bsdpufferfish

I don't blame you if you aren't entertained. But this analysis is like thinking Moby dick is about hunting whales.

you know what else sucks? living in a low trust society where people game these return systems (which we also pay for).

No disagreement.

People don't typically start a Phd at 34. You're at a different level of maturity now.

"have no hope" actually means someone at the department refuses to sign your papers. I have never been treated with so little respect in industry.

Research in a Phd program is 90% long term habit, 10% creative musing. Marriage structure helps with that 90% part.

Why are they always trying to sell these things to audiences who are not interested?

higher dimensional vectors or matrices are still not tensors.

> property rights

No you are conflating two topics. Property rights is not propping up stocks and bonds. It's protecting ownership so you can invest in building things over the long term without them being taken.

Similar reasons encourage the government to protect the value of their currency.

> the point of fiat is to be an easy medium of exchange

The stated goal of the federal reserve is price stability, not exchange.

> Hoarding paper or shiny objects is still speculation with risk

Yep but it's a difference of how much risk.

> having strong social safety nets

Those carry their own kinds of risk.

> I shouldn't be incentivized to hold dollars.

0% is hardly a massive incentive to hold cash. If we can't agree on that then ill be incentivized to hold a currency that does care about its value.

Of course there is always risk. But one of the supposed goals of fiat money and property rights is to reduce that risk, ensuring the ability to save into the future.

There are countless examples of countries where that trust was broken.

> not prerequisites

Almost the entire document is undergrad numerical topics (finite difference methods, maximum likelihood, Jacobins, hessians, newtons method, etc). This is all well covered material that is soundly not research.

> what's stopping them from keeping the money in an index fund

Risk of principal loss.

The comment is referring to playing loose with the currency, not a drop in supply or an increase in demand.

It's not good for society that ordinary people have to speculate their hard earned money just to keep it for retirement.

Even if it's good for GDP to have everyone spending every penny, it's not good for you.