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What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

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Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#81

Post by drewcoo »

rglullis wrote: post #59
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it really depends on the mentality of the very rich person The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like clean…

> A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper. So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.

And it would be heartless not to. Those housekeepers need jobs and incomes.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#82

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

kstrauser wrote: post #20
candiddevmike wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shatner has always been a jerk, the joy you're seeing is manufactured PR for a man who is worried about his "legacy" like any of the other older rich.

Does that make a difference to people outside his personal circle, though? An extreme example of this is Bill Gates, spending billions to cure diseases. Maybe he’s only trying to buy his way into heaven, but I bet the people cured by his medicine couldn’t care less about his motivations.

I agree in the case of Bill Gates. Shatner, however, is just some Hollywood (reported) asshole. I do lose respect for a celebrity like that even if I'm not personally interacting with them.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#83

Post by Balgair »

azlev wrote: post #15

With billions, can I be Batman?

I'm going to honestly answer here.

No, because Batman isn't a real person with real constraints.

Sure, I mean, if you have a $1B, then you get to have a lab with gadget people making cool shit and you can buy a fighter jet and a personal submarine and you have the detective agency too.

But you don't get the rogues gallery of super villains. You don't get new knees every week. You don't get to save your local city, because the problems are mostly the problems that the people cause themselves. And solving all those problems makes you a tyrant, not a hero. And even then, the problems are the same we've had since before history.

This is why in the real world, we have philanthropy mostly aimed at education and the alleviation of extreme poverty and diseases as the main outlets for the billionaires. Because it's the only thing we think that works at all.

I guess, if you really wanted to be Batman, you could fund yet another study that would state how best to give away dollars. But, without even having to look, I know that there are a few dozen of them out there already and they all pretty much say the same thing: that it's muddy and hard to discern, but maybe if you squint, education and making sure people have food and shelter.

To be Batman, you already can do it. It's mosquito nets for the poor, it's giving that bum a $100 and an hour, it's volunteering with prisoners to get them to read, it's making sure your kids' classmates have a snack before the test, etc.

So yeah, the real world Batman is a boring stressed-out Mom that's active in the PTA, her church/community-center, and local politics. Real World Bruce Wayne is Steve Rogers before the serum.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#84

Post by canucker2016 »

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #80

This is a great answer. But I'm curious what the answer would look like if every strata in it was not "things you can buy" but "things you can do with the money" ... if the "IMPACT" section was delineated at each level. One of the things I envy the most about my rich friends is their capacity to be generous. They can materialize their compassion on a regular basis without having to balance their budget. I'd like to s…

Automation is for less wealthy rich people - so the company can serve more users.

When you are rich, you get a real person who speaks your language well and has the authority/power to get things done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#85

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #5

I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods. The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes. We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards statu…

The incentives for the ultra-rich are screwed up.

I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was donating 99% to charity. The internet got very angry about it, based on flimsy reasoning: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-phila...

Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far less good, but keep a lower profile, get much less hate.

A common meme on the internet is "if your intent was truly charitable, you wouldn't care whether anyone said thank you".

But this is a false dichotomy. Many people find the idea of charity appealing to some degree, but most of us aren't die-hard saints either. When we see the good deeds of others get devalued or even punished, that makes us less enthusiastic about doing good ourselves.

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Punishing do-gooders is one of the most anti-social things you can do. On the other hand, praising do-gooders is a very cheap way to incentivize people to do more good in the world.

I believe that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you start caring more about your personal reputation than your material goods. Sadly, there is so much reflexive skepticism towards billionaire philanthropy at this point that it's not even clear to me whether doing philanthropy is reputationally net-positive.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#86

Post by Gud »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #85
HardCodedBias wrote: post #5

I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods. The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes. We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards statu…

The incentives for the ultra-rich are screwed up. I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was donating 99% to charity. The internet got very angry about it, based on flimsy reasoning: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-phila... Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far…

Bill Gates gets a lot of hate for good reason. His business practices killed off a lot of good products. BeOS, anyone?

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#87

Post by canucker2016 »

They watch just-released films on the day they're released in their home (cost $35K buy-in, $500 per film). see https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/7/8361475/prima-cinema-luxur...

They have a current star singer perform a private concert for them (so this was probably a corporate event, but I'm sure centi-millionaire/billionaire have hired her to perform) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyonc%C3%A9_2023_Dubai_perfor...

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#88

Post by analog31 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #58
analog31 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact they depend on the upper middle class in order to have those things. I'm thinking about cell phones. Nobody can have a cell phone unless enough people can afford them to create an incentive to build and improve the infrastructure.

The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.

Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#89

Post by canucker2016 »

leftcenterright wrote: post #19

So, no wealthy person is buying a physics lecture or investing in experiments to better understand the nature of this universe we live in? /s btw does anyone know if places like Fermi lab, CERN receive donations from the super-wealthy?

Mike Lazaridis, and other high-level execs of Research In Motion (Blackberry), donated money (>$100M) for the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perimeter_Institute_for_Theore..., in Waterloo, Ontario.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#90

Post by HardCodedBias »

lwo32k wrote: post #69
HardCodedBias wrote: post #5

I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods. The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes. We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards statu…

> which help no one since they are zero sum Signalling Status plays a big role in group formation/group maintenance/social cohesion etc. The larger groups grow, the more complex the group dynamics get, keeping groups of people together and preventing them from disintegrating is one of the most complex problem we face, given all the differences in culture, religion, language, class, personalities, ambitions, values, n…

Not to be trite, but signaling status is only complicated due to animals/humans making it complex. These are games and they are zero sum games.

We should strive to remove ourselves from these games as much as possible and not to lean into them as LVMH would like.

Rejecting such superficial signaling only enhances one's life, IMO.

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