The US had a whole host of laws that made pulling out cash from businesses very expensive, but investing in them very easy.
So you had a strong incentive to increase salaries, hire more workers, invest in more machinery, diversify, etc. simply because getting more cash out of a business wasn't worth it
"So you had a strong incentive to increase salaries, hire more workers, invest in more machinery, diversify, etc. simply because getting more cash out of a business wasn't worth it"
Unfortunately they focused on increasing executive salaries and forgot about the rest.
This isn't really true, because up until relatively recently most university funding came from the state and not tuition. The decline in state support led to higher tuition costs; federal student loans turned it into a bonanza, but the steep price tags are more because tuition was never the main revenue driver for universities.
When did the funding from state dry up? In the 60's the cost of univerity was like ~$1500 which is ~$11,000 today, yet today people are in debt for up to 100's of 1000's. The higher education act was introduced in the 60's, and its been downhill from there.
Vibe of the story is middle class retirees moving to Vietnam to have an upper middle class retirement; nobody on the median income line in the US can afford to have in-home staff to help them, or afford care outside of what Medicare offers.
Titles are important for pay reasons, as they correspond to pay bands. People that say titles don't matter are probably already making outsized compensation and don't find it important because their resume speaks for itself.
A manager and director can be doing the same job, but the title matters in terms of their compensation and potential title at their next job.
I wouldn't dispute your point that titles are important, but would ask, should they be? It doesn't seem that they really mean much at a lot of places, or are sometimes even given out in place of compensation. One anecdote I can think of is my company hired a front end developer right out of a bootcamp. After a few months he went on to a job at a large sports apparel manufacturer with the title of Senior Engineer. He was competent and a sharp guy, but come on, Senior with less than a years worth of professional experience.
The point made is that boards bend to founders, and many founders control the boards anyways, so the board is a big rubber stamp rather than any kind of control mechanism.
Transfer fees on Ethereum are currently $2.75, so either the movers got $2.25 or the dude paid an extra 55% just to pay them in something that's less useful for them.
This is pretty historically documented, and kind of something that still exists as a holdover in ex-Soviet countries. The lying became so pervasive that it was impossible to tell what the actual output of industry was
The idea that the Great Lakes are going to be tapped to solve water problems outside the watershed is fall flat when they realize those Great Lakes states aren't going to sell off access like that.
I remember some moonshot proposal to pipe the water to the Southwest, which is wild.
It's surprising, actually, how small the Great Lakes watershed is, compared to the surface area of the lakes. You really aren't going to get much of anything from tributaries; if you want some of the water you draw it from the lakes.
So you had a strong incentive to increase salaries, hire more workers, invest in more machinery, diversify, etc. simply because getting more cash out of a business wasn't worth it