Investors do provide an important role by taking on risk and enabling growth that otherwise wouldn’t occur. The concept of an economy that constantly grows is that, through investment and work, value greater than the sum of the parts put in can be generated.

If Bob pays Frank to build a house and buys all the supplies, Frank does the actual labor, and Laura buys it then Bob and Frank are left with more money than they started with and Laura is left with an asset worth to her what she paid for it. Her net worth is unchanged and she can borrow against the house or sell it some day. All three people have gained from the situation.

If Bob and Frank can’t sell the house though or the price of houses drops while it’s being built Frank still gets his salary, Laura’s life is unchanged or she got a good deal, but Bob just lost everything he put in.

The problem is our society is wildly imbalanced towards Bob, so Frank is going to earn pennies for actually doing the work to build a house and Bob is going to rake in most of the profits. Taking the risk and enabling something to be built is obviously important and a valuable service, but it’s deeply overvalued in our current system as compared to actual labor

That’s how an economy can be doing well (generating lots of value) but for regular humans almost none of the value gets passed to us and instead gets concentrated in the hands of Bobs and Lauras who contribute money instead of labor.

Ensuring us Franks have enough money to spend is critical because, as you pointed out, a far larger share of my money is recirculating into the economy than a billionaire who spends tiny percentages of their net worth. Conversely, someone living paycheck to paycheck is by definition recirculating essentially 100% of their net worth back into the economy every pay cycle.

Lastly being poor is expensive, and has large costs associated. Not having savings to cover unexpected expenses often leads to debt, not being able to afford a large one time purchase often leads to many smaller expenses that add up much higher in total, etc. Enabling people to break out of those cycles is massively beneficial to economies and obviously (and more importantly imo) to individuals and communities

The United States is one of the best examples of a democratic republic, it is absolutely both a democracy and a republic.

Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law observes that the United States exemplifies the varied nature of a constitutional republic—a country where some decisions (often local) are made by direct democratic processes, while others (often federal) are made by democratically elected representatives

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic

The lack of high school civics education in this country has done untold damage

And we didn’t abolish slavery for 89 years after declaring independence. We can absolutely agree change is usually painfully, unnecessarily, terribly slow but it does happen, requiring time, work, and sacrifice

our lives are worse than four, eight, twelve, sixteen, or however many four years you want to go back our lives get worse every election no matter who wins

Is what I was replying to and it’s objectively false.

An important caveat is that positive societal change is absolutely not inevitable, generations have fought to improve the injustices of their times and we must carry on their legacy lest we allow their sacrifices to be in vain

Tell that to my friends who’s parents weren’t allowed to get married until our lifetimes or who’s great grandparents were classified as 3/5ths of a person

Vote

I mean it explicitly says it’s not Gen Z’s fault they don’t have the requisite training. They want to learn more than the rest of the population, there just aren’t good opportunities to learn the relatively niche skills.

I totally agree the article should have been written way better, and I question why it focuses on just gen z when a lack of sustainable talent seems like a multigenerational problem, but improving training being most critical for gen Z as they will be taking over more and more of the workforce in the oncoming years (critically during the window of opportunity to reverse more of the effects of climate change) makes sense to me