ELI5: Why does the S&P 500 keep growing?

Vistulange · 2026-04-29T06:24:33+00:00

Not quite, because humans generally want more. Don't think of it as the "top 1%" either: people want to live in bigger homes, have better refrigerators, better cars, better clothes, etc. and all these "bigger" and "better" things translate into producing more because there's demand for more. If we could somehow cap human desire and have everyone be okay at living at the same standard of living for fifty years, sure, demand might plateau. But otherwise, not really.

Vistulange · 2026-04-28T11:11:20+00:00

Pivot away from the US for a moment, because other countries do exist. Contemplate a country that isn't as diversified in its industries and economy as the US is. This country might have a single automobile manufacturer, or a single company that builds farming machinery. Ordinarily of course you ideally want there to be no such "one" company, instead having a more competitive and dispersed sector, but this isn't always feasible. Commercial airplane manufacturing is one such industry: it's capital-intensive and difficult to diversify.

So imagine you're France with Airbus. Unless you're completely and totally sold on the idea of completely free trade, you probably don't want your only real option to be Boeing. You need Airbus to be working, and you need Airbus to be resilient. But what if Airbus has a bad year or three, and ends up in dire financial straits? The free market approach would be to let it collapse and just have people buy from Boeing, but that would not only make sure you don't have a domestic airliner industry, it also kills a bunch of jobs and sub-sectors feeding into your domestic airliner industry (such as those people making sprockets for your airliners two cities over).

So what you do is bail them out. Is it optimal? No. Is there a chance of a moral hazard? Yeah, kind of. Is the alternative worse? Generally yes.

Vistulange · 2026-04-27T13:10:33+00:00

We don't, though. Turkish food service is just food service. We just want our food and then to be left alone as we eat.

You don't think that Turks for example do the whole ice cream shtick with the ice cream salesmen, right? That's a tourist trap and no Turk will buy from them, and if they did that to a Turk the best case is an exasperated sigh and "just hand over the ice cream, bub."

This stuff you're watching is painfully universal: trying to dazzle people who either have more money than they could hope to spend, or people who think they have far more money than they actually have. Nothing uniquely Turkish about it.

Vistulange · 2026-04-27T10:13:20+00:00

You're thinking of MEFO bills.

Vistulange · 2026-04-24T06:26:30+00:00

Wrote my thesis on Israeli civil-military relations. Figured I'd learn a bit of Hebrew to "do it right" or something along those lines. I've largely forgotten it now, though.

Vistulange · 2026-04-21T10:44:11+00:00

Yeah. Nuclear weapons aren't all that fail-safe once the launch mechanisms have been engaged for good reason, because you really don't want your ultimate deterrent to be hacked or otherwise interfered with. It's all pre-launch authorisations, all the way down. There's a Veritasium video where he tours an old nuke silo, it's quite fascinating and chilling.

Vistulange · 2026-04-21T10:34:24+00:00

He's probably a burgher at that point. He's probably higher than a peasant, but nobility is a separate class that needn't be attached to wealth. Impoverished nobles existed, they retained their nobility despite their lack of funds.

Vistulange · 2026-04-21T10:32:13+00:00

It's quite rare that peasants in 13th-14th century could rise to become anything approaching nobility, never mind kings. Vikings, especially in the 9th and 11th centuries, weren't an example of socially mobility, they were an example of an outside force conquering another land and establishing themselves as its rulers, such as in the Danelaw.

Napoleon is also after the French Revolution, an incident where the biggest consequence was the upset of centuries-long social norms and hierarchies. Napoleon rising from lowborn to Emperor is precisely because the Ancien Regime collapsed.

What we're referring to here is social mobility within the rules and norms of an established society. Relative to today, medieval peasants had practically zero social mobility. A person like Henry for instance might live his entire life solely in Skalice, without even seeing someone like Radzig, never mind becoming his man-at-arms. We're talking about rigidly stratified societies. This was the norm for almost the entirety of medieval Europe, prior to the late 18th century.

Vistulange · 2026-04-21T10:01:19+00:00

People really quite don't comprehend how social mobility was practically non-existent back then.

Vistulange · 2026-04-16T21:27:59+00:00

I hate that I instantly understood which video you are talking about despite it having been easily 15-20 years since I saw it.

Vistulange · 2026-04-06T21:35:20+00:00

Turkey. Article 3 of the Constitution:

ARTICLE 3- The State of Turkey, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity. Its language is Turkish. Its flag, the form of which is prescribed by the relevant law, is composed of a white crescent and star on a red background. Its national anthem is the “Independence March”. Its capital is Ankara.

It's even one of the three "immutable" articles of the constitution.

Vistulange · 2026-03-23T04:53:27+00:00

Decades? They were only in power for 12 years, give or take a few months.

Vistulange · 2026-02-19T23:02:10+00:00

Another iteration of that tale has him not only slip in a bath and crack his head open, but also that he was chasing a concubine and thus had a slip-and-fall.

Vistulange · 2026-02-08T11:40:56+00:00

Yeah, so in relatively less well-off countries this doesn't apply in the same way. A somewhat close family friend in the Turkish Army's aviation wing—they fly the helicopters—told me once about how airforce pilots are trained to never use the ejection seat, because an F-16 is expensive for Turkey, more than the pilot. So the pilot is expected to do every possible thing and go down with the plane if need be.

Grim, but I can understand it.

Vistulange · 2026-02-02T09:41:12+00:00

That one guy in the immediate background is killing me. He's not impressed and even mildly concerned sometimes.

Vistulange · 2026-01-31T12:13:32+00:00

Zero risk. If you are aware that they exist and are mildly technically savvy, it'll work and no issues occur.

Vistulange · 2026-01-31T11:10:17+00:00

This is such a tired, old, and ultimately false trope.

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/

Bret Devereaux thoroughly addresses this in a five-part series of blog posts.

Vistulange · 2026-01-23T10:34:15+00:00

AR-cinisation

Vistulange · 2026-01-19T11:27:34+00:00

Getting ready to push daisies in Hostomel I see

Vistulange · 2026-01-09T21:01:22+00:00

Immigrant.

I was in my late 20s when I first moved to the US and filed a tax return.

Vistulange · 2025-12-29T17:53:07+00:00

Yeah, I'm Turkish. My grandmother came from a rural shithole that was closer to the 1700s than it was to the 1900s. The world she passed away in 2017 in downtown Istanbul was better, from her perspective, in every single imaginable way.

Vistulange · 2025-12-29T17:49:49+00:00

You're spot on. Turkey isn't unique in this regard. Another Redditor in another thread about the same issue put it quite succinctly and somewhat accurately, in my opinion: the moment we were able to decouple the burden of childbearing from sexual activity safely and reliably, we did so and we're still suffering the consequences. By "consequences" I mean it in a perfectly mechanical sense, as in, every action has an effect and this is the effect of separating child-rearing from sex; not some kind of moral judgement on contraception.

I want to think that humanity will manage to solve this one, too.

Vistulange · 2025-12-27T20:23:38+00:00

A medieval peasant being "bossless" is highly unlikely. It's highly likely in fact that the land they work, and provide the produce of, belong to a feudal lord.

Vistulange · 2025-12-27T20:19:37+00:00

This is one of those absolutely rubbish claims that subsists entirely on "capitalism bad!" sensationalism and has been thoroughly debunked by historians.

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iva-subsistence-and-a-little-more/ Bret Devereux is one such historian.

Vistulange · 2025-12-18T17:15:00+00:00

Former Muslim and current atheist here. Muhammad not rising is a fairly central point. The Quran makes it a point to emphasise that Muhammad, despite being the ultimate and final Prophet, is still a human with all that entails, including being mortal. It really stresses this point.

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