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How the .0001% Made Its Money

priceonomics.com

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Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#151

Post by paulhauggis »

barrkel wrote: post #149
paulhauggis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what would you call people that continually make poor life decisions over and over and end up in large amounts of debt for the foreseeable future? Smart?

I believe it's a combination of a necessarily present (as opposed to future) bias, and stress reducing available concentration for good decisions, because that's what the studies on the matter support. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/3880 http://www.cepr.eu/meets/wkcn/7/770/papers/Banerjee.pdf Have a good look at yourself in the mirror.

"Have a good look at yourself in the mirror."

I don't need to. I look around me and continuously see people making poor life decisions and blaming it on the "system". The truth hurts.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#152

Post by NhanH »

count wrote: post #150
NhanH wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of a circular argument, business runs with debt in the short term nowadays because our current system is being set up this way. It doesn't mean with some other settings, debt is an absolutely necessary (it also doesn't mean that the "other setting" won't be just Finance 2.0, however).

Finance is a circular argument, due to the nature of finance (see what I did there?). It's fiat currency and fractional reserve banking - the initial bootstrapping of the system is a giant 'just trust us' and 'go with it' moment for society. Debt is easiest way to grow an economy, as loaning money helps create new wealth. It allows banks to turn $5 actual dollars into $15 actual dollars, without having to take $10 ac…

To make my point clearer, if we have a one world communist government, and the government can dictate exactly which resource goes where and which human does what, we probably wouldn't need debt for economic growth, right? (And to avoid any confusion, no I'm not advocating for anything like that, not even within a hundred mile close).

And in any case, I'm not saying that finance is absolutely useless, I'm just saying that the focus on finance (and the return they get) might be too much for our society/ market nowadays. Thinks of it similar to the manager and developer situation, you need product manager to make a bunch of developers to work together, but if you have a 10:1 ratio of managers/developers, then you probably can use a few more developers.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#153

Post by anovikov »

anovikov wrote: post #92

You somehow forget that less than 20% of Americans live, or are born into poverty. With 20% of Forbes list having poverty background, this kind of, means that if you are poor in childhood, you have higher chances to get to Forbes list than if you are middle (well, really middle) class. Hard to explain. Maybe because poor have nothing to lose so they are more prone to risky things that stand at the root of their busin…

I think i understood why is this. Middle class kids are usually taught by their parents to obey the rules, learn and work hard and be loyal. Which is a way to keep in the middle class but hardly a way get to upper class. Most poor kids are probably not taught by their parents anything because parents are busy drinking and smoking pot, except the very valuable teaching of not trusting anyone at all.
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