Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I’m not sure to whom it’s dissipated. It does get dissipated. The great fortunes of the past are mostly gone, but they may not go to people below. And the idea of writing into a tax system, subsidies on that scale, in essence, subsidies to wealth, not GDP. But wealth is, say, six to eight times GDP. I just think the practical problems are quite significant. It’s not an idea I’m pushing, but there are, at the margins, ways you can do it that only benefit people who are poor, ways you can improve through better either regulation or deregulation, like the workings of local credit unions, that are a kind of de facto subsidy without having to subsidize all of the saved wealth. There are a lot of ways you can do that, and we should look for that more. Relatedly, I think, a couple of years ago, Paul Schlemming had an interesting paper that if you look from 1311 to now, interest rates have been declining. There’s been hundreds of years of interest rate declines. What is the big picture explanation of this trend? I’m not sure we have one. You may know Cowen’s third law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong. But simply, lower risk, better information, higher buffers of wealth would be what you’d call the intuitive economistic explanations. There’s probably something to them, but how much of that trend do they actually explain as a percent of the variance? I don’t know.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.