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Just Be Rich (2021)

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Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#41

Post by TacticalCoder »

xrd wrote: post #4

Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth and taxation. It makes me mad because it contradicts a lot of cherished ideas I have about the rich and taxation, but probably makes sense in this conversation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/theres-not-that-much-wealth-in...

> Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth and taxation

As this article explains: the US could confiscate all US billionaires' wealth and that would only pay for one year of public US spendings. Not to mention that confiscating that much wealth would crash the very value of that wealth, so they'd get less than that.

That's what I meant in my comment when I wrote that we know how it's going to end up: they won't stop at confiscating the billionaires' wealth. The state shall immediately run out of that. They'll then come after the middle class' savings (which the EU is preparing at the moment, should be coming out in a few months).

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#42

Post by xrisk »

dash2 wrote: post #21

"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s." Doesn't look like it: median income in 2019 was $44K, in 2001 it was $31K. That's adjusted for inflation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States I don't like it when the facts look wrong after two minutes' googling.

The same Wikipedia article notes that the increase in median income is due to increasing women’s wages and increased participation of women in the labor force.

> While wages for women have increased greatly, median earnings of male wage earners have remained stagnant since the late 1970s. Household income, however, has risen due to the increasing number of households with more than one income earner and women's increased presence in the labor force.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#44

Post by kortilla »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20
aorloff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about wealth you build for yourself ? Many of the duplexes in town were built by small builders who passed them on to family. Now they are treated like rich landowners but in reality grandpa built the wealth.

Do you not see how this was luck? Certainly, actions were taken to encourage an outcome (holding an asset of potential future value), but luck as a component of a favorable outcome cannot be overstated.

Of course it can be overstated. That’s basically the entire mantra of progressives in the US right now and it’s used as an excuse for incompetent people to attack people who successfully do things and (even worse) absolve themselves of responsibility for doing unproductive things.

Punishing people for not having something bad derail their business is tall poppy syndrome.

Luck is a part of why everyone continues breathing everyday rather than having sudden heart failure. We don’t need to constantly diminish people for living because they were lucky enough to not have a fatal condition.

We should be encouraging the people who were successful, even if part of it may have been luck. Any other approach punishes people doing the rest of the work that isn’t luck.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: post #16

This article feels like an attempt to morally wash one's hands of the moral stink of capitalism. Do you really think that because you're in tech and not mining, that the accumulation of wealth is any less driven by exploitation? By the way, I don't know the answer to this. I myself am a landlord. But if we're getting into morality, let's fully examine this. 11.5% of Americans are below the poverty line. The same econ…

[deleted]

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#46

Post by [deleted] »

dash2 wrote: post #21

"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s." Doesn't look like it: median income in 2019 was $44K, in 2001 it was $31K. That's adjusted for inflation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States I don't like it when the facts look wrong after two minutes' googling.

[deleted]

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

immibis wrote: post #3

Multiple replies merged into one because of HN's post rate limit. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps once and now I'm the richest person alive. Paul Graham is forced to appear non-scientific because there is no science, that justifies our current economic conditions. There's the whole field of economics, sure, but that only studies what does happen in our current economy, not how we should run an economy. The only t…

[deleted]

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#48

Post by soared »

dash2 wrote: post #21

"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s." Doesn't look like it: median income in 2019 was $44K, in 2001 it was $31K. That's adjusted for inflation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States I don't like it when the facts look wrong after two minutes' googling.

Agreed, that is a very weird sentence when the chart clearly doesn’t show the same thing. Not sure what the author meant.

> But middle-class incomes have not grown at the rate of upper-tier incomes. From 1970 to 2018, the median middle-class income increased from $58,100 to $86,600, a gain of 49%.10 This was considerably less than the 64% increase for upper-income households, whose median income increased from $126,100 in 1970 to $207,400 in 2018. Households in the lower-income tier experienced a gain of 43%, from $20,000 in 1970 to $28,700 in 2018. (Incomes are expressed in 2018 dollars.)

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

The graphs in the blog posted are from this pew article.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#49

Post by afpx »

xrd wrote: post #4

Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth and taxation. It makes me mad because it contradicts a lot of cherished ideas I have about the rich and taxation, but probably makes sense in this conversation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/theres-not-that-much-wealth-in...

When someone writes “confiscating rich people’s wealth” I can’t take them seriously. People make wealth from what infrastructure is available. Try making your wealth living in the middle of the Sahara.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#50

Post by kortilla »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24
aorloff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were builders, they had businesses building for other people and invested their own money and time into these buildings for their own family. Luck in exactly what sense ? Yes, they did not die of dysentery on the trail, so evidently some luck was involved, but the wealth building seems very intentional and causal.

See, you’ve caught yourself in the trap. Lots of builders fail, look at the YC startup failure rate. Even investing in broad equity index funds is luck (sequence risk). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378138 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...

You’ve caught yourself in the trap of thinking that passing something with a high failure rate means luck.
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