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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#621

Post by _coveredInBees »

tester34 wrote: post #592
pydry wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got cause and effect reversed. Bill Gates started giving his money away after he was attacked for his anti competitive behavior and attempts to kill open source, etc. The rich donate because they are protecting their reputation and for the sake of their own self image (everybody needs to be the hero of their own story). The only ones who can manage that and not be charitable are the utterly self deluded (e.g.…

you might not like this, but 2k was over 2 decades ago, nobody gives a fuck about it now except some HNers and Linux people recent fake news about Bill Gates connections to covid/vaccines probably caused more PR damage to him than all of you combined

Seriously. Every time I read a post like the parent you are replying to, my eyes roll back a little farther in my skull. It's like they teleported from the slashdot comment sections from 2 decades ago and decided to carry on without missing a beat.

Re: Just Be Rich

#622

Post by csomar »

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…

Inequality is a good theme to buy and rally voters, however. Also, what's better than stealing some stuff from rich people instead of figuring out how to fix the economy and create new wealth.

Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq... Inequality has nothing to do with standards of living, freedom and human rights, or how well developed a country is. It's a completely irrelevant thing. Sweden has more inequality than the Ukraine and most of the world; however, many people will vote to live in Sweden than anywhere else.

Re: Just Be Rich

#623

Post by conjectures »

iso1631 wrote: post #509
conjectures wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very simple. If you have N house-seekers and M house-sellers then when N >> M: houses get expensive. Given it's hard to change N, raising M implies building more houses. In the UK the equivalent of 'zoning' regulations keeps M low. Government 'help to buy' here exacerbates the problem as it directly increases N without directly increasing M. The fundamental model here is musical chairs.

I'd still be renting if it wasn't for help to buy. The mortgage payment was the same as we'd pay in rent, so affordable, but saving up even a 10% deposit would have been impossible.

I'm glad you found a place, but I think this amounts to help to buy incrementing N.

Re: Just Be Rich

#624

Post by ggjjjttt »

jkingsbery wrote: post #555

> It's less a tutorial or analysis and more a thinly veiled attempt to ease concerns about wealth inequality. Given in Graham's essay he comes out and discusses the Gini coefficient, it doesn't seem like a "thinly veiled" anything. The point of the essay is to discuss how much inequality itself matters (as opposed to, say poverty, lack of access to health care, or other things other people are raising as legitimate c…

If we care about how the wealth is generated, should we not also care about what the rich do with their wealth?

Re: Just Be Rich

#625

Post by ivanche »

neonological wrote: post #473
ivanche wrote: post #441

I have a feeling that the problem for a lot of middle-class people isn't wealth inequality but lifestyle. It became normal that one has $500/month car payment for life (which cost you around $3,000,000 over 40 years), or a 2500 sqft house for a family of 2 or 3, or credit card debt of $30,000 on a $60,000/year income.

Wealth inequality is known to exist because you can scientifically derive it from data. Income independent of debt shows a huge wealth gap that was not prevalent in the past. Be wary of data and whether or not your speculations contradict the data.

I don't contradict that wealth inequality exists, or even that it increases. But if middle class relies only on income from salaries and spend it like there's no tomorrow (because catching up with the Joneses, or simply they don't know better) instead of staying out of debt + saving + investing it, the gap will only increase.

Re: Just Be Rich

#626

Post by agumonkey »

agumonkey wrote: post #269
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…

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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

video url

Re: Just Be Rich

#627

Post by hellbannedguy »

adriancr wrote: post #588
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,…

> The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn't fair by any means. Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends. New wealth in…

Bill Gates 501c3 puts back less than 1 percent off their benovelent humanitarian money back to the United States. The country that coddled him, an his connected mother.

Personally, I think these good ole nonprofit boys; Billy, Zuck, Warren, etc. are tax dodgers.

Obama wanted to reform nonprofit regulations, but chickened out.

Re: Just Be Rich

#628

Post by adriancr »

laurent92 wrote: post #605
adriancr wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn't fair by any means. Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends. New wealth in…

Entrenched money stabilizes the world. Imagine putting 10% of the billionaires of the world on a boat, those who pull the strings of their empires to keep their nations into status-quo, and imagine the boat sinks. A year later, all those entrenched interests dematerialize, fewer powers hold people together, diplomacy isn’t as balanced as it has been when billionaires weighed in, and war starts. That’s the story of th…

> Entrenched money stabilizes the world.

It stabilizes the world into a corrupt distopia where those people rule only to entrench themselves and their friends (incompetent and malign as they are)

What you are describing is the old feudalism approach where aristocracy controlled everything. How well did that turn out for the serfs?, then how did it work out historically for everyone?, how many are still around?

Re: Just Be Rich

#629

Post by mdorazio »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #615

"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s." Income in the US has increased for all brackets since 1967[0][1] (at least). The argument is really about who is entitled to more of the increase. But it's framed by the charts as a zero sum: Rich gaining and poor losing. It's not true. All brackets are gaining. The actual risk is that super-we…

The author is almost certainly referring to real median household income, not personal income, and definitely not average (which is massively impacted by wealth gains at the top). See [1]. It depends which time periods you're comparing, but entire decades saw declines rather than gains. And that's still skewed by the top quartiles. Look at the tables in H2 here [2] to see what's really going on.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

Re: Just Be Rich

#630

Post by everybodyknows »

refurb wrote: post #371
ElKrist wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's very helpful. I cannot imagine any founder being deterred to start a company because of this wealth tax. With or without it you'd be very rich under PG's assumptions

It not a matter of a founder not starting a company, it doing it somewhere else than the US. Didn’t some study show a majority of founders are foreigners? They choose to come to the US. They can choose not to in the future.

A founder whose only agenda is to get rich and then put the proceeds into a mega-yacht and private island or worse yet, lobbyists and political contributions aimed at protecting his own privileged tax status, is one I'd prefer remained a citizen of some country other than my own.
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