15/hour, adjust it for inflation continually, but also adjust for local cost of living so that the nationwide average (average of regions) minimum wage is around $21/hour, continually adjusted each year for cost of living.
And I am not worried about automation increasing unemployment over the long term. We should have targeted efforts to increase employment rate if there are periods of disemployment from disruptive automation, but we have more jobs now than we did a century or two ago in spite of two centuries of increased automation and mechanization.
continually adjusted each year for cost of living.
One big risk here, or with any cyclically referenced benchmark, is runaway positive feedback. This can be exponential growth, oscillation, or exponentially growing oscillation.
If wages are referenced to CoL, but CoL is affected by wages, you have this risk.
A real example I have encountered: years ago, before an area I was living in experienced hyper demand, rent prices were fairly stable. I was able to get decent places just under $1k. My landlord was pretty chill, but said that they had to raise the rent eventually because they couldn't write off expenses (or maybe it was losses) if they were charging below the area median rent. So every year, landlords would have to increase the rent to the median, which would almost certainly raise the median (unless literally the bottom 50% of prices were exactly the same), and then they have to raise again, etc.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the composition of an annual raise for a civil servant. How much (and from what factors) is the raise in pay related to CoL, and how much is it related to productivity? How is that labor actually valued? I think if 80%+ of that raise is due to CoL, that's clear evidence of this feedback loop in action.
The percentage of civil servants in the local workforce probably also has an effect. If only 2% of people are civil servants or otherwise receiving an indexed wage, then other factors may dominate. But if a large number of people are civil servants / receiving an indexed wage, then positive feedback might dominate.
That's because minimum wage isn't actively pegged to a cost of living measurement, it's manually adjusted from time to time (ostensibly to be inline with cost of living). That manual adjustment is slow and decoupled enough that there's no runaway feedback loop.
If you legally define the minimum wage as a formula instead of an absolute number, and that formula includes cost of living, you can create a runaway situation.
The fact that the minimum wage isn’t pegged means it IS adjusted: downward over time due to inflation. That has massive societal impact as it reduces wages for folks over time, risking homelessness and other effects of poverty. It also reduces productivity growth. THAT has real risk of runaway effects due to the compounding effects of poverty.
I don’t see why a simple adjustment for inflation or cost of living is bad and risky a priori but allowing it to decline over time is a priori good and not risky.
> One big risk here, or with any cyclically referenced benchmark, is runaway positive feedback. This can be exponential growth, oscillation, or exponentially growing oscillation.
Have we ever witnessed an exponentially growing oscillation in a large scale economic feedback loop like this before? I'd never really considered that concept for macroeconomics.
I'm sort of extrapolating from the very little I know of control theory and feedback systems. I've seen others mention that economics and control theory could benefit from collaboration.
Maybe the boom/bust business cycle, coupled with inflation, is exactly this phenomenon? Maybe social media frenzy is also a feedback phenomenon.
It’s not really a big risk, here. It’s hypothetical. A scare tactic to argue against increasing the minimum wage to even moderately adjust for for inflation and overall productivity growth (and cost of living growth).
It is very frustrating to have any kind of productive discussion when the slightest hint of anything unexpected is negatively labeled and associated with the entirety of some diametrically opposed position that was never actually raised.
I apologize. But it's frustrating when people express opposition to even a minimum wage level from the 1960s with sort of outlandish hypotheticals. There's a bunch of pretty good empirical research out there on the effects of minimum wage increases, and none of them suggest this sort of "exponential" increasing effect.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pre...
The thing is, you assumed what I believe. I'm actually in favor of higher minimum wages and indexing to costs. But the feedback-loop nature of the economic system, or any feedback system (where future output numbers of the system depend on previous outputs), must be acknowledged and accounted for, or else you will, mathematically, get exponential growth and/or oscillation.
I also have a lot of family who currently live just fine making less than $15/hr. Their employers (small businesses) would have to raise prices (or go out of business, or both), which would raise costs, which would raise the CoL index, which would raise future minimum wages in a feedback cycle, if there is not some compensating factor in how wages and prices are set.
Because then they would lose profits. If labor becomes more expensive, maximal profit would be found at producing less and charging more, but overall profit would decrease.
...you’re ignoring demand effects. Higher wages means more aggregate demand. Empirical research on minimum wage increases shows that this basically fully compensates for hypothetical disemployment effects.
What do you hold as baseline? Baked in to your reply is a theme of prices go up over time (inflation). To take a concrete example: has a person employed to stock shelves at a store meaningfully increased their productivity in the last 25 years? What if, instead of increasing wages to match "cost of living", we made it easier for people to change jobs or move to an area with a more favorable cost/quality of life ratio?
> At the same time, multiple new industries have sprung up and computer/ai-aided workers are vastly more productive than ever.
I used to believe this but the reality appears completely the opposite. If the US economy was vastly more productive then we should see capital investment in areas with huge unmet needs. Take healthcare as an example, one of the shining beacons of AI-assisted efficiency, a colossal failure to actually address healthcare needs cheaply and effectively. Real estate is another; here we are in a world of telecommuting and automated brick-laying machines - and prices are sky-rocketing in many areas despite apparent "urban exoduses". We have high quality printing for cheap, yet the art market has reached such peaks that it has spawned a market in owning an exclusive "token" that links you (the purchaser) to an artwork in an essentially ineffective way except as a speculative asset. Exclusivity is the name of the game, and those who afford to pay for it will pay through the nose.
Unskilled labour is cheap because there are a lot of skilled people also competing for it. They are competing for those low wages because the success of monetary policy has led to a situation where there is a greater return selling exclusivity and limitation than there is actually producing products to sell to everyone. Capital investment has become so overrun with cash we treat it as an expense (subscription, everything-as-a-service, etc) or as a bet in the hopes we hit a unicorn (PACS, bitcoin, etc).
The slow march back to fiscal policy will, hopefully, deflate a lot of this inefficiency. One might hope that we end up in the fertile lands between the territories of the fiscal and monetary hawks, but life isn't like that.
How many people would Google actually need to supply humanity with targeted ads?
I suspect that ultimately, most are just there to out-innovate would be upstarts that might, perhaps, take some of their pie. But this doesn't have to go on forever, there already is the precedent of Google not dying at all from utterly failing with their Facebook counter. And that's just one example. I believe that the "productivity crisis" is actually much deeper than it seems because so many parts are glossed over by zero sum games taking up some of the overcapacity.
The past year made me realize if you are selling your time for money that means you are a part of the underclass. Full stop. Having lots of assets that appreciate in value and you can comfortably exchange them for money when you need to, that's where you should be trying to get to.
This story is a sign that I'm not the only one I guess that feels that way. The r/wallstreetbets story another example.
> Having lots of assets that appreciate in value and you can comfortably exchange them for money when you need to, that's where you should be trying to get to.
I think it's still middle class at best if the assets have to be sold to realize the gains. Full upperclass (IMO) means the ability to leverage assets to acquire even more assets (especially in down markets) without risk of catastrophic loss while funding a lavish lifestyle.
It's an important distinction because short of total economic or societal collapse, productive assets held as collateral continue to generate capital. One can raise large amounts of capital almost on demand with extremely favorable terms using those assets, essentially multiplying the wealth that the upperclass has at its disposal. Once they hit a certain scale, it's almost trivially easy to make modest but consistent returns on borrowed capital because investing is a lot like farming: being a farmer and owning a single farm is really risky due to unpredictable stuff like droughts, but being Tyson and owning farms all over the world is really low risk unless the entire planet is hit by a drought simultaneously, in which case everyone will get bailed out.
Imagine you own a hundred million dollars worth of Blockbuster franchises free and clear that generates a "paltry" $2 mil a year in profit. What do you do when your investment is threatened and Netflix IPOs at around a dollar in 2002? You go to the bank and get a $25 million loan to buy Netflix stock. Then in 2008 when it's at $5/share and the stores are barely generating enough money to cover the loan payments, you firesale the remaining Blockbuster assets to pay off the rest of the loan and laugh yourself to the bank after selling $125 million worth of Netflix stock for an annualized return of around 3% in a recession. That's a very contrived example but it illustrates the point: with productive assets, you can use the proceeds to pay the cost of hedging those assets. When you do that across a large, diverse portfolio, you have to try not to make money.
I think of that as independently wealthy, since I personally have a hard time telling someone that if you’re an engineering exec making > $1mm/yr, that you’re middle class because you get paid for your time. That seems pretty upper class even if it isn’t the properly wealthy, no need to work, upper class.
I'd say the exec is upper middle class because if their employer went bankrupt and they had to pay for a bad string of unexpected medical expenses or got sued for some liability they weren't insured for, it could easily send them deep into the middle class. It's like having exactly a million dollars in net worth - are you really a millionaire if all it takes is a little depreciation to drop you back to six figures? However, entering the upper class with executive salary like that takes a lot less luck - they don't need to start a billion dollar unicorn, they just need a little bit of luck and a few decades of steady investment.
The way I see it: the underclass has to work hard to move upwards, the middle class has to work hard to stay where they are, and the upper class has to work hard to move downwards.
You can’t call a top 1% person in income upper middle class imho and I think the definition of millionaire is tied to having more then a million net worth not whether you can lose it, but that’s where indepdently wealthy or similar definitions may come into play. If I have say a million or two, vs. someone who makes 50k/yr and worth maybe 100-200k, are we all middle class? What does it mean to define a middle class at this point then? It started with the middle 50% who have similar financial and social lives, but if it’s that wide, I’m unsure it’s a useful label. Everyone likes to call themselves middle class, but that seems wrong other then to say you’re a small millionaire vs. someone with real power in the > 100mm net worth category. The label does matter when we talk about the middle class being squeezed for example, and we know that’s not happening to tech execs or even software engineers in demand who start at 6 gigs, but to folks who work hard to break 6 figs in their career and see it as breaking into the upper middle class.
> Everyone likes to call themselves middle class, but that seems wrong other then to say you’re a small millionaire vs. someone with real power in the > 100mm net worth category. The label does matter when we talk about the middle class being squeezed for example, and we know that’s not happening to tech execs or even software engineers in demand who start at 6 gigs, but to folks who work hard to break 6 figs in their career and see it as breaking into the upper middle class.
Not to get too soap boxy, but that's exactly how the upperclasses have used divide and conquer to hold onto disproportional political power. It seems "wrong" to you, but imagine we went back to the tax rates set in the Revenue Act of 1942 with brackets adjusted for inflation: a family with a single tech exec or engineer making 6 or 7 figures a year can live well within their means and still have to drastically cut back on their quality of life under those tax rates. Someone with a hundred million dollars of productive assets probably wouldn't notice a change in QoL at all, unless they measure it by yacht-foot or jet-seat.
Also: that exec may have $1M expenses a year. He may be living paycheck to paycheck!
Almost all of us are N paychecks away from bankruptcy. The only difference between us is what number N is.
There are people who do nothing and dividends from their assets pay for their lifestyle and grow their net worth forever without labor. Those are the few actual upper (economic) class people!
An economy based on speculation in assets is unlikely to survive long. At some point the the majority of dollars will just represent speculation of one kind or another.
A far better alternative to “making money while you sheep”.
As returns on capital and assets start to vastly outperform returns on labor, you should be focusing not on what work you can do, but rather on what assets you can acquire and capitalize on.
Yup, feels good when you cross the million dollar mark ASAP rather than building it up toward some distant future where you retire. Feels like I have more cushion for changing times. And a million dollars ain’t even what it used to be. Feels like there’s more and more millionaires these days.
>And a million dollars ain’t even what it used to be.
is a result of
>Yup, feels good when you cross the million dollar mark ASAP rather than building it up toward some distant future where you retire. Feels like I have more cushion for changing times....Feels like there’s more and more millionaires these days.
Yea I get it. When several people are actively optimizing for becoming millionaires quickly, eventually being a millionaire ain’t shit.
It used to be that you had to do something extraordinary to become a millionaire. Now all you need to do is have a high paying job and invest heavily in the right stocks for a few years to get there.
> When several people are actively optimizing for becoming millionaires quickly, eventually being a millionaire ain’t shit.
It is not because people are optimizing for becoming millionaires. Everyone has always been optimizing for more power.
It is because the federal government, which controls the currency, decided to increase the supply of currency, which shows up as increased asset values.
>...$15/h was proposed as a sensible raise ten years ago
Sensible? Different states and different parts of states have vastly different costs of living. The average wage in San Francisco is going to be different than rural Alabama. The non partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the proposed 2021 increase to $15 would have caused a loss of 1.4 million jobs. (And obviously would have been even a bigger effect 10 years ago.)
>...online inflation calculators say the modern number would be $18.22.
No, that is wrong.
The minimum wage started at .25 in 1938. If it had followed inflation it would be at $4.70.
The last time it was adjusted was 2009. If it had been adjusted for inflation since then, it would be about $8.95.
This conversation about what minimum wage should be always devolves into useless bickering about location and which inflation statistic to use.
A more productive conversation would be to define the minimum quality of life that one should have, then calculate the cost of it, then divide by how many hours one “should” work to achieve that quality of life.
Should a person be able to own land in a tier 1/2/3 urban/suburban area? Should a person be entitled to healthcare with a certain out of pocket maximums(gold/silver/bronze)? Should someone be able to afford daycare for infants? How much should one have saved up by retirement date (which brings up its own cost calculation for expenses during retirement)?
>A more productive conversation would be to define the minimum quality of life that one should have, then calculate the cost of it, then divide by how many hours one “should” work to achieve that quality of life.
That's not productive at all for the simple fact that you cannot legislate people into wealth.
The real minimum wage is and will always be zero, because that is how much workers who are less productive than the legal minimum will get.
Let's be clear as to what a minimum wage actually is, it's simply and exclusively making employing unproductive people illegal.
It does not, and can not ever help low value added workers for the simple reason that all it does is prohibit them from working.
I think it means that if a company had money for $14/h for labour, and it originally hired 2 people for $7/h, then if minimum wage was raised to $14, one person would be fired and the other (presumably better) worker would get a raise. But total available capital for labour for the company did not change.
It also prevents subsidies from government to corporation. In many cases the minimum wage job creates less value for the local government than having the person do nothing at all. In those situations the job should not exist
> A more productive conversation would be to define the minimum quality of life that one should have
This assumes that everyone is in a similar situation in terms of trying to support a particular kind of lifestyle on whatever is deemed to be the minimum wage (or maybe two of them).
Should those same considerations apply to teenagers who are not trying to support that lifestyle themselves? What about the ones who _are_, including emancipated minors?
What about retirees who are working part time because they like to feel useful but generally not expecting to live off that money?
It feels to me that the right solution to the problem of us feeling that people in a certain situation (e.g. supporting kids) should have a certain minimum income is probably better solved via solutions like the EITC (which can be much more tailored based on overall financial situation), not a minimum wage.
Of course that gets some people arguing about the dignity of work and how receiving handouts rots people's souls. But I would argue that taxes are opaque enough that people receiving EITC don't perceive it as a "handout" anyway....
> No, that is wrong. [...] The last time it was adjusted was 2009. If it had been adjusted for inflation since then, it would be about $8.95.
I think you've misunderstood egypturnash's comment here. They're saying that if the $15 dollar minimum wage proposed in 2010 had been adjusted for inflation since then, it would now be equivalent to $18.22. If you check an inflation calculator, $15 in 2010 is equivalent in purchasing power to $18.22 in 2021. The argument is not that the actual minimum wage of 2010 would now be equivalent to $18.22 today.
Workers that lived off the “trickle down” effect of the economy lost their jobs. The govt injected money and created policy to help keep those workers with food and shelter rather than let everything crash a year ago.
If you were a high skilled worker you never lost your job and you no longer had the same outlets to spend your money. You probably saved money and now have a surplus of cash. So a year later everything is frothy and real asset prices are on the rise. The Fed still doesn’t think we’re back to ‘normal’ yet so low interest rates and cash injection will continue.
Not so sure the average high skilled worker had that much of a portfolio to get to the point that they would need to put investments into fringe investments.
And if you did things like proper art collectables or vintage rolex's. I did vaguely think about watches even looked at actual antique katanas or wood block print auctions.
Pokemon cards have been around since the 90's, and rare Pokemon cards have always had appeal and commanded high value.
This is less like Beanie Babies and more like the rare Magic the Gathering card economy. (Which is also a thing.)
The demographics are different too. Beanie Babies was mostly a suburban mom thing that came and went, whereas Pokemon cards appeal to computer nerds - many of whom have high paying engineer salaries.
> Lately I have been feeling like the economy just broke on a fundamental level over the past year.
There is something seriously broken for years now: unsustainably low interest rates drive a lot of money in desperate search for the most minuscule interest rates.
Venture capital in institutional form beyond former founders who got rich and want to return the favor would not exist - certainly not millions of dollars for a company called Yo. Real estate prices both for buy and rent worldwide are only affordable for those who are mega-rich as investors are the only ones who can put up the cash, and it's beginning to go the same way in agricultural land. Stock prices, despite a disastrous raging pandemic, are at all-time highs.
> Meanwhile we still don't have a minimum wage that is anything like livable.
Why should the minimum wage be livable on its own? The minimum income obviously should, but why should people who can’t currently provide labor worth a “livable” wage in the market be excluded from productive engagement in the economy?
The minimum wage is a crude hack to prevent economic coercion of low-negotiating-power labor by capital, but a UBI funded by progressive income taxes which treat capital income similarly to other income, would serve that purpose more effectively.
Minimum wages also provide a price floor on labor. If I make 21 an hour managing a Starbucks, then I make 3x the minimum wage.
I’d suspect that the owner values labor in multiples of the minimum, if the minimum wage were cut in half I’d expect the managers rate to similarly fall.
> I’d suspect that the owner values labor in multiples of the minimum
For low-bargaining power labor, having a progression from the minimum is probably a factor; OTOH, UBI eliminates the economic coercion that is a major contributor to low end labor having low bargaining power.
For labor what the combination of oversupply and economic coercion doesn't overwhelm normal market factors, competition among purchasers should result in wages @ the marginal value to the employer added.
A ton of money flooded into the economy via stimulus, the brighter folks realize that inflation is inevitable and rush out to every random scarce good in the hopes it will retain value.
When this many people feel that NFTs or Pokemon cards might be a better store of value than, say, the USD, it probably should be giving us some kind of shock, no?
And at this rate, we'll probably get that $15/hr wage soon enough. As you pointed out, the real question will be whether it actually buys more than the existing minimum wage once did.
minimum wage is a crutch to keep the system largely the way it is and trickle some crumbs down to the lower classes to stay a revolt. instead, we need to realign incentives so that labor is on equal footing with capital (e.g., enforce transparency on the labor market). in addition, the tax and regulatory system should be overhauled to actively promote a broader distribution of capital to encourage creativity, wider risk-taking, resiliency, robustness, and fairness.
we need to stop looking at simplistic crutches like the minimum wage (ubi too) as wins, as they further entrench systemic biases rather than alleviate them. don’t let moneyed interests buy us off in favor of these biases for pennies on the dollar.
>"Meanwhile we still don't have a minimum wage that is anything like livable. "
This is because the Fed, as well as the entire US legislature, knows deep down that wages are the final "finger in the dyke" of the whole system collapsing. For wages to truly begin rising would send inflation spiraling out of control. It's only under check now because the asset owning class is reaping the benefits; not the vast majority of wage earning lower/middle class which is keeping consumer prices in check. Our entire monetary policy is now pinned on the fact that wages will lag gains of productivity and inflation, so that the almighty CPI rate can be held up as evidence for low inflation and the free money gravy train keeps rolling for the monied elite.
Fyi, $15/hr in 2011 dollars would have been significantly higher than the minimum wage has ever been. The highest ever US minimum wage adjusted for inflation was $1.60 in 1968 which is $10.34 in 2011, $12.18 in 2021.
You don't just adjust for inflation, you adjust for productivity growth. That being said, $15 is meant to be high. It's meant to give you the ability to pay for housing.
For amusement value: the median house price in Jan 1968 was $163K in 2020 dollars. The median house price in 2020 was $300K. So really, minimum wage should be $24 an hour to bring you into Property Purchasing Power Parity™ with 1968.
“Why doesn’t the CPI include the cost of buying and financing houses as well as property taxes and home maintenance and improvement?
Houses and other residential structures are not consumption items and, therefore, should not be CPI items. All buildings and structures are capital goods, which are items that provide a service. In the case of houses and other residential structures, that service is shelter.
Buildings and structures are also investment items, things that are bought and resold in organized markets with a potential for gain. House prices frequently appreciate; in this respect they differ from consumer durables such as vehicles.”
Don’t houses depreciate while the land is what appreciates? IANE, but I thought some people in the states had a depreciation deduction on the building.
Maybe we just need to increase the supply of houses to drive that cost down. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t help if everyone is competing for the same limited supply.
“Why doesn’t the CPI include the cost of buying and financing houses as well as property taxes and home maintenance and improvement?
Houses and other residential structures are not consumption items and, therefore, should not be CPI items. All buildings and structures are capital goods, which are items that provide a service. In the case of houses and other residential structures, that service is shelter.
Buildings and structures are also investment items, things that are bought and resold in organized markets with a potential for gain. House prices frequently appreciate; in this respect they differ from consumer durables such as vehicles.”
This isn't so much a "fact" as it is a "position." In other words, the fact that the BLS uses this position in its definition does not make that definition the best possible definition, nor does it mean people have to accept that definition when they use the word "inflation" in a conversation.
There are loads of reasons why one might argue that house prices should be considered necessary expenses rather than investments. A particular area may have only houses for sale and very few rentals. Ownership provides things that cannot be achieved by renting. The appreciated value of a house is largely meaningless or even detrimental for people who just want to keep living where they live when their wages are not increasing. Etc.
Also, generally, quoting definitions unprompted isn't well received in most conversations :).
Whether it is rented or purchased is irrelevant. Increasing the supply will drive the cost down. If you have more renters than rentals prices will go up and a minimum wage is just a handout to wealthy landlords because you have the same people competing for the same housing just with more money.
People digging ditches is a requirement for a functional modern society. When a general strike happens the ditch diggers and their friends will be the ones wielding the power they forgot they had all along. I strongly recommend not looking down upon people who work with their hands. It's very bad decorum, and their shovels are sharp.
Sure they can who do you think is digging ditches in the USA? People with questionable immigration status or criminal record who have no other choices that’s who.
Citation needed. I make a show of getting to know various laborers in my union and what they worry about. Right now they care about class consciousness, wage/HR, healthcare, etc.
The ditch diggers dug the trenches to run internet to your home. Your internet connection has only went up in value/utility, yet the people who dig those trenches now don’t make any more than they did before.
The idea that employees are paid according to their value is entirely wrong. Employees are paid according to the labor market. The price of labor on the market is significantly controlled by supply, not the value to the employer of employing someone. Besides that, employers have much more power in the employment relationship. This is true even in tech. For example, the FAANGs got caught colluding with one another to suppress salaries via secret anti-poaching agreements a few years back.
They learned to use modern power equipment and make more than minimum wage. We shouldn't be forced to pay more to people who won't switch from using a hand shovel or whatever the modern equivalent is - cash register attendant? When people were "clerks" it paid an okay amount, but should it be paying more than an "okay" amount? Why should their buying power increase? Why should it track the salaries of people who made computers orders of magnitude cheaper and better? The people whose technology made mRNA vaccines possible for everyone to have?
Certain political bents like to mix "inflation" and "productivity growth" to juice the numbers. OTOH not sure I really trust inflation is balanced properly and accurately captures the cost of a certain standard of living.
Although, most think it was not over the 'past year'.
It just became more visible lately, as the 'trust' in USD was overextended by a decade or two.
48K $USD for a post by an 'influencer' can be added to your list. [1]
Basically, the monetary value of perception appears to be orders of magnitude higher than the value of traditional things that were valued before, up-to-say, early 90s.
I have heard of a view, that overall - what we are seeing today are just symptoms of the imploding trust in USD as a reserve currency of the world.
And in US as a trusted guardian of that status (suggesting that there is really no better alternative, apparently, no longer enough...)
There is really nothing to back up that reserver currency status of USD anymore:
-- not by technical means (no Gold standard),
-- not by economic superiority means ( subtract 'perception-based' & 'middleman' economy from US's contributions: financial services, ad-tech, sports & entertainment, from the economic 'booms').
-- not by superior political system (instead, a lot of money laundering, bribery to politicians by means 'book & documentary deals', stock tips, real-estate gifts, relatives on boards of directors for businesses, etc)
-- not by superior law enforcement system (instead, using federal agencies to entrap opposition)
-- not by superior judicial system (instead, US Supreme court choosing what standards to use for which issues)
I guess, we will see if that view is right or not. May be we will be the generation that will oversee the unwinding of the empire, may be not.
I have developed the same intuition about the economy.
My thought process is this: basically, any time dependent system can be modeled with a set of ODEs, no matter how many parts of the system, no matter how many feedback loops and inputs and outputs, you can still develop a reasonable model that is fundamentally just a gigantic vector of poles and zeros. When you have such a system, there is a region of stability: if there are are any positive real parts, one or more of the outputs will begin to climb exponentially towards infinity, until the whole thing comes crashing down.
Pokemon Cards, houses, stocks, bitcoins, NFTs, microchips, used cars... every single output is looking like an exponential response curve to an unstable system. We are doing something fundamentally wrong, in a critical part of the system.
Did you read the disclaimer at the bottom of the chart? The May 2020 slope is due to a change in bank financial reporting.
Edit. Looks like they changed the meaning of what an asset is and included the word liquid. 12000 billion could account for the worth of the stock markets.
> Lately I have been feeling like the economy just broke on a fundamental level over the past year.
We are reaping the success of monetary policy pushed to the point of absurdity. Interest rates have been pushed too low for too long - far beyond the point at which they have any real effect beyond flooding the world with more money.
Should all jobs pay a minimum living wage? and if the jobs become part time then once again you are in the same situation, not getting enough hours of work. I think livable ubi is a better Kong term goal
There has been a savings glut for the last 20 years and it just got really bad this year.
Excess savings are simply dollars that are sitting around doing nothing, employing no one, investing into nothing. There are lots of sources of excess savings. Right now one of the fastest growing source is the house hold savings rate but for the last 20 years it was mostly foreign exchange reserves and corporate savings.
These excess savings are almost equivalent to a contraction of the monetary supply with the caveat that in theory they could come back at any time and nobody knows when, however it's been 20 years and no sign of stopping. The Fed is conservative and only increases the money supply in a mostly reversible way either by issuing debt or buying assets which are then put on its balance sheet. Debt must be paid back, eventually the money that was issued via debt disappears and only the interest payments is freshly minted, QE (buying assets) works under the assumption that inflation will cause asset prices to go up and therefore if the Fed sells assets it will end up with a profit and the returned money is then destroyed to contract the money supply.
However, interest rates aren't powerful enough to steer the economy. At some point they will hit the 0% lower bound. At 0% people will switch to cash and cash equivalents (usually treasury bonds) and therefore it becomes impossible to charge negative interest.
If 0% interest rates are not enough to force people to invest their money themselves then there must be a barrier that is impeding investments to be made. The total investment rate and the total savings rate are just convenient numbers that summarize an entire economy. Surely there must be a crucial piece of information missing that explains the discrepancy. E.g. the type of savings that is currently in abundance is incompatible with the type of investments that are possible and profitable.
As with all things in life this is merely something I am figuring out as I go.
My first clue is venture capital and the Softbank Vision fund. VCs are chasing unicorns simply because their huge scale of capital requires a huge scale of investments. Softbank doesn't even bother with anything less than $100 million. Surely there are startups out there that need $10 million in funding to get started and can double their money in 10 years but have no growth potential beyond say $30 million revenue per year. These companies would do productive work and employ people along the way and everything would be fine but they simply don't fit into the VC model. The most famous case of a over funded company I know is Juicero. I'm sure there would have been a way to keep it running even if it takes a dozen revisions to the original juicer, but at $120 million you knew it was going to shut down before it made any money.
I think we are in a transition period where a new underlying economic system will be underwritten (and with it our politics system). We simply cannot continue this way.
You're right. Overwhelmed card grading services cannot be the defining feature of the American experience; we must rise together to meet this challenge. Nine month waiting times to get a Charizard graded? What is this, Soviet Russia?
Being a chronic procrastinator and lazy gift planner, a few years ago I was searching for a last-minute Christmas gift for my nephews. I retrieved my old Pokémon card collection from the closet, wrapped it up, and called it a day.
I felt mildly bad for not being more thoughtful at the time, but now it appears that I gifted them tens of thousands of dollars in value. Many of them were the rare 1st edition / shadowless versions.
Someone please tell me where to pick up my Uncle of the Year award.
Anybody else get the feeling that this is just pokemon marketing?
I think the biggest clue is that Youtubers who talk about brands only for money, such as Logan Paul, are suddenly head over heals about Pokemon™ trading cards.
It's not a fake craze totally pumped up by marketing, if that's what you mean. Pokemon cards are definitely at a fever pitch right now. Just go to your local Walmart and watch people camping out for them every week.
My theory is that people like Logan Paul are involved with them because they are currently hot and zooming up in price, not the reverse. But I guess them being involved amplifies the hype and keeps the hype train rolling, so who knows where it begins and ends.
People are excited to watch card pack openings, more content creators start making that content since it's popular, demand for old sealed product goes up driving price increases which also makes it more exciting, not to mention the increase in content introduces a broader audience, and then again more people interested leads to more content and demand and price increases.
It's a feedback loop, hard to say exactly what got it going, how big it can get, and what happens when it slows or stops, but for now you can enjoy the mania.
Matt Levine might credit this to his "boredom markets hypothesis" during the pandemic. If you can't go out to a bar or a movie or a casino, then speculating on stocks or crypto or Pokemon cards is more fun compared to the now more limited options you have available, so more people will do that. https://archive.is/X8qY6
The Pokémon Company doesn't make any money from 10, 20 years old Pokémon cards old on Ebay, the kinds the article is talking about. As far as I know trading card game makers even ban older cards from tournaments in order to sell a steady flow of new cards. So they have no stake in their value.
Except that a healthy trade in older cards ensures that demand will continue for the presently sold ones. The buyers hope the cards they buy today will appreciate in value.
Unless there is a central exchange showing it’s a deep, liquid market, I assume this is irrational exuberance for a small number of people which makes for good clickbait.
The article mentions that card grading services themselves have stated that demand for their services is unprecedented.
> At the time of this writing, PSA was receiving more cards every five days (over 500,000 per business week) than what we used to receive every three months.
Of course, the number of cards submitted for grading is not an indicator of market depth, but clearly something is going on.
I wonder if people are counterfeiting the cards. If they stay away from the high value cards and stick with middle of the road they could probably make a fortune before anyone notices.
In Europe there is cardmarket.com which exposes a lot of transaction data. However sales of the most high end MtG stuff are usually done elsewhere to save on transaction fees etc.
It's more of a guilty pleasure for some and an easy gift. They're fairly high quality and easy to store so they accumulate over time.
Three years ago, one of my online gamer friends was sorting and organizing their older brother's pokemon card collection and the final count was well over 5,000 cards. They were in the process of building a website to sell them off but I think the brother got back from college and shut it down. Hopefully they are getting them graded.
I don't think it's marketing. It seems like the people who were scalping sneakers/graphics cards/ps5's have added to the already existing lunatics who are into Pokemon.
We're living through our 21st century version of Dutch Tulipmania, it seems.
Like every other asset perceived to be rare, Pokémon cards have shot up in price lately. Some cards are now selling for more than the median price of a house. And yes, you read that right: 1 rare Pokémon card > 1 median house. Naturally, people are raiding their closets hoping to find cards they can cash out, and the companies that grade and certify cards as authentic are overwhelmed with demand.
But holy mackerel, I'm not doing the OP justice:
> I had a First Edition Charizard, one of the most sought-after cards of all time, when I was 10. I sold it on eBay when I was 11, for $150. It was a huge sum of money at the time. One of these sold for more than $300,000 a few months ago. Like many other people, I have spent much of the last few months digging through my old cards, identifying which ones are valuable, and selling them on eBay.
> Over the last few months, as people have been raiding their closets for their old Pokémon card collections, they’ve been mailing their cards to get graded at one of the three major companies that does this. The companies are Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), and Beckett Grading Services (BGS).
> Under the weight of the resurgent Pokémon card hobby, each [of the grading companies] has been completely crushed by demand and COVID-related backlogs, to the point that, from the outside, it seems as though they are barely functioning (It’s not just Pokémon cards, there has also been a resurgence in sports card, Magic card, and Yu-gi-oh! card collecting).*
Commodities price bubbles are the worst examples of irrational exuberance.
I would say stick with equities bubbles, like South Sea, 1920s, 1990s tech bubble if one wishes for a cautionary tale or any level of introspection.
Both the Tulip bubble and the Beanie Baby bubble were rational reactions to data. Although not cited as such, there is no introspective possibility for anyone researching markets and learning how to deploy their own capital while writing those off as irrational.
> A collector I know has begun to simply buy Top Loaders from Chinese wholesale websites and sell those on eBay rather than deal with Pokémon cards at all.
Just like in every gold rush, the ones who will end up with the most profit are the ones selling the shovels.
Joseph Francis Ladue founded Dawson City and became a very rich man by expoiting the gold rush that way instead of mining (he ended up making some money directly from mining stakes as well in the end though). I believe his reputation and life story are certainly one of the foundations of that popular idea.
I don't know of any empirical studies of commerce in the Yukon gold rush that demonstrated that the merchants were the fattest of the fat cats in the the whole scenario though. Lots of stories of scammer and schemers making big bucks too, but again, who really knows?
Very few legitimately struck it rich on gold, that's for sure.
Typical gold mining equipment isn't mentioned in that article at all, he seems to have had a regular dry goods store? I checked out one of the sources but I found nothing there either. A typical dry goods store was probably still good business during a gold rush though.
But the market cap of gold is vastly more. What you're saying is that the market cap for shovels would be the upper bound of the real number we are looking for, as there are other uses. So we can simply be more sure that gold has returned more economic value to those who obtained it than those who created shovels.
The truth is, what I said doesnt make any sense at all. I never thought it did. But thinking about it for a few seconds makes it obvious that it's unlikely selling shovels is actually a better business than digging gold. The major gas companies make more money than the companies who build rigs. Selling shovels is a lower variance method of capitalizing off a gold rush. I prefer to do both.
Most every successful startup is essentially someone digging for gold in a new gold rush. Rarely are they selling shovels.
Digging for gold or oil is kind of a misnomer as the important thing in both cases would be owning land with the appropriate land rights.
The common saying is misleading. It should be, "you're unlikely to lose your shirt, will have a higher likelihood of success and stability, and an overall easier time selling shovels in a gold rush, but with lower overall gain than the outlier winner gold miners" but that doesnt quite roll off the tongue.
I gave all my Pokémon and Magic the Gathering cards to my little cousins a few years ago. BRB just sending this article to their parents on the off-chance that there is real money sitting there...
And for what it’s worth, when people wonder what inflation looks like in 2021, as far as I’m concerned, it’s this.
When I read about the grading companies, it makes me wonder about processes that could be improved and how I would go about it. It says they hired efficiency experts ; it would be interesting to hear from them.
I’m more into buying comics (for reading, not profit) but there is a book coming out called Overstreet Guide to Grading Comics that sounds interesting. (Overstreet also publishes a famous annual price guide for comics.)
The craze for buying new cards makes me think of a cautionary tale. In the 90s certain old, rare issues were going for tens of thousands (current day, a few can go for millions). People started buying new comics thinking those would be worth something someday too. Customers, comics, stores, all expanded greatly before collapsing. Because the companies were printing and selling millions of copies they were not rare at all! https://comicbooked.com/comic-book/
So the important thing is, are they printing more and more cards to meet demand? (I actually don’t know; do any of you know?) If so, there’s going to be a collapse.
Actually the article pointed out how massively the production of graded cards is increasing, so there you have it. If those are new cards getting graded, I guess that will collapse at least.
It does seem like something a high resolution camera and some neural nets could do, right? Or conversely just put standardized images up on a website and have the public sort them (like hot or not). I’d bet it would become a fun thing for card aficionados to do even.
My guess is only on for high grades. For good, but not great grades, I'd expect you can get a good enough idea from a high-resolution photo, and you're better off rolling the dice, knowing you're not getting a gem mint, anyway.
The other reason to get it graded is it marks that it might be valuable for when you die and family is going through your stuff.
I'd also expect CGC-graded cards to be worth less. I sold all my MTG cards except one (unfortunately, I sold the Beta Chaos Orb), but when I saw the price ($200-ish) of the one I kept, figured I'd get it graded in case I want to sell it. There were two grading companies, BGS and PSA that have been around forever, and I went with the cheapest for grading one card. I didn't recognize the name CGC. The article says they've only been grading cards for a year, and I wouldn't be surprised if people value BGS and PSA-graded cards more.
This trend in trading card prices is the same trend that's driving bitcoin right now: people who are bored and have some extra cash to spend on something that seems to be appreciating.
Could somebody link me to a resource that explains the economics behind these collectibles ? (NFTs, trading cards etc. not art or rare items of historical significance)
Whatever I read either concludes scam or a store of value, but doesn't seem to explain the large amounts of money sloshing around in these.
FOMO is a big thing. They have appreciated so everyone thinks they keep doing that. Nostalgia is factor too and people who were interested in these in childhood now have extra cash.
Now I wonder pull of some of these for current and next generation and how will that affect the prices in long term, probably there won't be enough pressure to keep thing going at some point. I should probably check some graphs of low to medium end classic car pricing by decade... Just to see how future might look like.
An overview of most valuable cards would have been nice, but apparently you can't get a rating anyways. How do Pokémon cards compare to other card games, like e. g. Magic or Yigioh?
Just out of curiosity what about 'Magic the gathering' cards?
I found a load of them from when I was a kid. They are in good condition, I have unopened booster packs too.
Would now be a good time to sell them? Also could I just sell the lot for a reasonable price and not have to go through them all? Thanks!
>>>Also could I just sell the lot for a reasonable price and not have to go through them all?
I wouldn't recommend that. If you sell them as "bulk", you might get something like $10 for 10,000 cards. Buried in those 10,000 cards you probably have several cards that are worth $20-$100 each. This was my exact scenario over the past 2 years. I took a trip stateside in 2019 and got back into Magic (my cards were at my mother's house) after a 15-year hiatus. I started playing in 1994/95, so I had a pile of now-kinda-rare cards that were worth FAR more than I ever expected. But I've had to dig through my boxes and figure out what I had. Instead of selling them all off, I mostly trade them to local players/collectors in exchange for large quantities of lesser-valued but still useful cards for making EDH decks. I'm keeping my most valuable card though, the $800 Nether Void.
I recommend using the mobile app "Delver Lens" to scan your cards rapidly, which I think can export the card list as a CSV format. Then try to import that CSV list into a good card management site. I use Deckstats.net, which will display prices for your collection pulled from 3 different websites. This should make it slightly less laborious to sort your stuff as well as establish a ballpark value.
The niche industry of "grading trading cards for collectible value" is completely overflowing. Prices for this service are skyrocketing because the demand far outstrips the availability.
Meanwhile we still don't have a minimum wage that is anything like livable. $15/h was proposed as a sensible raise ten years ago from the current federal minimum of $7 and inflation has not stopped in the intervening time - online inflation calculators say the modern number would be $18.22.