Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Just Be Rich

keenen.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: Just Be Rich

#821

Post by nec4b »

Joker_vD wrote: post #551
janeroe wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The pro-communist argument really is founded on two points: a) it's impossible for everyone to be a (successful) businessman: somebody has to be an employee and do the actual work, y'know? b) to be "actually rich" -- which is not just "being on the level of personally comfortable standard of living", it's more of "having certain level of personal influence" -- you have to own a share in a commercial enterprise and ge…

Also not everyone can be good looking, a great singer or a professional basketball player. But you are right communism solves all equality problems by making everybody (except a few select and their families) miserly poor, prevents people (again except a select few) with talent to stand out and kills everyone else who is too unhappy with how things are.

Re: Just Be Rich

#822

Post by pnutjam »

McScroogy wrote: post #716
yarcob wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't a "housing shortage". The problem is that interest rates are so low, so everyone who has a bit of money on the side tries to invest in the real estate market. The result is that for every house thats sold, there isn't just someone who wants it as a living space, but also 5 people who want it as an investment. So 5 people outbid each other, the highest bidder gets it, and then the sucker who wanted t…

From your description, it seems to me that renting is cheaper than buying. So it seems renters get the better deal. It's a pity if a flat is empty for a year, but that in itself also does not cause a shortage. After all, it was rented out after a year. The market is supposed to deliver the flat to the person who needs it most. In that case, apparently it was you. Without the speculator, somebody would have rented it…

Renter here. I have yet to find a person who pays a lower mortgage then I pay renting. Renting also goes up every year with little ability of the renter to arrest that increase. In my experience the renter is usually paying the full cost of the mortgage, plus a little to the landlord. The landlord has no savings or interest in improving or fixing anything past the bare minimum.

Re: Just Be Rich

#823

Post by 0wis »

SMAAART wrote: post #489

Can someone explain to me why "Wealth Inequality" is a problem? If my neighbor has more then me, how is that an issue? Now, I do understand that: * Doing something illegal is wrong, but if someone aquired wealth legally, I don't see the inequality a problem. * Poverty is a problem but poverty is a problem whether 100% of the population is poor, or is a minority of the population is poor, or the majority of the popula…

One argument could be that on some zero sum games, wealth inequalities create material inequalities. An exemple is real estate. Major measures can be confort vs. business advantage: a large house in the middle of nowhere v. a small apartment in a 1-tier city. The wealthier you are, the more of a somewhat fixed quantity of space in a 1-st tier city you can have. It reduces the space available to less wealthier people, may decrease their confort and therefore their productivity. I'm not sure working on wealth inequalities is the best way to work on that, but wanted to make the point that it can be seen as the root cause of certain problems, given the rules we have chosen to attribute certain ressources.

Re: Just Be Rich

#824

Post by bagacrap »

ramblerman wrote: post #35

Great article, I wasn't aware the share of the middle class had dropped so significantly. I think there is also another factor that plays a role in the de-democratization of wealth. In the olden days you could be the biggest fish in your pond, but as that pond grows it's becoming more and more a winner takes all ocean. > As more occupations become scalable, jobs that were previously stable are becoming risky. Telehea…

Doctors are still time constrained so that one seems like a poor example.

Re: Just Be Rich

#825

Post by pnutjam »

aantix wrote: post #631
yarcob wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't a "housing shortage". The problem is that interest rates are so low, so everyone who has a bit of money on the side tries to invest in the real estate market. The result is that for every house thats sold, there isn't just someone who wants it as a living space, but also 5 people who want it as an investment. So 5 people outbid each other, the highest bidder gets it, and then the sucker who wanted t…

The renter doesn’t hold the risk. They can walk away. If you want the profit, then hold the risk. If you want the freedom of mobility, then rent.

I see you've been rightly downvoted. In the US, landlords also hold little risk, especially if they are corporate. Renters are stuck by leases and in many states, have little recourse to do anything when the property goes bad and the landlord won't fix things.

Re: Just Be Rich

#826

Post by jbeam »

camhart wrote: post #387
yiyus wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There isn't a finite amount of "wealth" in the world. Yes, there is. It is not limited, we can do more of it, but of course it is finite. It is also important that, the more wealth you have, the easier it becomes to make more of it. So, indeed, the rich obtaining more of it does mean there's less for you and me.

I can go outside and carve a wooden spoon out of a piece of fallen wood. I've just created wealth without taking it from anyone. Even if I had to buy the wood from someone else, I took a $1 piece of wood and turned it into a $20 spoon. Wealth was just created without anyone loosing it. Wealth is infinite. Sure the amount of currency in circulation is finite, but currency isn't wealth. > It is also important that, the…

> Sure the amount of currency in circulation is finite

Not strictly true with fractional reserve banking

Re: Just Be Rich

#827

Post by leinadho »

dougmwne wrote: post #807
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…

> 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. I strongly disagree with this and I think it runs counter to human nature. You're looking at quality of life as if there were some kind of absolute measure of it, but it really doesn't wor…

Could it not be people's own responsibility to practice managing their perception of what they do have? This might be a more pragmatic solution for reducing social suffering, and I've found that you can learn to let material things have less importance in your life. Caveat: this is coming from someone in a relatively well-off country with decent welfare

Re: Just Be Rich

#828

Post by greyhair »

AlexandrB wrote: post #717
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 personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here. So you're saying we need a 100% estate tax? Because the same applies to those lucky enough to be born into rich families.

Bingo. Rich people deserve the riches of their birth, but poor people be damned.

Re: Just Be Rich

#829

Post by gumby »

greyhound wrote: post #733
gumby wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige . Sounds like it was written by someone who didn't grow up around "old money". There's plenty of statistical literature on this myth.

I didn't even realize that there was a myth like that.

It's been a very important myth for a very long time as it helps (to some degree) reduce the impetus to decapitate the aristocracy. Hundreds of years old in the west, thousands in China.

Re: Just Be Rich

#830

Post by evrydayhustling »

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…

Agreed that a rising-but-unequal quality of life is better than a falling-but-level, and also re: the global perspective on wealth distribution.

But that doesn't account for the decline of opportunity in the USA. As the article points out at the end, just because the rich aren't directly inheriting their wealth doesn't mean that they aren't inheriting opportunities that are restricted to a narrow class, and there's a lot of data showing that to be the case [1].

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

Post reply on HN