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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)

#91

Post by david38 »

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…

Little, but largely impactful in certain circumstances * money for health care * education * money to walk away from a bad job + money to hold you over for extended periods during hard times

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

#92

Post by analog31 »

immibis wrote: post #66
BurningFrog wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without people to buy from, money is worthless.

Sometimes it's fun to realize that if we all just decided dollars were worthless, they would be. There'd be nothing the government could do about it. Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-netwo…

My viewpoint is that money is a technology, and people will choose whatever technology works for their use. A technology can be designed so that some favored uses are much more likely than others. For our government money, those uses are as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. Also, some money transactions are delimited by regulations.

People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.

The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.

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

#93

Post by maxerickson »

analog31 wrote: post #10
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…

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 other piece is that there's no incentive to keep prices out of reach.

There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.

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

#94

Post by canucker2016 »

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…

In Bill Gates's post about changing his charitable giving goal to give most of it away in the next 20 years, he references Chuck Feeney as someone he admired.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney

  Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag." He did not own a car or a house and wore a $10 Casio F-91W watch
He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.

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

#95

Post by kstrauser »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #82
kstrauser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get it, I do. My opinion on Shatner was that he was a jerk to his coworkers a long time ago. I don’t follow him super closely, but most people chill over the course of 50 years or so. I do hope he has.

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

#96

Post by dctoedt »

Brings to mind the famous Joseph Heller quote: "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.'"

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...

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

#97

Post by mpweiher »

47282847 wrote: post #72
lwo32k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In my experience roaming many different groups, the ones who do not signal status typically are the most powerful/influental. Their membership is safe; they don’t need to signal status, or rather, signaling it draws too much attention (annoyances by those seeking to gain status by affiliation). I remember reading a study about this some years back to find my own findings confirmed. The people I know with a net worth…

> the ones who do not signal status

> AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement.

That's also signaling status.

"Don’t be so humble — you’re not that great" -- Golda Meir.

And of course:

"You cannot not communicate" -- Paul Watzlawick

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

#98

Post by martinpw »

Loughla wrote: post #40
throwaway713 wrote: post #3

I saw that Reddit post a while back. It’s interesting, but I wonder how much it really applies to all of the super wealthy. There are certainly billionaires and centimillionaires who reject that lifestyle out of hand (I know I certainly would). The average person doesn’t know their name and they prefer it that way. Even the local billionaire near where I lived for a while was pretty modest, all considered (his kids n…

The local billionaires here own a large family business. The founders (parents) were great people. They lived life poor for the first 50 years of their lives. They were super down to earth. The next generation are mostly good people. They're involved in politics at the state level and have some philanthropic organizations that really do good work with zero strings attached. The grandkids, who all have known nothing b…

> The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.

I wonder if they somewhat expected it. The 'third generation curse' is a widely known effect. Question is whether there is anything that could have been done to avoid it.

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

#99

Post by canucker2016 »

You were a fast collegiate-level runner, became a wealthy financial adviser, who now has three sons who are doing well in high school long distance running.

What do you do? You convince one of your old running buddies, who now coaches elite runners, to coach your son. The son sets the national high school indoor record for the 800m.

Son decides to go pro after graduating high school.

Then Covid19 hits. Access to outdoor 400 tracks is limited. What do you do?

You build an 8 lane 400m track with running surface to match the quality at the site of the Word/US track and field championships. Cost: ~$4M

You hire the best coaches for your kids. Coach needs a place to stay nearby - no problem, buy a townhouse for him to stay at. etc.

see https://www.letsrun.com/news/2025/05/how-josh-hoey-went-from...

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

#100

Post by tsoukase »

david38 wrote: post #91
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…

Little, but largely impactful in certain circumstances * money for health care * education * money to walk away from a bad job + money to hold you over for extended periods during hard times

After health and edu, your points do not apply. Filthy rich do not have jobs, hard times etc And at least in Europe we have (mostly) low cost health and edu and we do not (mostly) get jealous about the rich
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