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Just Be Rich

keenen.xyz

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Re: Just Be Rich

#191

Post by dnautics »

Tech doesn't cause the wealth inequality gap. If anything it closes it by making the aggregate cost of goods, like raw commodities, basics,etc, cheaper (e.g. hpc for modeling shale oil drilling strategies).

It's policy, like lowering interest rates, promoting financialization, driving people to invest their savings in the stock market, squeezing out basic saving strategies and causing people to seek higher and higher risk investments (while socializing the risk of the upper class) that's driving a wedge.

100% of this is public policy (often in the guise of helping out main street "saving jobs" e.g.). Capitalism is just responding, but as always with unintended but predictable consequences.

Re: Just Be Rich

#192

Post by kortilla »

Barrin92 wrote: post #49

I'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,…

Interesting CS Lewis quote considering it’s frequent usage against government regulation from busy bodies who “know best” on how the economy should work.

Re: Just Be Rich

#193

Post by imtringued »

That's what happens when inflation is incredibly low. Wealth taxes are just a hack to introduce artificial inflation for the worst offenders of society.

Wealth beyond a certain point is highly deflationary. At some point you are earning so much you cannot possibly spend it all. Any factor that accelerates the growth rate of your wealth just makes it worse because the spending portion goes down as a percentage of your wealth.

Wealth is just savings which represents deferred consumption. Therefore either you invest your money (keeping money in the stock market isn't the same as actual economic activity, you still have to do something with the money) or someone else has to give up their savings because your lack of spending also caused a lack of employment on the other side.

Yes, savings are zero sum if the savings aren't investment. If one person saves and doesn't invest, then some other person has to lose out. Inflation exists to force investment and to punish those who refuse to invest.

I've seen lots of HN comments about indexing capital gains based on inflation, they just want to flee the obligation to invest their money.

Re: Just Be Rich

#195

Post by yoz-y »

nullptr_deref wrote: post #78

This is pretty accurate. When I went through that essay (by PG), I got the similar idea. The essay read to me like, "Oh, you are white guy, your parents are well off, you must have been studying in some tier 1 school, why not risk 1/2 yrs of your life to start a company, while you are in college. Chances are you may get some money from us too! You should try a lot. Infact the more you try, the better we earn." edit:…

You don’t even need to go to the third world. SV culture is something quite unique where you can get funding for any stupid idea and run with it. In France for example the idea of a “risk capital” is that if you don’t have a solid plan on how to be profitable in 2-3 years you can forget about it. Also the funding itself is orders of magnitude below SV VCs.

Re: Just Be Rich

#196

Post by taurath »

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…

Extremely rich people around rookie who aren’t rich are likely targets, because frankly on a whim that extremely rich person can solve most of the poor persons material problems in an instant. That’s why rich people live in secluded communities so they don’t have to deal with the consequences of obscene wealth.

Re: Just Be Rich

#197

Post by FlyingSnake »

muzani wrote: post #148

There's a little company called MyTeksi. My is a for-profit social startup with a mission to revolutionise the taxi industry. They started GrabCar, which killed off the taxi industry with higher wages, higher quality services, lower prices. To win the war against Uber, they'd lie about how long it took for a car to arrive, and they'd deceive drivers as well. A driver might be promised a $100 bonus for driving into an…

This is similar in vein to what DeliveryHero is doing in South and SE Asia. They closed shop in Europe once the regulations made it difficult to keep rider wages artificially low, and now majority of their operations are in the Developing world. The lax nature of regulations in Asia make it easier to do "naughty" things and move up the ladder.

Re: Just Be Rich

#198

Post by jay_kyburz »

baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

I agree, and would go further and argue that the lives of most middle class is perfectly fine right now.

I think the lives of the bottom 20% could be improved, and I think that we should ask those at the top 10% to help them out.

I think there are other more specific things we could worry about, like house prices out of control, nobody is paying to clean up the waste they produce, governments baling out rich people etc.

Talking about "inequality" in the abstract is not worthwhile.

Re: Just Be Rich

#199

Post by piva00 »

saddlerustle wrote: post #103
donnythecroc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty much every mainstream economist put the blame for this squarely on the massively increased regulation of the housing market since the 70s causing a massive decrease in the amount of new construction, not wealth itself.

Wait, all mainstream economists put the blame on massive increase of regulation all around the developed world? I really doubt it's happened everywhere, from NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Portland, Seattle to Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, München, Vienna, Brussels, Amsterdam and so on.

Everywhere housing prices went way up, I doubt everywhere had the same issues with regulations since the 70s.

Now let's talk about cheap credit...

Re: Just Be Rich

#200

Post by namelosw »

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…

100% Agree. Just add another point:

Rich people with supportive networks of course can pursuit their goals easier.

Occasionally people from not very good families can do this as well because they're so screwed by the environment and tried to get rid of everything in (the book 'Masters of DOOM' is an example assuming it doesn't try to be too dramatic).

It's much harder to do the same as middle classes with a lot of life obligations, distractions, and most importantly they are by default need to follow linear career developments - it's much harder to be adventurous to had drastic improvement compared to previous categories.

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