191–200 of 320 posts
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https://www.statsamerica.org/sip/rank_list.aspx?rank_label=p...
California is the 4th highest state in income per capita, which supports my statement. Thanks :)
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Aside from the influence of money on politics almost all of what you have written is complete bollocks. Many of us have been successful from nothing and know friends who have been more so. There is usually a luck element in the size of that success but it is blindingly obvious to someone who was in the crab bucket to see that actions work. It sounds as if you have an emotional issue with the idea that people can chan…
> It sounds as if you have an emotional issue with the idea that people can change their own situation. On the contrary, I am simply data informed. It sounds like you're operating from a mental model that overweighs ability in outcomes. I have provided links below to help you improve and evolve this model. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greate…
I'm confused because to me, everything you have posted backs up the idea that these things are in fact actions and not luck based.
Country of residence is not luck based, it's either pre-determined or chosen by parents.
27% self made is huge, I would have expected it to be lower.
Parental income having an effect on children's is also not an example of luck. If I work hard so that my children do well, that is not luck based.
Genes influence success, so choose good genes.
43% of marriages failing simply shows that many people don't take it as seriously as they used to due to things like no fault divorce. So choose well. Your partner, at least the type of person they are, should not be luck based. Your marriage definitely should not feel like a 4 in 10 dice roll, if it does you have really messed up.
I think you and I (really, me and most left wing media) have a different definition of luck. Luck is rolling a die and getting a number, these things are more like causative factors.
But still, there exist plenty of people who have been born into adversity and study and work hard, network and press the right buttons. That isn't luck, a lottery win is luck.
I dunno. It all just feels like a way to absolve one's self from responsibility to me. I did the washing up yesterday, so today I don't have to do it. Is today me lucky that yesterday me did it? Only in the colloquial sense.
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> Extreme inequality leads to crime, social instability and eventually major civil unrest Historical example, please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Besides, it was a feudal society with nobles and peasants, with different laws attached to each. That's bound to cause resentment.
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The Rust Belt long predated Amazon. How is Bezos extracting money from the middle class?
I refuse to believe the Rust Belt existed before 1995. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
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Why smart people continue to say this is beyond me. There were so many problems with the USSR - central planning, corruption, bureaucracy, secrecy, misaligned incentives - and it's just not true that everyone was equal. Very few rational people would agree that the USSR is something that we should aspire to. As far as I can tell, "look how well it worked for the USSR" is just a trope that's trotted out by people who…
If you don't like the USSR, provide another example that suits your position. Also, why are the FAANG companies all American companies?
There's a housing problem everywhere and your vaunted free market hasn't been able to solve the problem, but that's okay because we can just blame the victims for wanting life, liberty, and the pursuit of their happiness in a place of their choosing, in a manner of their choosing. As if anyone in their right mind would choose to live like they do in the video linked above.
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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.
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Capital includes everybody’s life savings. It’s common to have a goal of retiring someday, and having capital is how you retire. What would it even mean for labor to “win,” if not by controlling some capital of their own? Could a union win without a pension plan?
> Capital includes everybody’s life savings. Capital in the sense being discussed (which derives from the same critique of capitalism in which "capitalism" was coined) refers to the non-financial, non-land means of production; one's life savings are not capital, though they may (or may not) be used to acquire capital. > It’s common to have a goal of retiring someday, and having capital is how you retire. Having priva…
So okay, for capital, substitute “ownership of a claim to the profits from capital.”
I think it might be fun to imagine an economic system very different than ours, but I suspect it’s going to need cultural institutions that fulfill similar roles, because they serve human needs and those needs aren’t going away.
For example, suppose that in the system you’re imagining, a retired worker goes to the store to get something to eat. Presumably, the collective has a worker making sure that nobody takes more than their fair share, or otherwise it’s all going to disappear. So the retiree has present some kind of abstract claim showing what they’re entitled to.
It’s going to serve a similar role to retirement savings. How does it work? When you retire, how secure is your claim? How much can you get, and what happens when political institutions change?
I think it’s easier to talk about such things in terms of familiar institutions that we understand well, but with the understanding that there could be different approaches, in theory.
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And yet, Microsoft and Amazon are still there. Isn’t that what matters? I see people moving to other states as a form of load balancing.
People living and spending their money in the same place is irrelevant to the local economy? The taxes they pay into the local economy have produced obvious civic booms in places like Redmond and Bellevue. BTW, the Ferrari dealer moved to be close by the Microsoft campus.
> You would think, after having been on the side of labor in its fight with capital for almost two centuries, that the far left would be happy that labor has finally prevailed. PG does make a reasonable point here. Capital is much less of a barrier than in the past for starting a business. A small group of people with no outside investment can do a lot of damage.
At least half of the recent YC batch is in AI, and building models is not cheap (or startup cheap any how).
I live in a country with wealth tax (Norway), and I'm a bit conflicted on it. On one side, it is effectively the only real tax a many in the "ownership class" are paying - relative to their wealth. On the other side, it is a really problematic tax for entrepreneurs. It is downright horrible for startups and scaleups - critical funds that should be used to grow your company, has to be given out in dividends to founder…
A lot of people think wealth is just a large Scrooge-McDuck pile of money sitting in someone's vault and a wealth tax means just sharing some of that money with others. But most wealth is owning and running extremely valuable companies. So taxing someone like Elon 2% or whatever of his 'wealth' per year, would mean some random Blackrock bozo passive investors running the companies after a few years. You're basically…
I wouldn't confine wealth to just the billionaire class; I'd say wealth is anyone with 5 million+ USD in liquid assets (specifically, that sum of money in stocks, bonds and cash).
The poorest of the poor in the United States (that have to pay tax), make around $12K per year, and pay more in tax, percentage-wise, for their work than an individual doing absolutely nothing but passively investing in the market does (10% long-term capital gains).
There's zero political will to change this because, surprise, every senator, and most members of congress, would be shooting themselves in the foot if legislation to increase captial gains tax were passed.
There's too much focus on billionaries -- the United States population as a whole consists of many, many individuals with absurd amounts of wealth that pay next to nothing for doing nothing.
At any rate, it is what it is, the American corporate wealth machine benefits, largely, the already wealthy.