161–170 of 356 posts
And yet 70% of generational wealth is gone by the 2nd generation.
It seems that the 70% "rule" is on very wobbly legs. I wonder if there are any actual studies - well, now I know what I'm doing this afternoon ;)
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But what about it a Trust is depressing exactly? It's just a legal agreement for how wealth can be spent.
Money is a social construct, and it seems you are starting from the base assumption that wealth can be transferred infinitely and unrestricted between generations. Not everyone holds that view of money.
What's the difference if the structure is a government, religion, guild, corporation, cartel, mafia, family or Mars colony?
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This is true if you view the world from a zero-sum perspective. If the rich are winning, then the poor must be losing. But I would argue the world is not zero-sum. Modern life for middle class or poor class people is a lot better than the vast majority of history (the 2 notable exceptions are post WWII USA and post Cold War USA, when America was punched through as an undisputed global superpower). We are a looooonnng…
I think you're confusing zero-sum between people at different economic levels and zero-sum between people at different points in time. Yes, people at a given economic percentile today have many things better in absolute terms compared to poor people at that same economic percentile X years ago. (This is obviously true for large enough X. Everyone's got it better today than the Cro-Magnons did!) That does not mean the…
This is not an example. Today the government can print more dollars out of thin air. So no, dollars is not zero-sum.
Even then, dollars is only an approximation of value, the thing that really matters. And value is also not zero-sum because of technological innovation and the existence of waste. If we are smarter about how apply our resources, literally more people can have more, and no one has to lose. (One example is people in the US simultaneously being food insecure while the nation also has tremendous food waste).
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For more on this, which I really don't recommend, google "South Dakota Dynasty Trust."
> "Dynasty trusts can be created in South Dakota for families who do not live in the state. South Dakota allows trusts to continue in perpetuity, avoiding federal transfer taxes for generations. The state does not impose any form of taxation (income, dividend interest, capital gains) on these trust assets."
This is the conclusion of Thomas Picketty's 2013 book, "Capital in the 21st Century." Due to the historical averages of the rate of return on capital, he concluded empirically that wealth will continue to concentrate to the point to inheritors, to the extent that individuals become increasingly unable through labor to achieve parity to the inheritors. The book was very provocative in economist circles, but even the c…
Hardly empirical. The data shows the opposite. ~80% of current billionaires in the U.S. are self-made first generation.
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People whine about "wealth distribution" day and night, but at the end of the day what alternative is there to combat the (continually increasing) concentration of wealth at the top? At some point there will have to be redistribution, in some form, and the sooner society comes around to that the better off we'll all be.
The alternative of last resort is always violent revolution[1]. Wealth redistribution is the olive branch. There seems to be an open question among the wealthy and political class of how far inequality can go given the modern police state and effectiveness of technology in accomplishing the goal of maintaining or exacerbating the current political economy. 1. See historical populist grivences against aristocracy that…
So it isn't really a "last resort". It's more of a "well you didn't compromise, so now our choice is to burn the whole system down"
This doesn’t appear to breakout by country. This isn’t surprising for more socialist countries like in the EU where it is harder to start and build businesses (wealth) in general. I’d be surprised if it was the same in the US where studies have shown that the majority of wealth is not inherited.
Yet on the billionaire leaderboard the top-10 are: Musk, Arnault, Bezos, Ellison, Buffet, Gates, Zuckerberg, Balmer, Page, Bin. Not one of them through inheritance. Sure, you have the waltons a little lower on the list. As a person who started in the bottom decile of wealth I want to hate inheritance at least as much as the next person. But at first glance it sure doesn't look good for these "researchers".
Musk: Rich father, emerald mine money? Arnault: "In 1971, he graduated from the École Polytechnique, France's leading engineering school, and began work for his father's company. Three years later, after he convinced his father to shift the focus of the company to real estate" Gates: "His father was a prominent lawyer" "At age 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school, where he wrote his first software prog…
> Annual tuition $40,080
Does your parents spending $160,000 to send you to high school not count as inheriting wealth ?
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That's a false dichotomy. Redistributing =/= squandering.
How is it different? Squandering typically means spending, which means the money is re-entering the economy, typically to people at lower rungs of the wealth ladder, and is not much different than other forms of redistribution. Unless you mean the squandered billions was through literal setting piles of money ablaze or losing it all in a poker game to bigger billionaires, it seems if redistribution was the goal then…
This is the conclusion of Thomas Picketty's 2013 book, "Capital in the 21st Century." Due to the historical averages of the rate of return on capital, he concluded empirically that wealth will continue to concentrate to the point to inheritors, to the extent that individuals become increasingly unable through labor to achieve parity to the inheritors. The book was very provocative in economist circles, but even the c…
Hardly empirical. The data shows the opposite. ~80% of current billionaires in the U.S. are self-made first generation.