(Part 3) Top products from r/economy

> I am fairly ignorant on the different options available to me as far as investing goes, but that's what investment companies are for, isn't it?

Absolutely. We have a financial advisor that keeps a close eye on our money, and he's more than earned his pay. But I think it important to educate yourself enough to develop a functional BS detector. Otherwise, you won't know what to expect in different market conditions and will have a tough time picking an advisor.

We got in with our guy nearly ten years ago because he maintained the value of his clients' portfolios in the dot-com crash while still delivering good returns during market upswings.

I'd recommend interviewing a couple of advisors before picking one. Don't be shy to ask how they get paid. Many of them get commissions based on selling particular financial products. Get up and leave as soon as you hear that. Others are limited to selling a particular set of products. That would also make me nervous. Part of the reason we picked our guy is that he takes a flat commission off the value of our portfolio (originally 1%/year, now around 0.75%) and can get us into all manner of financial products including options, commodities, etc. We primarily hold mutual funds and individual stocks, though.

> but if people who are making moves on Wall Street do what they have done recently, there is no guarantee that my retirement fund will have any value by the time I'm ready to draw on it. My dad has been investing in his retirement for decades, and in the last two years, it lost $50k in value.

There's no sure thing. You have to do something with your money and realize that holding cash has its own set of risks, particularly now that we have a madman with printing press in charge of our central bank.

FWIIW, our portfolio value dipped in 2008/2009, but we were fully recovered in value by mid 2009. We recognized the housing bubble for what it was and stayed out of that sector. My parents were blindly turning over their money to a manager who had them heavily invested in Fannie and Freddie. They lost a couple hundred large in the 2008 crash, and it's not coming back.

> Do you have any advice on where to start learning without having to spend every hour after work piddling with it?

Four of my favorites include One Up on Wall Street, Fail-Safe Investing, The Black Swan, and How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes. The first book talks about picking individual stocks (gave me the confidence to load up on AAPL back when it was trading under $100/share), the second about structuring a portfolio for growth while still playing defense, the third about common fallacies and hubris, and the last about what drives an economy (particularly useful for recognizing bubbles).

Is this at all helpful?

http://www.rfe.org is good first stop if you're looking for raw data

Most university library (particularly my alma mater of UC Davis) is likely to have a large selection of previously published economic journals and publications available electronically.

The Nation Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers (https://www.nber.org/) has a pretty decent selection but you have to become a member to read beyond the abstracts

http://repec.org/ is also a great source for papers, though one should note that they tend to be working papers and lack full peer review.

If you're looking to gain a greater understanding of more basic economic theory I recommend you up pick up a primer) or textbook from amazon. Thats how most people get started (either through classes or self-study).

I would greatly recommend that you read the book Pax Technica.

Here are some excerpts:
> In a world in which most of our political, economic, and cultural lives are mediated by networked devices, power lies in setting technical standards. Simply put, you either set technical standards or you follow them. International tensions over competing technology standards are only going to increase as governments and firms identify the engineering protocols, licensing arrangements, and telecommunications standards that will allow them to use the [internet] to advance their goals.

> Information activism is already a global ideological movement, and competition among device networks will replace a clash of civilizations as the primary political fault line of global conflict. Samuel Huntington famously divided the world into nine competing political ideologies, and described these as largely irreconcilable worldviews that were destined to clash. What is more likely, in a world of pervasive sensors and networked devices, is a competition among device networks. The most important clash will be between the people and devices that push for open and interoperable networks and those who work for closed networks.

> The dominance of technology over ideology has two stabilizing consequences. The first is that information activism is now a global movement. Every country in the world has some kind of information-freedom campaign that allows for a consistent, global conversation about how different kinds of actors are using and abusing digital media. The second is that the diffusion of digital media is supporting popular movements for democratic accountability. Some Silicon Valley firms build hardware and software for dictators, and as I’ll show in the next chapter the serious threat to the pax technica comes from the rival network growing out of China.

> The [internet] will help bring structure to global politics, but we must work for a structure we want. This is a challenging project, but if we don’t take it on our political lives will become fully structured by algorithms we don’t understand, data flows we don’t manage, and political elites who manipulate us through technology. Since the internet of things is a massive network of people and devices, structural threats will come from competing networks. There are two rival networks that seriously threaten the pax technica: the Chinese internet and the closed, content-driven networks that undermine political equality from within the pax technica.

> The Chinese internet is already the most expensive and elaborate system ever built for suppressing political expression. The Chinese are trying to extend it by exporting their technologies to authoritarian regimes in Asia and Africa. Russia, Iran, and a few other governments are also developing competing network infrastructures. The Chinese government controls the entire network, the network is bounded in surprising ways, and the network can, and does, mobilize to attack other networks.

> The Communist Party has developed a dedicated army to resist the spread of the technologies and values of the West. By one estimate there are more than 2 million “public-opinion experts,” a new category for jobs that involve watching other people’s emails, search requests, and other digital output. In other words, the army of censors is as large as the military, and often military units are given censorship and surveillance tasks.

> Government agencies need censors, but the government also makes tech startups and large media conglomerates hire their own censors to help with the task of watching the traffic. Pundits have referred to these people as China’s fifty-cent army because some get paid small amounts of money to generate pro-regime messages online. But that moniker makes the army of censors seem like freelancers who are inexpensive to hire. In actuality, they are a well-financed force deeply embedded in the country’s technology industry.

> Lots of other authoritarian regimes employ censors, but let’s put the numbers in perspective. If there are 2 million people occupied with Chinese censorship tasks, and 500 million users, that’s one surveillance expert for every 250 people. Aside from the human resources put into censorship and surveillance, China’s device networks have three unique features: the government controls the entire network, the network is bounded in surprising ways, and the network attacks other networks.

> First, the Chinese government owns and controls all the physical access routes to the internet. People and businesses can rent bandwidth only from state-owned enterprises. Four major governmental entities operate the “backbone” of the Chinese internet, and several large mobile-phone joint ventures between the government and Chinese-owned media giants offer additional connectivity.

> The research on China’s censorship efforts finds that the government works hard to support Chinese content and communication networks that it can surveil, and discourages its citizens from using the information infrastructure of the West. In one study, researchers went through the process of launching a social media startup in China. They took notes each time they encountered a new regulatory hoop to jump through, and they kept track of the amount of information they were making available to the state-security apparatus.

> Second, the Chinese resist Western device networks by making sure that connections within China are extensive and reliable, and connections to the rest of the world less so. Chinese device networks are bounded by the Great Firewall of China, as we call it in the West, though the more poetic translation is the Golden Shield Project. Some consider it the largest national security project in the world, and its singular task is to protect Chinese internet users from access and exposure to outside content.

> Third, the Chinese government is aggressively assaulting international information infrastructure. Corporate cyberespionage, design emulation, patent acquisition, and technology export are the key weapons of this attack. Some of these are subtle defenses that smack of cultural protectionism, while others are aggressive strategies for attacking outside networks. Cyberattacks on Western news media regularly originate from within China.

> The Chinese are trying to win over other nations, co-opting the device networks of poor countries into nodes of their rival network. The Chinese are not just seeking to protect their citizens from the West, they are aggressively expanding their networks to rival the pax technica through cultural content, news production, hardware, software, telecommunications standards, and information policy. In terms of content and news, their rival strategy involves:

> • Direct Chinese government aid to friendly governments in the form of radio transmitters and financing for national satellites built by Chinese firms.

> • Provision of content and technologies to allies and potential allies that are often cash strapped.

> • Memoranda of understanding on the sharing of news, particularly across Southeast Asia.

> • Training programs and expenses-paid trips to China for journalists.

> • A significant, possibly multibillion-dollar, expansion of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) own media on the world stage, primarily through the Xinhua news agency, satellite and internet TV channels controlled by Xinhua, and state-run television services.

> China’s aggressive efforts to build a rival network are not the only form of resistance to the device networks of the pax technica. The Russians have been successfully pioneering another strategy, one emulated by Venezuela, Iran, and some of the Gulf States. The Russian gambit is not to build its own network from the ground up, it is to join the internet by sponsoring pro-regime internet users to generate supportive commentary online.

> The critical rivalry in the years ahead will not be between countries but between technical systems that countries choose to defend. Rival information infrastructure is the single most important long-term threat to international stability. The empire of the Western-inspired, but now truly global, internet isn’t the only major system in which political values and information infrastructures are deeply entwined. Indeed, there are many internets.

Okay your first two links are to blogs that only publish work by Austrian economists. Hardly objective analyses. Even if SO did drop the cost of gas, that says nothing of who bore the brunt of the cost. It says nothing of the enivronmental costs of their business practices. It says nothing of how they treated their workers. And still sidesteps the point of how the monopoly was formed by business practices that are anti-competitive and would completely overcome any advantages of a strictly free-market system. As I mentioned before, costs aren't the only metric we should use in judging a civilization.

> This is how high profits counter-intuitively accelerate the trend towards lower price and higher quality (witness computer and cellphone progression).

It isn't the fact that profits were high that drove this trend. It's the incredible volume of demand that drove prices down. Again, see the history of Bell Labs for this as far as computers and cell phones go. It was a government-sanctioned monopoloy that made these possible.

Your DC link was unfortunate, but was just a case of idiots in government. This isn't something inherent in governments. There are more than enough idiots in management. Luckily we live in a democracy that can be changed with an informed electorate.

> Insurance companies profit only because of the fact that it costs MORE to have health insurance for most people than it costs to NOT have it. It's risky to not have health insurance, but if you are of normal health, you come out ahead financially by not having it. Also, [5] many hospitals, doctors give discount for paying cash

I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make. This is all obvious. The point is that you never know your future health states. The fact that doctors give discounts for paying cash is analogous to people not paying interest rates when they pay off their credit cards on time. But in the real world, most people can't afford to do this. As I mentioned before, the number one cause of individual bankruptcy in the US is due to medical bills.

> Consumer Reports is a private regulatory agency. Amazon ratings are a consumer-driven regulatory agency. Yelp too. Ebay feedback, etc. Your social network is a regulatory agency.

Okay so you never actually meant regulatory agency. Consumer Reports is a consumer advocacy magazine. Amazon, Yelp, and Ebay are a sort of word-of-mouth that only exist due to technology developed by the government and public-private parternships. And Yelp has recently been accused of removing negative reviews if the businesses pay up. None of these can do anything about abuse of workers or pollution or anything else industry has a history of doing.

>We can take risks for discounts, or be conservative and pay a premium for a trusted brand, and when that trusted brand starts overcharging, people like me step in and offer a new solution at a better price.

This really depends on what you're talking about. We shouldn't have to risk that discounted item being unsafe or dangerous or snake oil. Not everyone can afford items that are too expensive. And sometimes the profits just don't exist for goods and services at the price point that people can afford them at.

>Let's say there's a mafia. They steal from everyone, but they use the money to fund research projects. They steal half of what everyone earns (total cost of govt taxation over what things would cost without it, includes regulatory costs), but they take credit for everything that is done by the researchers they pay with the stolen money. Some people defend it, and say "without the mafia stealing from everyone and paying some of the people to research things, it would be impossible to get humans to create amazing things!" That is absurd, that human society requires guns to our heads to make us innovate.

Or let's say there's a charity that everyone chips into. They build roads so we can transport goods. They organize police forces so thieves don't rob us. They have fire departments so our homes don't burn down. They fund a military to protect us from foreign threats. They fund scientific research so that our children don't die of diseases that we suffer from or so that energy costs go down in the future from new and cheaper sources of energy.

Do you think ideas just pop into people's heads? You really really need to read up on some science history. I really hate to repeat myself, but you are incredibly ignorant and should educate yourself if you really want to argue that your magical free market could have built the world we live in. Private industry has no financial incentive to fund basic science research. Without basic science research, there can't be future applied science research. Without applied science research, there can't be future engineering in that field. Humans don't need guns to their heads to innovate. That's why we got together and use our tax dollars to fund basic science. But private industry sure as hell needs a gun to its head or else they risk pissing of their shareholders for throwing away profit on research they won't see an ROI for decades or centuries.

> Venture capitalists are the exact opposite of govt research, and they have funded every major advance in the past 20 years.

Buuuulllllllsssshhhiiiiiiiittt. Holy crap don't even try to act like you know what you're talking about. Are you gonna tell me that it was a VC who funded the Human Genome Project? It was a VC who funded CERN? It was a VC who put Rovers on Mars? You are completely divorced from reality.

NASA ended shuttle launches because America doesn't give a damn anymore. And those private enterprises you claim have no government funding . . . they get their grant money through NASA. It's called contracting. And in case you were unaware, contracting is done using tax dollars. Those engineering firms don't do it out of charity. They have to get paid like anyone else.

Learn some fucking history.

That's the consensus of most economists, and countries which started out with low paid labor intensive industries like India, S. Korea, China and Japan are evidence that sweat shops do mature.

A good book on the subject is In Defense of Globalization. it's a well rounded look at the benefits and problems the system has had.

It seems safe to say that Globalization and trade liberalization has done more to help the developing world that any system yet tried.

Lemme dig up the exact examples but a good start is Hamilton's Blessing. In there it explains the lengths people would go to hide income and how the 90% rate produced unnecessary resource allocation.

The corporate tax structure is the primary vehicle allowing the rich to hide income from taxation. I'm not going to go into the details of corporate tax law for that would bore you to tears but there is a reason billionaires purchase "money losing" sports teams. They can shield income in other business with the artificial loss. A good portion of the tax cheats set up a series of shell corporations to pass the money through. While eliminating the corp tax wouldn't completely eliminate this, it might reduce the incentive.

If the corporate tax system is removed the rich would be taxed on their portion of the business's profit. For example, if you own 60% of the company, you are taxed on 60% of the stated revenue (defined by the irs) as well as receive 60% of the tax deductions for that business. The business then has no reason to hire an army of tax accountants and bury the IRS in phone book sized tax returns. It can focus on maximizing revenue and profit and let the shareholders worry about the taxation.

Corporations are only taxed on the taxable income generated in the usa. To reduce this, companies shift profits overseas and use currency manipulation to reduce the amounts owed. The usa is one of the few countries that taxes its citizens based on their worldwide income instead of the income generated only in this country. By eliminating the corp rate and going to a single system of taxing all income, it would allow that individuals global income to be taxed, not merely corporate profits recognized here at home.

I don't remember what it's called but I had a textbook in college that was basically a bunch of short stories or case studies that I absolutely loved. Can't find the book but for whatever reason I remember one of the stories was "The Trashman Cometh..."

I'll check when I get home tonight, it's still on my bookshelf. One of the few textbooks I kept!

Edit: The Economics of Public Issues

This isn't the same cover, but I recognize the authors so this might be it. Will confirm tonight.

>That's because it became an alternative to public schools. Trade skills have been privatized, from education to job placement.

Only because public schools quit teaching it. The mandate from the federal level came forth that ALL students should be taught to a standard in preparation for going to college. The result was the gutting of "shop class" for classes that teach to the test. It didn't happen overnight. It took a couple of decades to shift the public perception that public schools shouldn't teach some kids just to be farmers or auto mechanics because EVERYBODY should be lined up to go into the highly profitable higher education market.

here's a good book on the need for shop class and why we shouldn't be teaching everyone to work in white collar jobs.

this is a great book I read in grad school about 10 years ago (this is the updated version), it's not a long book and it's a surprisingly easy read: http://www.amazon.com/International-Money-Finance-Eighth-Edition/dp/0123852471/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413755532&sr=8-1&keywords=international+finance+melvin

When you're done, order The Big Short. Absolutely fascinating read. It goes into plenty of detail re: CDOs and the rest of the alphabet soup surrounding the meltdown.

You might be interested in a book Legacy if Ashes



Makes you get the impression everyone is just off doing their own thing.

The Long Tail or The Tipping Point

https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Americans-John-E-Schwarz/dp/0393310744/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1495993522&sr=8-11&keywords=americas+forgotten+poor


This was published in '92 and probably isn't the first book on this.

> Common sense tells us that if you're so poor that you can't afford $0.80 condoms, you probably shouldn't be having sex at all and risking getting some woman pregnant.

Common sense tells us that if you're in the econ sub you should have at least an econ101 understanding of how the world works.

Start with this and work your way forward. It might be challenging for you because its an actual book written by an educator and scientist. Not an angry conspiratorial youtube video, Brietbart article, or Twitch stream. But I believe in you!

You're quite right when you say it's politically unfeasible. The current US body politik would rather see the country utterly destroyed than confront a few basic ideas about the future of human society.

At its essence, the system doesn't function during periods of negative growth. The whole idea of interest depends on whomever you're lending to having more next year than they did the year before. Simple things like that are built into the economy as we know it.

Ideas like these get at the heart of how we've structured our economy and our society. Theories that question these basic tenets are not well received, and for good reason. People with money shy away from ideas like peak oil and climate change because they represent a threat to their way of life.

That isn't to suggest that alternative systems aren't possible. I haven't read too much on things like steady state economic theory and I certainly haven't read any credible accounts indicating it as a feasible alternative, but at some point we're going to have to acknowledge the fact that there are limits and act accordingly.

I believe that we are approaching or breaching those limits today and the last 8 years of relative stagnation are the result. Market bulls, please note the use of the word 'relative'. Yes, economic growth in OECD countries is still a thing, but it is significantly less than what we're 'used' to. I don't believe it's going to get better in the long run.

So what does that mean, doom and gloom? A forever recession? No. We'll adapt. But we'll adapt with less than what we had and that's goddamned near guaranteed at this point.

Build resilient local communities, evaluate ways to decrease your dependence on petroleum and decrease you carbon footprint. At some point (very likely within the next decade), it won't be some alcoholic on the internet telling you to do these things, it will be your government.

For more information, consider these resources:

• The Limits to Growth
  
• The Long Emergency
  
• The End of Growth
  
• Crude: The Story of Oil

You dont have to buy expensive ass cars to be EV.


Shit I ride around in a M365 and ES2 scooter. For Around $500 for both I am now moving around the city carbon free.


If your commute is under 25 miles try the Segwat Max. Amazon has a presale going on right now for $800 and this scooter has a 40 mile range.


https://www.amazon.com/SEGWAY-Electric-Long-Range-Portable-Commuting/dp/B07WYXXL4V/ref=sr_1_9?crid=1UM5XJ4J34BFH&dchild=1&keywords=segway+max&qid=1570130666&s=gateway&sprefix=Segway+ma%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-9

Not exactly. There aren't a lot of Fortune 500 CEO's willing to under go MRIs or publicly release their psychological profile results, but have been several studies in several countries that indicate that corporate executives are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population.

That problem is mentioned in this abstract :
We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications, in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organizations. This has left us with only a few small-sample studies, anecdotes, and speculation.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20422644


An arctile in the Journal of Public Affairs :
Since this prediction of dire consequences was made the
Global Financial Crisis has come about. Research by
Babiak and Hare in the USA, Board and Fritzon in
the UK and in Australia has shown that psychopaths
are indeed to be found at greater levels of incidence
at senior levels of organisations than they are at
junior levels (Boddy et al., 2010a). There is also
some evidence that they may tend to join some types
of organisations rather than others and that, for
example, large financial organisations may be
attractive to them because of the potential rewards
on offer in these organizations (Boddy, 2010a).

Whole article available @ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pa.352/abstract


The bibliography of this students paper has a bunch of decent looking references:
Yet, in spite of poor reviews, managers seemed to view the psychopathic population as having leadership potential. Most of those with high psychopathic traits were high-ranking executives. Indeed Boddy, Ladyshewsky, and Galvin (2010) found that significantly more senior level managers portray psychopathic traits compared to their lower level employees. Babiak et al. concluded that charismatic and manipulative traits have allowed the corporate psychopaths to “talk the walk” and that this charisma, manipulativeness, aggressive selfpromotion, and single minded determination (Babiak & Hare, 2006) may put these individuals at an advantage to climb the corporate ladder.

http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=pure


CEO is listed as the most desired job of psychopaths in
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374291357.

>... what the imf did to the third world ...

Develop its industry? Build its infrastructure? Seed its capital markets? Bring its population from malaria-ridden jungles and into cities? Those heartless globalizing bastards!

But seriously though, get educated:

Niall Ferguson:
http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/1594201927

Milton Friedman:
http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Freedom-Anniversary-Milton-Friedman/dp/0226264211

Matt Ridley:
http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves/dp/006145205X

Hernando De Soto:
http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Triumphs-Everywhere/dp/0465016146

If you think that's what Karl Marx wrote, I'm pretty sure you have actually have never studied Karl Marx.

Marx's experience was deeply rooted in 19th century Europe. This was the period after the 1789 French Revolution. The period when for the first time, democracy emerged, the market economy grew and finance and industrialization spread. European societies went through an unprecedented transformation when millions of peasants moved to cities and started become employed. There were no labor law or rules.

Marx argued that every society throughout history is based on a hierarchical structure. Elites at the top enjoy great wealth and free time. Non-elites have no free time or restrained free time. The conflict between those two classes take different forms in different societies. He mentions the Pleb and the Nobility in Ancient Rome, the Slaves and Masters in Greece, and the Lords and Peasants in Feodal Europe. He notices those classes have been in conflict with each others because every hierarchical order has been market by violence and revolts from the lower order when they feel that the upper order has been too abusive.

Marx did not argue against capitalism or oppose capitalism in any way.

People who claim this have never read him. Marx believed Capitalism was a formidable force that allowed to overthrow feodalism. He saw the emergence of a new class, the bourgeoisie, replacing the feodal one, as a formidable event in human history. This class made its wealth through trade and has a strong interest in rule of law.

At the time people worked up to 12, 16 hours a day in terrible conditions. This led to regular episodes of violence. Marx predicted that the bourgeoisie in a capitalist system was a formidable class because the most educated bourgeois would eventually realize that to keep their power and privilege, they would have to make concessions on the political ground and on labor grounds. For decades, strikers were beaten up, killed, and riots broke out until labor unions were recognized. Wealthy families such as the Cadburries started taking care of their workers and arguing for stronger norms to protect the most vulnerable people.

Marx also worked on Globalization. He predicted that Capitalism would always feel restrained in a national territory. He saId business, by it's very nature, would always feel an unresistible need to thrive on an international level and that one day this would happen. Marx however warned that this could also lead to great threats as each national ruling class would try to beat commercially the foreign bourgeoisies, leading to great tensions between European powers. Marx turned out to be right and this is one of the key reason why France almost went to war with Germany in the 19th century to obtain exclusivity over commercial trade outposts on the African West-Coast.

Marx believe that the business bourgeoisie played a key role in in the emergence of parliamentary democracy in England then in France, and the establishment of rule of law. He predicted that all European Kingdoms would fall under the pressure of capitalism and those countries would transform into democracies. At the time, only property owners had the right to vote. Workers, who tried to demand the right to vote, were repressed. Marx predicted that in a future society this would evolve and every citizen would have the right to vote.

Marx predicted that Capitalism would fall into crisis because of accumulation. Lack of profits because lack of a consumer base would become a major problem and would lead to falling stocks unless the government, whichh represented the common interest of the elite, decided to intervene with major public spending. He argued that Financial Crisis would happen regularly because they are normal features of the Capitalist system.

Marx supported the revolutionary movement against the Tsar in Russia. He, however, worried that another exploitative group, pretending to represent the working class, would seize power and create a dictatorship as savage and ferocious as ever before. This is exactly what happened in both Russia and China.

____



Marx is a man who observed the end of feodalism. Things he predicted would happen include :

• How life under Capitalism could be hard but richer than ever before
  
• The emergence of public health laws
  
• How elites would accept Labor Unions instead of facing further violence
  
• The fall of dictatorships in every country in Europe
  
• The right to vote for every individual, regardless of his income
  
• The Soviet Union, Communist China. Corrupt elites would mobilize exploited masses to overthrow Emperors but they would now rule brutally in the name of the same exploited masses
  
• How Financial Crisis are normal and will happen regularly
  
• How to escape them
  
• How the financial success of the Jewish Elite could lead to terrible violence
  
• How Business would never resist the urge to go global
  
  He is a man who foresaw the modern world from scratch. That's what make his work fascinating.
  
  He is, along Martin Luther who created Protestantism, maybe one the most influential figure in European History. Few men have movements in their names all around the world. Now I certainly don't agree with everything Marx wrote, but I recognize his work can't just be dismissed. He inspired John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and dozens of other prominents thinkers. Everyone should read him at least once.
  
  https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/marx-was-right-five-surprising-ways-karl-marx-predicted-2014-237285/
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0198821077/ref=sr_1_8?keywords=marx&qid=1573247974&s=books&sr=1-8