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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#171

Post by input_sh »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #129
d_silin wrote: post #7

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 lot of people who are just as smart and motivated as ..." Wealth is not synonymous with intelligence. And certainly not with motivation. A lot of people who are wealthy will never be as smart as ... nor as motivated.

I'm always reminded of this quote by Stephen Jay Gould:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Re: Just Be Rich

#172

Post by jackdh »

kjcharles wrote: post #144
ac29 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World population crossed 4B in the 1970s and 5B in the 1980s, now we are about to cross 8B in the next few years. I agree with your point about real estate becoming more heavily securitized, as well as being used as a method to escape capital controls. But, you cant ignore the fact that there are a lot more people both rich and working class competing for those major world city houses than there were 40 or 50 years a…

But the problem is the supply of housing hasn't kept up with that demand due to artificial limits placed on the market. Single-family zoning has made it illegal to build more of the dense housing that's needed in cities today. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...

To play devils advocate, surely removing the artifical limits won't help in the long run as the city will just continue to spraw until it hits natural limits?

Re: Just Be Rich

#173

Post by lmm »

teraku wrote: post #140
zachkatz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incre…

> But there is nothing about pricing in there.

Sure, but that part immediately follows - there was a good piece from a property developer working in Los Angeles (which has a lot of those kind of regulations) that was posted here a couple of months back. Because of all these regulations (parking minimums, max heights, setback requirements and so on), the only kind of housing that is profitable or even possible to build is luxury housing - the land costs x, the things that the regulations require cost y, you have to charge a lot more than the city's existing housing stock (most of which is grandfathered in) so you can only justify that by targeting the high end.

There is definitely speculation in the housing market, but most or all of the price rise can be explained by simple supply and demand. And since housing demand is fairly inelastic (everyone needs a house), a small amount of undersupply means a big increase in price.

Re: Just Be Rich

#174

Post by jusssi »

refurb wrote: post #139
jusssi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The owners generally want profit, where does it come from?

Re: Just Be Rich

#175

Post by dmitriid »

inglor_cz wrote: post #132
dmitriid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 und…

To add to what the sibling comment already said:

- If you don't have to work two jobs to survive, you have the time to pursue other things, and you're more "lucky".

- If you have the ability to not work and can spend a year/two/five working out of a "garage", you're more "lucky" than those who can't.

- If you have the ability to send your kids to an expensive college without you or them going into life-long debt, then those kids can create lasting connections (a.k.a. networking) and be significantly more "lucky" than those who can't.

- If you have the money for good food, leisure, home, travel, medicine, etc., you're significantly more "lucky" than those who have to balance those things, and may not even have access to those things with all the consequences: chronic illnesses, stress etc.

Re: Just Be Rich

#176

Post by inglor_cz »

fer wrote: post #169
inglor_cz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 und…

> 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. I'd say that's largely a new-rich problem. People born in rich families generally have the wealth management groomed in. I'm far from being rich, but that's something I'll teach my kids, as I believe one major driving factor in poor families staying poor is lack of ed…

Now that is a good reply. Where I live (Czechia), pretty much everyone rich is new-rich, the tradition of old money was interrupted in 1948.

That is a possible explanation for why I see this pattern fairly frequently, while other commenters seem to disagree.

Re: Just Be Rich

#177

Post by kortilla »

d_silin wrote: post #70
mulcahey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is the portion of people without those restrictions increasing or decreasing? How would you measure it?

In the US at least, it is definitely decreasing. Income inequality is growing, as the original essay noted.

Income equality tells you nothing about the conditions of the middle or lower class. An economy in which all classes grow income and wealth can still increase inequality if it allows more people than before to become rich.

Re: Just Be Rich

#178

Post by bildung »

jiofih wrote: post #147
ludocode wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statistic is misleading. The U.S. government defines the poverty line based on a 1955 model of spending patterns. It's completely inadequate for modern needs. The poverty line for a family of four is defined as a household income of $26,200. Any reasonable person knows it's impossible to pay rent and feed and clothe two adults and two kids on less than $2200 a month. Nevermind owning a home, having a car, saving…

The poverty line is supposed to mark the very bottom of the scale, not the middle. $2200 is still a ton of purchasing power compared to almost any other country.

> $2200 is still a ton of purchasing power compared to almost any other country.

$2200 is the income, not the purchasing power. Purchasing power is income normalized by domestic price level. This isn't to nitpick, it actually means purchasing power is quite different when compared to other rich nations. For example PP in the US is 25% lower than in Germany: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PRVT.PP?location...

In other words: With a household income of $2200 in the US and a household income of $1650 in Germany you can buy about the same amount of things.

The more important point however: Most rich countries use the concept of relative poverty as the poverty threshold. This has the nice benefit of automatically updating itself if wage and thus price level increases. It usually is defined as 60% of the median income.

US median income in 2019 was $31133. For a household of two adults that means the poverty line for the US should be set at $3113[0] - quite the difference.

[0] $31133 * 60% * 2 adults / 12 months = $3113

Re: Just Be Rich

#179

Post by babesh »

feoren wrote: post #135
babesh wrote: post #91

The 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…

That new technology benefited someone besides the entrepreneur. All the consumers of that technology benefited from it. Some of that technology was directed to providing services for the wealthy but a lot benefited people widely. That is blindingly obvious: smart phones, covid vaccines, cheap screens, etc...

A wealth tax of 100% has been tried before. That definitely disincentivized wealth creation. We have run that experiment before.

In fact, various experiments have been and are being run around the world. Go look at Europe to see how it is doing. Less wealth creation and less technological innovation but a higher floor.

Also, a wealth tax as others have mentioned is a very narrow minded approach. It reeks of envy and is not a considered approach. It makes far more sense to look widely both at ultimate problems and solutions.

Re: Just Be Rich

#180

Post by [deleted] »

ackbar03 wrote: post #39
d_silin wrote: post #7

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…

While I agree to some extent with the point your trying to make, the way you phrase and portray this sounds like more of an excuse than a strong argument. >Because they have family obligations that take priority This is on you. If your serious about it you should see this coming. Elons familial situation isn't exactly all flowers and roses. A lot of my friends who managed to start successful business started yong pre…

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