Just Be Rich • Hacker News Board

Re: Just Be Rich

#401

Post by saint_abroad » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

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…

> But an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology deserves our praise. They're not causing the "poor to get poorer".

Extracting more work from the poor is often veiled under the guise of "improved productivity", so this measure of praise is not particularly helpful.

When companies measure labour productivity by the bottom line "Revenue output per Wage input" rather than "GDP output per worker" this ignores a subtle distinction that has severe societal impact.

Re: Just Be Rich

#402

Post by allendoerfer » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

throwaways885 wrote: post #389

southerntofu wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes isn't the reason why more people aren't richer. In fact, taxes is the reason why more people aren't poorer, because they pay for essential social services. At least in most countries, when receiving hospital bills you're not afraid to end up with crippling debt. The reason more people aren't richer is because of private property and the capitalist system. As a whole, humanity is pretty rich and is severely dest…

Give a viable alternative that doesn't descend into fascism. Capitalism is called the 'least worst' system for a reason, and some countries have an excellent QoL under it.

Social market economy. Socializing some things does not mean you have to put up red flags everywhere, hold big party meetings and kill all the intellectuals. You can still keep markets where they make sense and outcompete others in a global capitalist system. Extremists are always wrong.

Re: Just Be Rich

#403

Post by hnbad » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

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…

It's somewhat "ironic" that pg seemingly has a blind spot on this when the norm for startups is to start with a "family and friends" funding round.

Most people don't have family and friends able to lend them a few thousand dollars, let alone tens of thousands, to invest in a complete moonshot (given that we all agree that most startups fail, i.e. lose the investment).

This makes the startup scene extremely self-selecting. Even if you pretend that Elon Musk is a rags to riches story because he says he had to sleep in the office when he started out, he wouldn't have had the millions of dollars to invest in Tesla if he hadn't had an extremely lucky exit with Global Link and then again with X.com. Not to mention that he had previous access to both UPenn and Stanford, which also means massive networking opportunities (assuming he had access to those networks, which again requires a certain inherited status).

Re: Just Be Rich

#404

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

0wis wrote: post #366

agumonkey wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veritasium had a video about success vs luck and survivor bias. There's a bit of that here too. That said, I'd love to have a graph or model (or book even) to describe the tipping point at which things become increasingly better and easier. I observed that in the crypto bubble. Once you lifted off (fortune by accident maybe) you can comfortably ride the game from the back seat and pick what kind of new wealth you're…

This ! So much easier to hussle if you have a clear goal in mind. The threshold to « wealth » should be clearer. FIRE « levels » seems a good approximation but more detailed studies would be great.

Honestly I wasn't even trying to make it easier to get rich but so that everybody can understand how easy some have it and how hard other may have it.

It's difficult to understand unless you lived in it, and I only had a small taste of the bad. Urgency forces you to lower places where you get less and less acceptable conditions and you don't even have time to think about getting rich.

Re: Just Be Rich

#405

Post by gjulianm » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

claudiawerner wrote: post #341

imtringued wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's at best a band-aid attempting to treat a symptom caused from underlying issues. We need to treat those underlying issues--not the symptom. The underlying problem is that the economy is breaking basic macroeconomic equations, namely that savings must be invested. A wealth tax would force such an outcome. This is unpopular for republicans. Government investment would force such an outcome. It's still unpopular fo…

I'm curious what it means to say that savings must be invested. I have an account with an online broker/trading platform in which I put a portion of my money each month (most goes into stocks, some into ETFs). I think that counts as investing, but I also save money in the bank for paying bills, rent, food, and emergencies. That's not invested, and it makes up a large portion of my 'wealth'.

I think that in that context, investing means putting money back in circulation. For example you invest in a company and that money goes to pay providers, salaries, taxes, etc. It gets back into circulation straight away. But I don't think that's the case with most stocks and ETFs, most of that money just circulates in the stock market for speculation, maybe a small part of it goes back with comissions and brokers and taxes, but it doesn't do that much good in the overall economy.

Re: Just Be Rich

#406

Post by dagss » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

camhart wrote: post #247

Income inequality is growing, yes. But are the wealthy somehow responsible for it? Is their "getting richer" directly responsible for it? There seems to be a growing consensus on the left that they are. I have yet to see a convincing argument to show this though. Someone who builds a company worth 100m didn't have to steal money from me (or anyone else) to do it. If they did steal, then that's what needs fixed. Preve…

You speak as if ownership is a force of nature.

It is not. Ownership, wealth, money is an outcome of processes of the government -- like the existence of police and military, and that the majority of the population (in a democracy) agrees to only the state having a monopoly on violence, and agreeing on who owns what.

In a democracy, one asks everyone to agree a) that violence is monopolized, b) to protect ownership.

If wealth is then superconcentrated -- why would that work? Why would or should most people participate in that specific social arrangement?

A problem with capitalism without any form of wealth tax is that it is fundamentally unstable mathematically -- those with a lot already have more opportunities to get even more, making wealth more and more concentrated.

Without wealth tax, there is no stabilizing force.

This is about mathematics more than right or wrong. There just isn't a way a system that only concentrates wealth can keep working without mechanisms to redistribute wealth.

At some point, majority of people are slaves or starve and there isn't a way for that economy to progress further.

This is not hyperbole... it is human history. Historically, devastating wars and/or revolutions have been the mechanism to reset wealth distribution and happen all the time.

Tax on wealth isn't about "fair vs unfair", it is about whether one wants to construct a system that can be stable over more than a few hundred years.

Re: Just Be Rich

#407

Post by olejorgenb » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

stdbrouw wrote: post #360

TeMPOraL wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about just, people buying multiple houses/apartments to rent them out? IANAE, but I have a sinking feeling the situation would quickly improve if ownership had per-person limits (and no easy way to pool the limits into a company). Countries could build new housing faster than the population grows, but as long as it can be scooped up by the wealthy for renting out, the scarcity would prevail.

Not an expert in macroeconomics either, but in a perfect free market there shouldn't be a lot of difference between renting and buying: if you can get a 5% yearly return by renting out a house, then the person renting from you can probably also get a 5% yearly return by investing their freed-up capital elsewhere and/or by not having to pay interest. If renting is too expensive, you buy, and if buying is too expensive…

> then the person renting from you can probably also get a 5% yearly return by investing their freed-up capital elsewhere and/or by not having to pay interest.

This might be true if one could get as cheap and deep leverage on alternative investments as a house mortgage.

Re: Just Be Rich

#408

Post by amelius » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #158

The really shocking quote from the article is the part of the caption below one of the charts: "Data for families in the first quintile (bottom 20%) are not shown. Their median wealth was as follows: 1989 — $0; 1998 — $0; 2007 - $36 and 2016 — negative $1,099." BOTTOM 20%. Has has zero or negative wealth. And that has only changed for the worse during the last 30 years. If one FIFTH of your country has $0 or negative…

The graph for middle incomes is also pretty shocking, going from 32% to 17% share of aggregate wealth.

I really wonder why we haven't seen so many pitchforks yet.

Re: Just Be Rich

#409

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #372

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…

Not that I disagree with anything you said necessarily, but it's so much more complicated than this. Sometimes being less fortunate is what motivates people to become rich. The truth is I had a huge amount of stuff holding me back as a child, and still do, but imo that is why I managed to succeed (relatively at least) where others I knew who had similar intelligence and better backgrounds did not. Even in my own fami…

Being poor is only a motivator for an incredibly tiny number of people who are probably prone to risk-taking anyway. The unfortunate reality is that some of them shade into outright narcissism.

https://www.psypost.org/2021/02/narcissists-make-their-way-t...

It's vastly easier to become rich if you don't care about employees, customers, tenants, and co-workers, or if you can persuade yourself that people who don't take risks and succeed are somehow inherently morally inferior and deficient.

In fact a good safety net is likely to increase entrepreneurial activity, because it makes it possible to fail into a safety net instead of failing into homelessness and catastrophe.

Tax increases are a separate issue. But generally wealth inequality is politically as well as financially toxic.

You want to reward smart, clever, inventive individuals. But you do also want to make sure they don't automatically get privileged legal or ethical treatment which encourages destructive narcissistic and authoritarian behaviours in the culture as a whole.

Re: Just Be Rich

#410

Post by flexie » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:26 AM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #328

flexie wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protestant zealotry? Seriously? When you bring religion into it, at least get the religion right: The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had Jewish backgrounds but consider themselves non-religious. Facebook founder Zuckerberg had Jewish background and considered himself atheist at some point. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is Catholic. Paul Allen had Jewish parents. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was raised Catho…

The commenter is referring to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic which is the cultural handmaiden of contemporary american capitalism.

No.

"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"

The comment literally suggests that Silicon Valley billionaires (which it juxtaposes with old money) have a Protestant fanaticism associated with their money.