41–50 of 1001 posts
A lot of people who are just as smart and motived as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs will never be able to start their own companies and get rich. Because they have family obligations that take priority. Because they live outside high-income countries. Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom. Because they may have made a crippling mistake in their pasts that now prev…
A very well thought out and articulated essay. Essential to get the billionaires of the pedestal that they have perched on. Put your money where your mouth is and fund the wealth tax. Personally, I vehemently disagree with the 10x programmer narrative in IT. It fuels " management provides more value than replaceable workers". If there were no workers, then management is just sitting there coming up with random ideas.…
Why not fix the income tax? At least try fixing it using the existing system, before creating this huge new boondoggle.
Hint: the top income tax bracket is about 400K. It was 500K in 1913 (~13 million today adjusted with conservative, CPI-based inflation figures). There's your problem. Nobody should be making 10 times more than the top bracket in a year. If they are, you add a new bracket and skim an extra few percent. Right now, the wealthiest make ~10,000 times more than the highest income tax bracket, plus they are typically paying the capital gains bracket, which is even worse, so they end up paying less than doctors and engineers.
When politicians clamor for a wealth tax, it's because they are either A. clueless or B. don't actually care about the problem, but want more power and votes. I think it's the former for Bernie and the latter for Warren.
My opinion about current wealth inequality , which I'm sure the entire world doesn't give a flying fuck about, so I started my own blog based on the comment so I can talk to myself like a loon in a dunce cap sitting alone in my little corner of the internet like the bad child most of the world seems hellbent on viewing me as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732
Link to your blog?
https://butterflyeconomy.blogspot.com/
These are both related projects and I think they are vastly better:
https://projectsro.blogspot.com/
(If you don't see any relationship between the three: Sorry.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to assume the original comment-or simply didn't think about inflation (common mistake...which is further understandable since the graphic doesn't make it obvious whether or not it is nominal dollars or adjusted dollars). So in that spirit, here is another resource which talks about minimum wage and even included an adjusted minimum wage graph within: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inf…
> which is further understandable since the graphic doesn't make it obvious whether or not it is nominal dollars or adjusted dollars Except for the part where it says "Median family wealth, in 2018 dollars"?
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
Where it was clearer:
> Even so, the gains for both lower- and middle-income families were outdistanced by upper-income families, whose median wealth increased by 85% over the same period, from $344,100 in 1983 to $636,000 in 2001. (Figures are expressed in 2018 dollars.)
Absolute wealth has increased as the wealth gap increased. Standards of living for everyone have gotten better, but there is still an issue. Wealth is not just about your buying power it's also about your social status and power. A lot more status and power is concentrated with the few. This is a big problem if you care about individual freedoms. They tend to erode very quickly with a concentration of power.
I think the limit should be put when that power and status becomes physical violence.
My opinion about current wealth inequality , which I'm sure the entire world doesn't give a flying fuck about, so I started my own blog based on the comment so I can talk to myself like a loon in a dunce cap sitting alone in my little corner of the internet like the bad child most of the world seems hellbent on viewing me as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732
When I was in kindergarten, I would draw pictures of dragons and give them to girls, saying "I drew you a picture of a dragon, it's not very good". And of course they would say "Oh no, this is a great dragon, thank you so much!" Very deliberate on my part.
But I hope you got lots of kindy dates and held hands often. Go, you.
A lot of people who are just as smart and motived as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs will never be able to start their own companies and get rich. Because they have family obligations that take priority. Because they live outside high-income countries. Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom. Because they may have made a crippling mistake in their pasts that now prev…
Imo forget being "rich", just growing up in a relatively sane environment is an advantage.
>"People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?"
And my answer to that question would be, arguably yes. Why? Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige. The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that it's not at all about meritocracy, it's that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.
The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fiction, but that they're intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous in ways that anyone else just can't understand.
Old money might have ignored you and thrown a party, but Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison.
C.S Lewis:
"“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
The author says that middle-class incomes have dropped since the 1980s, but the associated graph: (1) is pertaining to wealth, not income. (2) shows that middle-class wealth has increased since the 1980s, not "decreased"
The graph shows that middle class wealth increased from 1983 to 2001, then decreased from 2001 to 2016. The latter period (with the decrease) is the most pertinent considering the Graham essay is from 2021 and called "How People Get Rich Now " (emphasis mine).