What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?
The folks reading this are going to get the wrong message. They are going to believe that rising interest rates will magically make it so that the most highly valued companies are the ones that produce the most societal good. This may start to happen more to a certain extent, but it&#x27;s a totally false assumption.<p>The most valuable companies before and after this era of low interest rates were and continue to be monopolies. That&#x27;s what Warren Buffet invests in (Davita Dialysis, Exxon, Apple, rail lines ---&gt; all monopolies). That&#x27;s what Peter Thiel tries to invest in (Zero to One). That&#x27;s what successful Y Combinator companies ultimately strive to become.<p>Societal value creation is not the same as value creation to shareholders. The latter can be achieved by the former, but the former is not a requirement for the latter.<p>The question for many of the readers of HackerNews is whether their jobs (mostly as software engineers) ever needed to exist. The answer for many is going to be -- probably not. On the flip side of things, lowering wages for software engineers is going to enable many institutions and companies that do not operate as tech monopolies or startups to start to get some of the benefits of skilled software engineers!