32 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 20 Sep \ on: wage discrepancy in different countries - does bitcoin fix this? bitcoin
Likely false, but definitely irrelevant. Wages are determined by the amount of value you're able to add for your employer. In a poor country, consumers can not spend as much on a product as they can in a wealthy country, so the producers cannot be paid as much either.
Where this question gets really interesting is in considering the downstream effects of bitcoin adoption. If bitcoin makes it more difficult for rent seeking politicians to extract wealth from the rest of us, then fewer people will go into politics and the political class will shrink. That would even things out to some degree, between those who live in relatively free societies and those who live in relatively oppressed ones.
but if, in a poor country, they were able to stack more, they would start to become a non-poor country and therefore their purchasing power would go up, no?
i feel like the rent-seeking class would still be able to convert some assets into btc and then find a new way to get an advantage , after all, they could swap assets to acquire more btc
it should stop people using things like real estate as a store of value which would be good for people that actually want to live in houses / apartments
reply
The downstream effects are many. I agree that adopting bitcoin will increase prosperity, but it will do so in rich and poor countries alike.
It's only if poor countries are more artificially poor (which I think is largely the case) that bitcoin would even things out.
reply
Poor countries are less productive. Bitcoin can make them more productive by incentivizing capital accumulation and better capital allocation, but that takes time.
reply
That's aligned with my point. Poor institutions discourage capital accumulation, because people aren't secure in their possessions. That leads to capital misallocation.
Bitcoin reverses that by making people more secure in their possessions (at least wrt their money).
reply