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What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
101–110 of 829 posts
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#102Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Perhaps not exactly comparable, but I went to a talk at wlog REI from some relatively ordinary person who climbed some famous, but accessible peak (Kilimanjaro?). I asked about the practice of hiring local porters, and got basically this answer.
The local economy pretty much depends on the influx of foreign money from the people climbing. A fit person would be physically capable of carrying their full load, but it simply isn't done because of the economic disparity between the foreign climbers and the local porters. I don't know if that was enforced by law or custom, but the presenter was quite clear that it's not really possible to climb without local porters.
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Over the years I have heard several anecdotes from "expat" wives in various places (Kenya, Philippines, New Guinea) of being taken aside by a local headman soon after arrival and being told that they will hire a cook and a housekeeper and a laundrymaid.
On the mediocrity principle, I think this is how things worked in general. Necessary to the local economy.
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#105I 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…
> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
Those are called philanthropic charities - research institutes or the like. Some of the very rich have them.
Edit: the town I was born in had a Carnegie Library[1].
Edit 2: the point being that the very rich buy social status and respect.
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#106[flagged]
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’ve tried saying this the other way around to people and I’ve only received blank stares. Maybe I should describe it like that. Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc
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Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#108This 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…
There are only 902 American billionaires*, but this 'Redditor' claims to know nine of them. The wording implies these were chance friendships. It is a big answer, but not a great answer.
*https://npr.org/2025/04/01/nx-s1-5345950/forbes-billionaires...
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#109I 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…
Commissioned art and other things of little intrinsic utility plus occasional trappings of status are the discriminants for some. If you don't need these things, life is simpler and cheaper. It is nice to do things that aren't solely about advancing utility sometimes. Art is another good way to hide, transport, and increase wealth.
Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This article, and Google's and Bing's AI overviews for "how did microsoft kill off beos", disagree with that premise:
https://lowendmac.com/myturn/02/0403.html
(Edited to add, another more detailed article: https://macfolkloreradio.com/be/)
People make this claim about a lot of software (Netscape being the poster child) but typically whenever I look into it, the nuanced answer turns out to be "Microsoft may have thrown it's weight around, but the product largely failed on it's own merits."