Ray Dalio says the global economy is under threat

If machines can produce every useful good and service better than humans -- including manufacturing copies of themselves -- then the global economy (denominated in units of currency) might be under threat, but people will materially prosper. It&#x27;s not dollars or euros or renminbi that people really need. People need goods and services. If the machines-do-everything technology gets invented once, copies will soon spread globally [1].<p>The real problem is more likely to be the transitional turbulence. If self-driving vehicles <i>do</i> wipe out millions of truck driver jobs in the year 2029, but automated doctors aren&#x27;t ready until 2059, large groups of workers lose income without seeing deflationary relief in the prices of services they need.<p>[1] The spread of maker machines could happen &quot;legitimately&quot; -- Gates Foundation or a similar organization financing freely shareable re-implementations. It could also happen &quot;illegally&quot; -- a government in a poorer country will just decide to tell international patent&#x2F;copyright holders to pound sand in favor of their own domestic constitutents. This would be similar to South Africa&#x27;s treatment of HIV drug patents in the 1990s.

It seems very clear to the man on the street, the fights are getting more fierce. Assets prices increase and the bottom 80% are getting squeezed out of many things, slowly but surely: education, housing and with that also out of participation in society.<p>There is literally nothing, that hints at progress at this point: Tech and internet will has turned into permanent surveillance, the home surveillance is rolled out, the internet of things and workspace will be next, allowing for google analytics on labor.<p>And if workers complain too much, increase investments in software and data tools and replace a bunch of wet ware with some tool; heck, half of the &quot;knowledge workers&quot; today might be obsolete already.<p>The average person won&#x27;t have much to laugh for the next few decades. We live in a sad time, where the most miraculous things man can create (machines that &quot;think&quot;) will be the prime weapons of the owners against the non-owners. I fear this will be a costly battle.

&gt;He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive.<p>Why can&#x27;t we let the individual find a way to make themselves productive? And, why do they <i>need</i> to be productive? Some of my best times in life are watching and playing games with my friends. Socializing. Loving people.<p>I, and most people I know, can look around and see things that need to be done. If our lives aren&#x27;t so focused on paying the bills all the time, we can relax a bit and be creative.<p>I remember I used to get <i>great</i> school lunches. I knew the cafeteria staff by name and they knew me because I went back for seconds and thirds and fourths... skinny as a bean pole. Lunches were made fresh every day. The staff were there at 6am cooking for the kids. Fresh bread. I used to love watching that dough bounce around in the industrial mixer. It was bigger than I was.<p>A decade after I was out of school, I saw one of the ladies and asked how the school lunches were. She said they don&#x27;t get to make them anymore. The menus are decided in Washington DC now and they have very little control over what is cooked or eaten. Kids don&#x27;t come back for seconds and thirds and fourths anymore.<p>The federal government took local control away from the schools and homogenized everything and basically ruined it from what I remember.<p>Why do we think the federal government knows better how to manage our day to day lives than we do ourselves? Get out of our kitchens and homes.<p>The government doesn&#x27;t need to find a way for me to be productive. People who need to be productive to keep their sanity will find a way. They&#x27;ll clean their bedrooms, volunteer in their communities. They won&#x27;t be judged by what their job is, but rather, what they do for themselves and the people around them.<p>The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person&#x27;s freewill.<p>We need more freewill in the world.

Dalio unquestionably has had success with investing. But his ideas are often called crazy. (i.e. the bond-heavy nature of his &#x27;All Weather Portfolio&#x27;.)<p>He&#x27;s also at odds with stalwarts like Warren Buffet, who point out that gold doesn&#x27;t really have a reason to be a hedge against a crash. It doesn&#x27;t do anything, it just looks pretty. Once people begin to figure that the emporer has no clothes, gold will just be cheap, pretty metal.<p>Dalio is worth listening to, but with a large grain of salt, IMHO.

As someone who likes to crack jokes at the expense of goldbugs, Dalio saying to buy precious metals got my attention.

People taking seriously what a hedgefund manager says in a public speech... it is to laugh.<p>If productivity were going up because of automation to the point where mass unemployment is an issue, interest rates would be higher: the end. Anyone who disagrees doesn&#x27;t understand how finance works.

If I guy that got awfully rich by shuffling money around instead of actually producing anything of value gets scared, then I feel like perhaps the economy may get a bit more fair. Bring it on.

People have been saying robots will take all the jobs and kill everyone for centuries: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timeline.com&#x2F;robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-jobs-for-more-than-200-years-5c9c08a2f41d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timeline.com&#x2F;robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-...</a>

What is ccn?

This is the same guy that wrote worthless self-help (&quot;principles&quot;) and claims capitalism is bad, not practicing what he preaches he also benefits the most from it.