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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)

#131

Post by mcmoor »

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…

I've heard that it's even worse (better?) the more you go to the past. Bret Deveraux [argues] (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...) that this is one reason why lots of farmers choose to stay in subsistence level, because there's not really better things they can buy anyway. So they just conserve energy and time (which some outsider may see as lazy) and focus on long term resiliency (through building horizontal and vertical social relationships) to ensure that no disaster may pull them down all the way to starvation.

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

#132

Post by JohnBooty »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #90
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…

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.

I think status signaling is fascinating.

Veblen goods are the most simplistic and superficial form of intentional status signaling and yes, the world would be much better off without them.

Other kinds of status signaling are more interesting and more subtle. If I talk about my weekend softball team, I'm not doing it to impress anybody, but it unavoidably does convey some things about my status.

It tells you I almost certainly have a car, I have leisure time, people like me enough to at least tolerate me on their team, that I have a few hundred dollars to spend on gear/fees, and that I have some basic level of physical coordination/strength/ability. It also strongly hints that I grew up middle class or higher because middle class+ kids are the most likely to have learned the game as kids and continued with it as adults.

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

#133

Post by frosted-flakes »

martinpw wrote: post #98
Loughla wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Donate their wealth before they die and leave only a token amount for the kids. Enough to give them a headstart, but not enough that they never have to try.

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

#134

Post by ahahs »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #106

[flagged]

Was looking for this comment.

The whole response reads like a cheesed up, swaggered out, smug essay. It's so clearly trying to illicit strong emotional response. I read this years ago as a teen and ate it up. Wiser more adult me knows how garbage and fake the entire response is. Reddit is known for this.

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

#135

Post by florbnit »

It’s funny how emotional responses questions like this become on part of the people answering everything but the question. If some one asks in a sports forum what the best exercises are that pro tennis players do that novices don’t know about you wouldn’t expect the majority of answers being in the line of “Tennis players never experience true love! If all you have is tennis you’ll be depressed!”

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

#136

Post by thomassmith65 »

ahahs wrote: post #134
thomassmith65 wrote: post #106

[flagged]

Was looking for this comment. The whole response reads like a cheesed up, swaggered out, smug essay. It's so clearly trying to illicit strong emotional response. I read this years ago as a teen and ate it up. Wiser more adult me knows how garbage and fake the entire response is. Reddit is known for this.

The author's boast that he/she, despite being a run-of-the-mill person, has befriended one out of every hundred American billionaires is a red flag.

I closed my Reddit account years ago. To be on that site is to be forever stuck in a middle school cafeteria.

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

#137

Post by keeda »

alwillis wrote: post #129
keeda wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

Except for education, you had to buy a browser. You could go to a CompUSA and buy a copy of Netscape Navigator. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer for free with Windows, essentially destroying Netscape’s business overnight.

Sure, and there was a huge antitrust trial about it too, and we all knew how it turned out. The trial surfaced a whole bunch of shady stuff, but that was more related to them abusing their monopoly position (i.e. "throwing their weight around"). Netscape died because:

1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.

2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)

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

#138

Post by bombcar »

JohnBooty wrote: post #128
drewcoo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I think this is something that people in countries like the US don't instinctively understand, or at least I didn't. My Filipino friend explained to me that back home, if you have more than a certain amount of money, it's seen as incredibly selfish not to employ people as housekeepers, etc. I'd imagine that's true in a lot of places with income disparity and/or high unemployment numbers. It made a lot of sense t…

We have that in the USA for some things - depending on where you live.

Some places if you’re the only house on the block who mows their own lawn, you’ll be considered stingy or weird.

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

#139

Post by 124123124 »

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 answer is out-of-topic because the question ask what is something that ordinary people do not know.They go on a tangent about perspective and power over society, but nothing listed was a thing that I do not know.

like

>Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back.

Funnily, my parents always call back within 60 seconds even midnight, while a certain someone get disowned by their kids.

>For a donation of $100k+ to his charity, you could probably play a match with him.

For a donation of 16k you can have a 1 on 1 zoom call with Keanu Reeves. He advertised this pretty well, so "ordinary people" should know this.

At this point, all the riches and riches are on SNS flexing their wealth, I don't think there is anything left that ordinary people just couldn't browse SNS and see what can you buy with those money.

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

#140

Post by bombcar »

naveen99 wrote: post #50
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…

I would pay to avoid flying : private or public…

You can hire a private rail car: https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars
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