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How People Get Rich Now

paulgraham.com

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Re: How People Get Rich Now

#911

Post by random314 »

aerosmile wrote: post #857
random314 wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that using the phrase "you do realize" does not make your argument any stronger. France did quite well in the decades it applied a wealth tax, irrespective of Macron's actions. You seem to be obsessed with France. Have you considered Switzerland, one of the wealthiest countries with the highest standard of living and super high minimum wage. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/swiss-wea.…

NPR disagrees with you. Good night. Edit: seems like you added some more info to your comment. Ok, I'll bite. Nobody ever uses Switzerland in an apples to apples comparison with Western democracies because Switzerland employs bank secrecy laws that make it a crime to identify owners of bank accounts (which brings into question the legitimacy of much of the capital in those bank accounts). This is straight from Wikipe…

If you want to engage in cherry picking and rhetoric to insist on justifying your preconceived bias, allow me the same luxury.

High income inequality causes regulatory capture by a minority elite. Any financial discomfort to this tiny elite through popular movements that impose a very modest wealth tax, faces relentless attack by this tiny elite and their chattel, which includes the politicians they sponsor - ultimately resulting in the overturning of tax policies that benefit society as a whole.

High income inequality leads to regulatory capture by a tiny minority and results in a government primarily focused on the coddling of the idle rich. Hence, all examples of overturned wealth taxes you picked can be dismissed outright. Cherry picking is not a luxury available exclusively to you.

Your bias is obvious from the fact that you were fixated on France while completely ignoring their much more successful neighbor.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#912

Post by random314 »

aerosmile wrote: post #855
random314 wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that a wealth tax of 1% on 5% gain is basically a 20% tax on idle asset appreciation. American middle class pays 1% property tax on their primary asset without flinching. It is not applying taxes on income. There is a separate tax for it - it is called income tax. A tax cut friendly premier repealing tax laws means nothing. France did not implode in the decades it had a wealth tax. Its not like the USA…

I come here to learn and hopefully also share some insights with others. I thought you were genuinely trying to teach me something, which is why I engaged with you. But justifying sloppy arguments with "no one really gives a shit" doesn't really do it for me.

Does learning for you involve responding with

1. Lol

2. You do realize

3. Pretending to be the only person who understands algebra

If so, I thought you must be made of thicker skin; able to take what you dish out. My adoption of your style might not do it for you, but no one really gives a shit.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#913

Post by jason0597 »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #905
jason0597 wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you are conceived, before you even become a zygote, who rolls the dice for which womb you'll end up in? Who decides whether you'll be in the womb of a Japanese mother, an American mother, or a Greek mother? Do we as individuals have any control over which country we are born in? To pretend as if this is not pure chance (luck) is bonkers.

The Japanese/American/Greek mother who had sex? Or are you saying it was just luck my mom got pregnant then? She just fell asleep one night, the stork visited, and then she woke up pregnant? I think you don't understand how sex or genetics work, I am 50% my mother's dna and 50% my father's. It's not like they were going to have sex and then I would be born with the genetic code of two entirely different people.

I'm talking about YOU, not what your parents did. YOU personally had no ability to determine in which country you were born in.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#914

Post by FredPret »

adwn wrote: post #577
sillysaurusx wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm? That paragraph is accurate. When you're free to work flat-out – as hard as you can, as much as you want – you can make a lot more progress than if you were paid to do the same thing for someone else. 36x may not be the exact multiple, but it's correct within a power of two.

> Hm? That paragraph is accurate. No, the assumptions in it are ridiculous in context: 1) "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee" : Okay, maybe you can "work" 80 hours a week, as in "be in the office 80 hours per week". 2) "if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour" : No. You can't stay focused for 11.5 hours a day, especially not 7 days in a row, especially e…

You don’t have to work 80h’s though. Many employees waffle around so much that you can get the same work done in an hour or two of distraction-free, meeting-free, daydream-free grafting.

I agree with point 2.

Point 3 may be valid, but have you ever worked for a real idiot?

Point 4: remember that an IQ of 100 makes you smarter than roughly half the population. If you can string two formulae together in Excel, you’re probably ahead of the game. That may be a little cynical but my point stands.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#915

Post by InitialLastName »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #704
InitialLastName wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excepting the WWII memoirs (because I'm not sure how I want to count either Anne Frank, Elie Weisel or Winston Churchill in terms of "authors from the 1940s"), among authors whose nonfiction works are still read, there are a few names that do occur to me: George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, John Maynard Keynes, Jean-Paul Sartre For fiction there are obviously many more whose works have come through to…

Lewis would be my example for nonfiction . Narnia is fun and all, but it's stuff like "The Inner Ring" ( https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ) where he really shines.

I agree (Planet Narnia also blew my mind), but I tried to make a judgement call over whether his non-fiction was "widely read" (I know very few people who have read any of it, relative to the number who have read the Narnia books).

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#916

Post by liveoneggs »

xur17 wrote: post #624
liveoneggs wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an RSU is a massive tax problem, for one thing.

How so? Isn't it just taxed as normal income at vesting time? Most employers automatically sell enough to cover the tax withholding to solve any issues.

I only have limited experience but first I had to do an 83(b), then dealing with a K-1, and didn't make crap from the company so my RSU ended up costing more in accountants than netting money for me.

Amazon is probably a safer bet.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#917

Post by frongpik »

whimsicalism wrote: post #382
frongpik wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emma, no, the top 1% has at least 10M in liquid assets (primary residence doesn't count). 150k will never take you to that level.

If you are a two-professional household it can.

Even with a 1M income you can't catch up. Their 10M grow at 10% per year, which gives 1M in the first year alone, while you can put only 0.5M after taxes. In 20 years it will take 50M to be in the top 1%.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#918

Post by marcmarc »

danans wrote: post #569
rland wrote: post #274

It's really interesting to see the world through PG's eyes. Kudos to him, I guess, for actually saying out loud what most of the mega-rich are unwilling to. Everyone who isn't like PG (so, 100% of the population) is finding it difficult to make enough money to have a life in the most basically fulfilling sense: education, retirement, support for loved ones, and good health. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/…

> Everyone who isn't like PG (so, 100% of the population) is finding it difficult to make enough money to have a life in the most basically fulfilling sense: education, retirement, support for loved ones, and good health This exactly. PG arguing the relevance of the Gini coefficient is oblivious to the the crumbling state of the public infrastructure in the US and the declining accessibility of high quality public go…

The Gini coefficient is a relative measure. It is possible for the Gini coefficient of a developing country to rise (due to increasing inequality of income) while the number of people in absolute poverty decreases. This is because the Gini coefficient measures relative, not absolute, wealth. In Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty is looking at wealth groups (top 1%, top 10%, rest of the population). And it paints a very different picture.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#919

Post by TapWaterBandit »

jason0597 wrote: post #913
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #905

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Japanese/American/Greek mother who had sex? Or are you saying it was just luck my mom got pregnant then? She just fell asleep one night, the stork visited, and then she woke up pregnant? I think you don't understand how sex or genetics work, I am 50% my mother's dna and 50% my father's. It's not like they were going to have sex and then I would be born with the genetic code of two entirely different people.

I'm talking about YOU, not what your parents did. YOU personally had no ability to determine in which country you were born in.

Well duh, noone who has ever lived has willed themselves into existence. But just because you didn't will yourself into existence, that doesn't then imply that the circumstances of your existence are based on luck.

My parents chose to have a kid, where else would I be born except in the country where my mother chose to live? There was 0 luck involved, I wasn't going to randomly pop into existence in Mongolia when my parents decided to have a kid while both living in Australia.

If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#920

Post by ashtonbaker »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #906
ashtonbaker wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part of your comment is arguing for the second justification. Which I agreed was logically fine to do, and I think you laid out the case well. The second part seems to reveal a difference in opinion unlikely to be resolved easily in this forum. Food for thought, though - thank you!

Whoops, I didn't mean it to read like that. I actually happen to agree with you (that social status is a likely factor in certain cases for VC, and that people often seem uncomfortable about acknowledging such things). I was just trying to illustrate that it's at least possible for someone's behavior to appear dogmatic when in reality their mental model is carefully reasoned but differs from yours.

For sure, point well taken. There is a question of differing goals and values there between me and the "startup" or "get rich" people, I think, but I suppose we all have our own dogma in the end.
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