Just Be Rich • Hacker News Board

Re: Just Be Rich

#871

Post by eevilspock » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #579

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 by itself is not a bad thing. Isn't it? Even when taken to extremes? Wealth inequality is in direct conflict with a core value of democracy: one person one vote is reduced to a bit of a joke when there are people who can easily afford to pay an army of hundreds of political operatives to flood public discourse with their opinion. A little inequality doesn't hurt, but the existence of billionaires (even 1…

Exactly.

90% millionaires and 10% billionaires means the billionaires have 99.1% of the monetary power.

Re: Just Be Rich

#872

Post by camhart » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

yiyus wrote: post #700

camhart wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Wealth was just created without anyone loosing it. If you use the wood for the spoon, it means someone else cannot use that wood for making a ship or heating their house. You cannot go and make a million spoons to get rich without either having money to invest or breaking a few laws. And this happens because the amount of wood (or resources, in general) is not only finite but relatively scarce.

As long as time doesn't cease to exist wealth is infinite. Someone can always choose to make wealth with their time.

Re: Just Be Rich

#873

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

sharperguy wrote: post #533

saddlerustle wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I keep hearing people debate about why housing prices are so high but it confuses me. Didn't housing prices fall dramatically in the 2008 financial crisis? Didn't various governments put vast amounts of money into the economy in an effort to ensure house prices returned to their previous levels and continued to rise? It seems as if high housing prices are an explicit policy of most major powers at this time.

No, housing prices didn't fall dramatically in the wake of the 2008 crisis. I mean, sure, they fell 33%, but they were still higher (compared to income) than at the beginning before the start of the 2000-2008 bubble, at least in the 80 years of records I can trivially look up.

That's true in the US and UK.

I'd contend that preventing massive asset depreciation, including housing, was an explicit policy of every major economic power in North America, Europe and China. I don't know, but suspect other major economic powers also participated in that, but I'm not as well versed.

(I should point out that in the 1950s it was just as large a multiplier of household income, but in that time we went from one wagerearner to two.)

Re: Just Be Rich

#874

Post by llamataboot » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

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.

Yes, without getting into all the practicalities (and there are many deep dives into all of them), the general argument is go ahead and get rich off a mixture of your luck, work, and all the benefits that society collectively owns (well-educated workers, roads, etc etc etc) and enjoy it. Be a multi-millionaire. But after you die, whatever is left goes back into the common pool for all kids to have, for example, savings accounts that they access when they are 18

Re: Just Be Rich

#875

Post by llamataboot » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

esyir wrote: post #813

dougmwne wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Basically, crab in pot. Fuck having overall better conditions, I'm screwing myself over if it means I can be king of the dirt mound.

No, not at all. Read The Spirit Level and also a bunch of happiness psychology. Relative equality and perception of fairness matter quite a lot to humans.

Re: Just Be Rich

#876

Post by shireboy » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

“Tech has made startups both cheaper and easier but only for a small percentage of people”

I’d really like to see cold hard data on this. As best I can tell it is false- tech has made starting a business way easier and cheaper for more people from more walks of life than at any time in history. Sure, we should work to push that to more people.

Re: Just Be Rich

#877

Post by Tiktaalik » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #662

hellbannedguy wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah Bill Gates - terrible guy. Spending money trying to eradicate diseases that kill poor people. What's worse, here's him in 2015 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI ) wasting money and faffing on about some pandemic. As if that's going to happen, and even if it does the pandemic won't affect rich countries in any way.

You're falling for his scheme hook line and sinker.

He spends a minor portion of his extreme wealth on good causes and charitywashes his bad reputation into being a "good guy."

We then don't talk about the fact that we could go remarkably further on the same course if we took a much larger bulk of his wealth and put it toward similar objectives of reducing poverty, disease etc.

This is of course nothing new. Robber barons did the same thing, which is why there's a Carnegie Library in my town etc.

Re: Just Be Rich

#878

Post by hemantv » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

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…

As a consumer I prefer Grab over local taxi all day.

No haggling, no bad routes. No overcharging.

The reason uber and grab worked was because these taxi were so bad and rated so low for consumer experience.

Everyone keep talking about taxi people but there are far more consumer who are not getting fleeced everyday.

Re: Just Be Rich

#879

Post by Tiktaalik » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

McScroogy wrote: post #535

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…

The rich outbidding poor people is not what is causing a housing shortage. There are only so many houses a rich person can occupy. Even if you assume that every rich person keeps a number of spare houses, there are not enough rich people to cause a housing shortage.

Established wealth leverages their outsize influence and power to ensure that new housing for the poors isn't built, so that they can maintain their lush and leafy, exclusive rich person neighbourhoods.

There's literal mansion districts in my major city, where not only is building an apartment illegal, but even building a small detached house is illegal. How on earth did that happen??

Re: Just Be Rich

#880

Post by solipsism » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

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…

You've made the case that what you call "social suffering" exists, but you haven't made the case that we should care about it. There are people struggling to survive, even in a country like the US. We have people dying in hospitals at differential rates based on their poverty level.

One sweet day when everyone is guaranteed the most basic of human necessities, maybe then we'll start caring about the anxiety a (small-minded) percentage of us feel when our neighbor has two Teslas and we only have a Leaf.