Apropos schwag:
Stop Being Poor T-shirts using Paris Hilton's likeness on various overseas ecomm platforms.
Just Be Rich
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Just Be Rich
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a lot of people who are as smart and motivated will start their own company but will not get rich because they are not as lucky. Luck play a big part in success
The more money you have the luckier you are.
Are you sure? From what I see around me, people who have money are a constant target of other people who want to drop their beaks into it, so to say.
Starting with distant relatives that got into trouble and suddenly found a familial love for them, continuing with various false friends, gold diggers of both sexes and people hustling investment opportunities. Ending with lawyers and doctors who might induce you to undergo procedures that are more expensive, but not necessarily in the best interest for you.
The price for being rich is being on constant alert and distrust against "luck" that isn't really luck, but a veiled threat.
Edit: OK, I get it, not everywhere is Eastern Europe. Countries with old money have systems in place that mitigate this problem. (Although I am not so sure about mafia-heavy countries like Italy.)
Re: Just Be Rich
#133I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself >" 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,…
The problem is all down to the basic human need of a home. In the 70s and 80s even 90s someone on a teacher's salary could own their own home in a major world city - say London. Now, literally zero chance. Because homes have become an asset class and the rich can outbid regular people so they are pushed out. That's the problem. I couldn't care less how many billionaires there are if regular people can afford a decent…
You’re going to provide a source for a teacher owning a home in London in the 70’s, unless you mean far flung suburbs.
US cities like LA, SF, NYC have been very expensive for a long time.
Re: Just Be Rich
#134Isn’t it agreed upon that the Gini coefficient is misleading though? According to it, the worst inequality can be found in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, just because borrowing money for a house is cheap and safe.
There's a big divide between those who can get a mortgage, and those who can't.
When you buy, pay the maintenance expenses, and for a limited time (well, not Sweden, what they do is essentially renting from a bank) you pay back the loan to the bank and interest for it.
When you rent (because you don't have enough income to get a loan big enough, or have otherwise messed up your finances), you pay the maintenance expenses, and the owner's loan and interest (and after the loan is paid, profit for the owner's investment forever after), and their taxes.
Also, it's only cheap right now with the record low interests for the last 10 years, and it's only safe in specific locations where (and when) the demand for housing is stable or increasing and prices increase over the rate of inflation.
Re: Just Be Rich
#135The creation and adoption of new technology has created a lot of new wealth. This has increased inequality just as it has done in the past. This creates power disparity and envy. The creation and adoption of new technology has decreased the wealth of people obsoleted by new technology. Additionally, our system has grown many oligopolies including healthcare, education, utilities, etc... that increasingly leech off th…
New technology could create new wealth for everyone, but instead it mostly creates wealth for the people who already own everything. If you own a bunch of factories, and someone combines a bunch of open-source technologies and concepts developed in public universities with a couple good new proprietary ideas to create a robot that replaces all your workforce, congrats! Someone else just made you a billionaire and now you get to cast off all those formerly heroic hard-working Americans into an uncaring libertarian hellscape where they become stupid lazy moochers whose death in the streets is a cheer-line for Republican conventions.
There has never been any evidence that taxes disincentivize wealth creation. That's a nonsense myth that doesn't hold up to historical evidence nor to a few seconds of personal introspection. You really think a wealth tax or a 70% tax on income over $10 million would make people like Jeff Bezos go "okay screw it I'm not going to do an Amazon anymore -- the world doesn't deserve my genius!" and just John Galt out of existence? That's nonsense.
Re: Just Be Rich
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homes in the US today are much larger than they were in the 1970s. About 2x as large! Per square foot, the average home is actually cheaper today than it was then, inflation adjusted, and this isn't even factoring in the modern 2.2% mortgage rates vs the 13% mortgage rates of those days.
Housing built small in the 1960's is still going for unaffordable for most rates in my area ...
At least in Canada (massive housing bubble now), if you look at median income and average house payment (not house price as payment decrease with decreasing interest rates), thy aren’t that different - it takes about the same amount of median income to own a house.
Re: Just Be Rich
#137A missing piece of this discussion is how American wealth got there in the first place: 19th century industrialization.
In that era you're either a farmer or an entrepreneur. America had a literal explosion of engineering, innovation, and entrepreneurship such that by Lincoln's death America was already the top global economy GDP (including per capita) and spearheading the industrial revolution.
This was much due to generally high edu levels especially technical education, specific regions of innovation (e.g. CT river valley creating interchangeable parts), and a lot of openness and mobility in the culture (and probably the general cultural obsession with commerce).
America doesn't exist like this anymore however it's a blueprint how inequality could be lowered... bring back a radical culture of entrepreneurship and innovation (not "go have a career at someone's company"), bring back widespread technical education, and bring back a whole lot more of our former industrial-manufacturing economy (which was like 80% of our economy in 1950 to like 10% today; "knowledge economy" is not going to get us there).
Re: Just Be Rich
#138A 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…
> Because they have family obligations that take priority. Is that "I have kids!" I hear now? > Because they live outside high-income countries. Well then move to high-income country. > Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom. That's unfortunate, but that's life. A lot of people don't have that safety. And not all of them are poor. > Because they may have mad…
> Well then move to high-income country.
You can't just take an Uber to a rich country. You have to do a lot of work to get there. All that work is wasted years compared to someone who was just born there in the first place and can focus 100% on their actual path of getting rich.
Re: Just Be Rich
#139Isn’t it agreed upon that the Gini coefficient is misleading though? According to it, the worst inequality can be found in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, just because borrowing money for a house is cheap and safe.
There's a big divide between those who can get a mortgage, and those who can't. When you buy, pay the maintenance expenses, and for a limited time (well, not Sweden, what they do is essentially renting from a bank) you pay back the loan to the bank and interest for it. When you rent (because you don't have enough income to get a loan big enough, or have otherwise messed up your finances), you pay the maintenance expe…
Renting is often cheaper in major cities.
Re: Just Be Rich
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha What? Seriously?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-n...
But there is nothing about pricing in there.
I mean, I'll be honest and share that I didn't know the housing regulations are so f-ed up in the US, but they are pretty complicated everywhere.
What drives housing prices is a deflation of living goods coupled with an inflation of luxury goods which makes finding safe investments for large sums of money with relatively high yields hard to find. This is driven by an increasing inequality gap, which makes rich people desperately trying to find more things to invest their money into. And they have found housing in urban areas is the safest bet right now. So houses are bought and sold for the millions in hopes somebody else buys it for higher prices or the area justifies the rent.