When upward mobility has been stymied for generations (the US has the lowest upword mobility among Western nations, outdoing even the class-ridden Brits) and insane house prices, student loans and cost of living increases have cut all the bootstraps, people are looking for anything - anything - that offers the slimmest of opportunities, because education and hard work don't cut it any more. Hence the crypto nonsense among the younger generation and MLM cults for the older Facebook crowd.
The people who put their hope into blockchain and crypto currency technology are missing a fundamental point that would have _catastrophic_ consequences on social mobility, exploitation and oppression in the long term: You don't actually want a decentralized, persistent log of all transactions, especially if that also includes credit and debt.
The financial market is going out of hand because since the 70's/80's it isn't serving it's purpose anymore, which is regulating and allocating resources and credit. Instead it is disjoint from actual value and productivity, so it has started a life of its own.
People and entire nations are being held down by financial obligations while not benefiting from the increase in productivity and profit because the connection between finance and value production is almost completely severed.
The only non-violent way out of this is forgiveness. Which acknowledges that exact monetary value and debt in any form and especially in it's current form is just a highly volatile figment. And that's only possible if we can actually _forget_ transactions.
An eternal, cryptographic, decentralized transaction log might just be the perfect tool for long term financial oppression and exploitation. And the more convenient it gets the more exchange will flow through it. Well at least until the people start magnetizing and burning down data centers and PCs. But I think there are less destructive ways forward.
You make a large assumption that people don't want a permanent log. If the system works then you do want it to be permanent. The only reason why you propose forgetting the transactions of the current system is that it is distorted by politicians. Politicians cannot distorted crypto markets in the same way they can with the USD, therefore is no need to ever forget crypto transactions
I think you give politicians too much credit, they have influence, but at the end of the day we all have one master in this world. There is something importantly impersonal and algorithmic about the circulation and allotment of capital and currency, and that is the ultimate reason we live in the unjust and unforgiving world we do. A persistent totalizing ledger would only reify these systems more. It would absolve the system of any traces of humanity it might incidentally have, leaving nothing but transactions.
There is not a more egalitarian capitalism hidden under the machinations of corrupt politicians, it is itself a dark, destructive thing. I am confident that money will save no one at the end. Money is not the salvation you are looking for.
I'm saying "the system" doesn't work because it doesn't serve its purpose and on a deeper level it is inherently based on imagination.
Politicians and the financial system are not entities that can isolated from each other. The financial system is in of itself a form of trade regulation: to make rules about what costs what, who owes who, what can be traded how and so on. Finance is the bureaucracy of trade. It is failing because it shifted its purpose from regulation and quantification of value to a life of its own and has become in large parts speculative and non-proportional. Even some of the most libertarian thinkers like Adam Smith have warned us about this.
A crypto market is one such thing, but not only is it already disjoint from its purpose, which is enumerating value, credit and regulating trade. The speculative and volatile nature of crypto markets show that. But it also doesn't enable the use of a safety break - that has been used time and time again in larger history but also in smaller interactions - to repair the economy from becoming fantastical to real again. Crypto has also no alternative solution of doing that.
What happens when you don't do that for long enough is that the people will do it for you. They will at some point burn it all down. Debt and profits that are disjoint from actual value and become more so through financial mechanisms erode trust. And currently that is exactly what you can see happening since a few years. People are quitting their jobs, joining protests, unions and so on because they intuitively understand that they are being screwed.
The way to deal with excess debt is not to have a cranky database that loses the records. Also forgiveness seldom happens.
What does happen in reality often is inflation - government gives money to the needy (or similar) and the money being given out inflates away the debts.
Education and hard work drive labor. These aren’t qualities respected by any kind of wealth generators or management. If anything they are unrewarded implicit requirements except for labor where there aren’t other more substantial qualities to rate individual contributions.
In most of the country house prices remained low and stable until very recently. Only a few coastal areas have seen decades of out of control pricing.
I can clearly see a strong correlation between both education and hard work vs. social status and income. I come from Europe though. Is it really not the case in the US? Is it because of student loan barrier?
How hard did Boris Johnson work again? Or Priti Patel? Or Don Jr? Or Jair Bolsonaro?
I'm Brazilian, but I live in Europe, and everyday I see that I was privileged to be able to focus on studying hard (and didn't, most of the time) and still managed to be quite successful when compared to the average European. In Brazil, my skin and eye color was a ticket to some very restricted spaces I simply wouldn't have access to with the wrong colors.
You are cherry picking outliers to argue against a claim about a general trend.
It really does not matter how hard this or that particular individual worked. What matters is statistics which describes the opportunity of an anonymous Joe in the society.
It really depends on what kind of mobility we are talking about. The wealth and influence of the individuals I mentioned is pretty much impossible to reach unless you have optimal initial conditions. As the saying goes, the easiest way to become a millionaire is to be born a billionaire. Even if you are born a mere millionaire, you can make many more attempts at becoming a billionaire than a person who needs to work in order to have dinner.
There is a lot of statistics that point that current levels of social mobility are on par with feudal England and, while a modest improvement in conditions is very achievable for those who aren’t born in the most unforgiving situations, the remaining possible paths are very much closed.
I kind of expected that we are talking about the basic mobility, such as my wife coming from a low income blue collar family becoming an upper-middle class architect. Not the chance of becoming a super-rich or super-powerful.
