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Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

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Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#321

Post by lapcat »

pkkm wrote: post #317
lapcat wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The foundation doesn't have to be cushy in itself. The family members already inherit enough money to satisfy all of their material desires. You don't even need to be a billionaire to satisfy all of your material desires. Beyond a certain point, wealth is simply power, and the foundations give power to the families. What I see from the billionaires is a desire to undermine democratically elected governments, starving…

What is your evidence for this grand conspiracy theory?

That's kind of a strange question. It would be a confirmed theory rather than a conspiracy theory if there were empirical evidence. I would say, though, in support of the theory: (1) this is how the ultra-wealthy have always behaved throughout history, to advance the interests of their own social class, to preserve and enhance their social inequality, and (2) I have a hard time trusting the motives of the people who have set up these foundations, because they've always been ruthless and greedy throughout their lives. Gates has never stopped accumulating personal wealth; his net worth is higher now than when he "retired" and claimed he was going to give most of his wealth away! Buffett has never stopped accumulating personal wealth either. It's a cop-out to claim that you're going to give everything away to charity, but only after you're dead. Moreover, your pledges are worthless when your dead, because your children who now control your money via the foundations may behave in ways that you didn't intend (which is often the way with children).

If you're going to give most of your wealth away to charity, and by that I mean to actual people who need the money, not to a "foundation", then give it away now, before you die. I do not trust Bill Gates one bit, not even one tiny bit. I don't even trust the foundations to do good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

So you can say that my conspiracy theory is the most cynical interpretation of the situation, due to my cynicism about the billionaires themselves.

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#322

Post by pkkm »

lapcat wrote: post #321
pkkm wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your evidence for this grand conspiracy theory?

That's kind of a strange question. It would be a confirmed theory rather than a conspiracy theory if there were empirical evidence. I would say, though, in support of the theory: (1) this is how the ultra-wealthy have always behaved throughout history, to advance the interests of their own social class, to preserve and enhance their social inequality, and (2) I have a hard time trusting the motives of the people who…

In other words... you made it up to confirm your bias?

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#323

Post by giardini »

wdb wrote: post #25
raincom wrote: post #6

There are more secret billionaires, who don't appear on the billionaires list. I know of two such billionaires. One is super, super secretive, who passes off as a multi millionaire. There are special trusts that billionaires make use of. Treat a trust like a corporation, with its own independent existence. Such trusts can be set up for multiple generations: these trusts (corporations) are run by professionals, while…

I liked the trust funds where you only get the monthly paycheck when you have a job. No matter just a 35 hours work week otherwise no pay. E.g. only get like $8-10k/mo when you work.

This still won't keep people from "calling J.G. Wentworth", blowing all their net worth on methamphetamines and then crashing into the hospital ER of the USA support systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#324

Post by giardini »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #244
rabuse wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when the masses get fed up with the inequality and 400+ million guns in the U.S.?

I see people joking about this all up and down this thread, but rich peoples wealth is not sting around in gold bars waiting to be stolen by poor people. All that will happen in a violent uprising is a lot of people will die, and peoples houses will burn down, but nothing will happen to those numbers in a spreadsheet.

well, there will be a lot of inheritance and spreading of wealth (thru theft et al) as a result of that uprising!

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#325

Post by lapcat »

pkkm wrote: post #322
lapcat wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a strange question. It would be a confirmed theory rather than a conspiracy theory if there were empirical evidence. I would say, though, in support of the theory: (1) this is how the ultra-wealthy have always behaved throughout history, to advance the interests of their own social class, to preserve and enhance their social inequality, and (2) I have a hard time trusting the motives of the people who…

In other words... you made it up to confirm your bias?

No. I'm not even sure what you mean by "confirm".

Did I make up the theory? Yes, of course, by definition. All theories are made up.

Am I cynical about the motives of billionaires? Yes.

Was my theory inspired by my cynicism? Yes.

Did my theory "confirm" anything? No, I don't know what it would confirm.

The purpose of the theory is to explain the existence of all these family-run "charitable" foundations that every ultra-wealthy person seems to be setting up nowadays, regardless of how terrible that person might have been in the past or continues to be in the present. Don't you think that's a bit suspicious?

Honestly, I have a hard time believing that these foundations could do any more good than simply writing $10k checks to millions of poor people. That would immediately and dramatically improve their lives.

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#326

Post by uoaei »

abeppu wrote: post #319
uoaei wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of contortion to attempt a defiance of etymology. And anyway the conversation was about redistribution, that prefix of course demanding an additional contextual layer on which the word is applied. Trying to imply that in general redistribution should be ambiguous enough to be synonymous to concentration is firstly just muddying language to make conversation harder and second taking us further from the po…

Words mean things. This word doesn't mean what you want it to mean, either according to the other people in the thread you're interacting with, or the source you decided to cite. Etymology is not the sole determiner of meaning. We can call an area on the moon a "mare", and know this comes from the Latin for "sea", but "mare" in the context no longer means "sea".

This word does indeed mean exactly what I want it to mean, you're cherry picking other aspects of the definition to somehow overwrite the original rather than to acknowledge that we both can be right in certain ways. I'm right about what this word literally means, you're right that carelessness wins the day when it comes to language drift.

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#327

Post by jay_kyburz »

trealira wrote: post #279
jay_kyburz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "class mobility" is a thing that we have to have. I don't think its a problem that needs fixing. I also don't think its a problem that there is a big gap between rich and poor. I _do_ think we need to make sure that our governments are well funded, and that it can afford to feed, house, and make safe all of its people, no matter how disabled, unlucky, or lazy. I also think we need to have protections in…

> I don't think "class mobility" is a thing that we have to have. I don't think its a problem that needs fixing. Really? If there were zero class mobility, that would mean that no matter how hard someone works, no matter how good their business ideas are, they'll never become more wealthy than their parents were when they were born (at least, compared to someone who sat around doing nothing). And it would mean that n…

When I hear class mobility, I think moving categories, not moving up and down in your own category.

I believe strongly that people need to be rewarded for getting out of bed in the morning and doing something productive. I fear the UBI because I think its human nature to choose to do nothing. I think people who claim people will still work on a UBI are kidding themselves.

So in context, I believe it's important that everybody's material wealth is going up. We don't need laws that somehow make it easier for you to go from nothing to a billion dollars somehow.

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#328

Post by godelski »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #318
godelski wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is the major issue and I think there's a big difference in how people internalize the notion of "self-made" vs how others actually utilize the terminology. Definitely part of this is due to human psyche where we (generally) place importance on our actions rather than our environment (which makes sense due to this is what we have (more) direct control over). There is also a significant number of people who h…

>> Assuming all this is reasonably true, there's a crazy amount of difference between ranks 7 and 10 For me the ranks are ordinal, not cardinal, so if they are represented as cardinal somewhere I wouldn't agree with that. I assume that "I think it would be __difficult__ to claim that Soros is highly self-made" has a missing not somewhere?

> if they are represented as cardinal somewhere I wouldn't agree with that.

I'd disagree. While in a well defined ordinal metric you can always map to a cardinal system by means of grouping (losing precision), but that well defined condition is a bit of a killer. Certainly in language it is not true and I'm suspicious that one could find well defined metrics with global optima that account for all reasonable variables. This is why cardinal systems are highly effective for voting systems (social choice) as it is accepting that the conditions that one is ranking preference on is not universally agreed upon and thus is baking in a noise term to the model. Not to mention is far more computationally efficient (fuck man, we gotta rebuild the entire self-made graph every time someone enters or leaves the list and an entire recompute when metrics/variables change (and they will)).

> I assume that "I think it would be __difficult__ to claim that Soros is highly self-made" has a missing not somewhere?

Ops, yeah, that is correct. Soros is one of the clearer examples of someone being self made. But we can see the other examples are far less clear and understand how someone my place significantly different weightings on the various variables at play. But I think with the exception for holocaust deniers, people are going to generally agree that "Jew during Nazi occupation" trumps almost anything else.

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#329

Post by jay_kyburz »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #306
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they could - much of the land in the US sells for hundreds of dollars per acre.

I think the point is that humans need a lot of infrastructure to live. Reliable water/sewage, internet connectivity, schools / day cares if you have kids, access to healthy food (google "food deserts"), etc.

Ahh, no, I think there is an interesting question here, can a young person today go out west and build all that stuff from nothing. (Like people did a few hundred years ago)

Can you buy a small parcel of land, dig a well for water and a hole under the outhouse, plant veggies, have some chickens, pigs, perhaps a goat.

Can you do it in range of a cell tower for internet, do you need some satellite solution. How much solar and how big a battery do you really _need_. How would today's tech change the life of the settlers?

I did some web searches for here in Australia, and I didn't parcels of land much less than 10k, and they looked liked barren desert to me. More like 100k if you want nice looking forest in the middle of nowhere.

Re: Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

#330

Post by jay_kyburz »

giardini wrote: post #324
jay_kyburz wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people joking about this all up and down this thread, but rich peoples wealth is not sting around in gold bars waiting to be stolen by poor people. All that will happen in a violent uprising is a lot of people will die, and peoples houses will burn down, but nothing will happen to those numbers in a spreadsheet.

well, there will be a lot of inheritance and spreading of wealth (thru theft et al) as a result of that uprising!

You missed my point, a looter might get a new car or tv, but that's not wealth. A looter is can't take ownership of television network, or a social media website, or a coal mine, or a rail way, or like anything actually worth anything.

Now instead of a violent uprising we talk about electing a democratic government that's prepared nationalize our nations infrastructure we'd be talking real wealth redistribution.

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