While working at Amazon, I never really had the time to understand the income I was making. Our incomes are just a number, but what does that number actually mean, and how do we properly assign value to work? What is the price of the consumer?
Most people are taught that if they go to college and land a job, that they’ll be promised wealth. This is far from the truth. Real wealth is achieved by making the right decisions at the right time, and by choosing your battles wisely. The only benefit of education, for me at least, was getting the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Everything else was more or less self-taught.
Most financial literature out there teaches the “Inversion Narrative”. The financial system spends a good deal of money in advertising and marketing disguised as “education” to spread misinformation on how you should best invest your money. I recently have taken up a habit of watching/reading this flawed educational material, doing the math, and seeing it for the fraud that it truely is. So if you are going to make any investment decisions, Google is not your friend. The internet is full of bots and real people spreading false “buy signals” and “sell signals”. Sadly, the educators teaching this material are also just as misguided as they typically aren’t investors themselves.
If you are thinking of studying finance, I would suggest taking a class in finance or by watching the Yale course on finance to fully understand what you’re getting yourself into.
Finance is nothing like computer science. If it were, 80% of the material out there would be on how to write awful code. It’s a field devoid of any sound engineering principles. Our current system, fractional reserve banking is very fragile and it depends on constant stream of liquidity supplied by a central bank. I see this as a massive single point of failure, and not a very efficient system. I can care less about who it benefits or why. The wealth gap we’re seeing today is as a result of living in a world where very powerful rational actors (financial AIs) price more efficiently than humans can.
Maybe one day, everything will be priced in.