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Money and wealth

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Re: Money and wealth

#51

Post by koralatov »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #8
probablyfiction wrote: post #4

Robert Kiyosaki's claims are pretty hard to verify. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is not a good source for financial information. Edit: Forbes link ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/helaineolen/2012/10/10/rich-dad-... )

Even if it's true, property millionaires are outliers who simply used lots of leverage to accumulate property during a massive credit fueled orgy of speculation. They got lucky. Those conditions are not likely to return and the path is likely to be much more difficult for anyone trying to do the same today. I don't admire property speculators such as Kiyosaki. Recklessness rather than brains led many people down this…

I couldn't agree more. It's because of buy-to-let `investors' that rents on one-bedroom flats start at about £550 per month in the city in which I live and only go up from there. That's up by about £250 in the ten years I've lived here, and has continued to climb even during the Recession. Prices to buy have more than tripled during the same period. The net effect of that is that some people got very, very wealthy, others got a little bit wealthier, and the majority got much poorer funding the wealth of the other two groups.

Re: Money and wealth

#52

Post by jerf »

rmah wrote: post #42
jerf wrote: post #31

This is also why wealth redistribution works far less well than people who imagine it as money redistribution think it will. Part of the wealth is tied up in the owner, and that can't be redistributed without loss, sometimes great loss. Let's take a concrete example. Suppose that class warfare rhetoric utterly wins, and as its first scalp The People decide that the filthy rich Bill Gates needs to have 100% of his wea…

Strawman. Safety net programs aren't about "wealth redistribution", they're income redistribution. Further, there are social factors and goals beyond aggregate economic growth to consider.

Strawman; I was explicitly talking about wealth redistribution qua wealth redistribution.

Politics ruins another mind.

Re: Money and wealth

#53

Post by mullingitover »

drharris wrote: post #41
jerf wrote: post #31

This is also why wealth redistribution works far less well than people who imagine it as money redistribution think it will. Part of the wealth is tied up in the owner, and that can't be redistributed without loss, sometimes great loss. Let's take a concrete example. Suppose that class warfare rhetoric utterly wins, and as its first scalp The People decide that the filthy rich Bill Gates needs to have 100% of his wea…

This is a really salient point. I would go a step further and ask whether or not that $100 is better in the hands of a wealthy person (in the context of this article - a person who would put that money to work in the local/national economy to make more of it), or in those of the poor person. Certainly the latter can put it to great use buying necessities of life, but in the hands of the former it might increase the l…

> I would go a step further and ask whether or not that $100 is better in the hands of a wealthy person (in the context of this article - a person who would put that money to work in the local/national economy to make more of it), or in those of the poor person.

That's a testable hypothesis, and as it turns out it's already been refuted: research has shown that dollar-for-dollar, tax cuts are a net drag on the economy, and food stamps deliver the biggest bang for buck economic stimulus. Even investments in infrastructure don't deliver as much of a GDP boost as food stamps. Giving that $100 to a wealthy person is one of the least productive things you can do with it.

Re: Money and wealth

#55

Post by smrtinsert »

Luc wrote: post #33
aymeric wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. The concepts he teaches is what matters.

Yes, it bloody well matters. What's the point in getting some high-level concepts correct if all the nitty-gritty detail is wishful thinking and fantasy? Instead, read Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders and take it from there.

I remember reading one and thinking that it was more insightful than most finance content that is actually supposed to provide actionable information.

Re: Money and wealth

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #52
rmah wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. Safety net programs aren't about "wealth redistribution", they're income redistribution. Further, there are social factors and goals beyond aggregate economic growth to consider.

Strawman; I was explicitly talking about wealth redistribution qua wealth redistribution. Politics ruins another mind.

[deleted]

Re: Money and wealth

#58

Post by jerf »

_delirium wrote: post #44
jerf wrote: post #31

This is also why wealth redistribution works far less well than people who imagine it as money redistribution think it will. Part of the wealth is tied up in the owner, and that can't be redistributed without loss, sometimes great loss. Let's take a concrete example. Suppose that class warfare rhetoric utterly wins, and as its first scalp The People decide that the filthy rich Bill Gates needs to have 100% of his wea…

This just seems like a complaint about illiquidity of certain assets, which is a legitimate concern, but also a pretty commonly addressed one, because it already arises semi-frequently. If you were one of Sam Walton's heirs, for example, you can't just dump all your Wal-Mart stock on day 1. But if you want to turn that in-practice-fairly-illiquid holding into more liquid and diversified holdings, you are not SOL. It…

That's only the example, to make it easy to grasp. The same thing happens at scale in real life, too, it just isn't so obvious because it looks like merely the background state of the world, rather than something that is actively occurring.

Again, people are going to have a hard time reading this as a morally neutral statement, but the fact that taxes exist depress the value of assets on the market. It's already priced in to the value of the asset, so it doesn't look like something that is "occurring", but it's still there. This is a morally neutral statement, and yes, taxes can fund things of value that can bring wealth to the society at large, etc etc, but all of that adds to the truth, it does not somehow "undo" this fact.

Re: Money and wealth

#59

Post by mark_l_watson »

tomstokes wrote: post #10

The takeaway from this article is that hoarding cash is not a good store of wealth, and that the key to long-term wealth is to acquire net income generating assets. Great points for sure, but I strongly disagree with his assertions that saving up for retirement is ill-advised and that traditional investments (stocks, etc.) are too volatile and risky to be useful. He never explicitly gives any advice for acquiring net…

+1 entrepreneurship is risky and not for everyone.

I have generated wealth by working for other people, diversifying, having low living costs, and getting most happiness out of life from being with friends and family.

In other words, a mixed strategy of setting goals for lots of free time and consuming less than I produce.

Re: Money and wealth

#60

Post by siphor »

drharris wrote: post #41
jerf wrote: post #31

This is also why wealth redistribution works far less well than people who imagine it as money redistribution think it will. Part of the wealth is tied up in the owner, and that can't be redistributed without loss, sometimes great loss. Let's take a concrete example. Suppose that class warfare rhetoric utterly wins, and as its first scalp The People decide that the filthy rich Bill Gates needs to have 100% of his wea…

This is a really salient point. I would go a step further and ask whether or not that $100 is better in the hands of a wealthy person (in the context of this article - a person who would put that money to work in the local/national economy to make more of it), or in those of the poor person. Certainly the latter can put it to great use buying necessities of life, but in the hands of the former it might increase the l…

I found these posts interesting, and I don't know what to think of them. In terms of large corporations, I do think it would be more beneficial to split the money more evenly amongst the people who helped create the wealth, and, with bill gates in particular, is having money in stock actually generating wealth? Sure, if he sold it all at once it would crash, but if he slowly started getting rid of it and turning it into cash, what would Microsoft actually be losing? Wealth, more evenly distributed, would give more people a greater chance at, in turn, creating more wealth. I think one of the things, or at least one of the things that perturbs me, is the huge difference in salary that key players are able to command, through connections or plainly through the non-unionable work that employees can offer, limiting, collectively, their negotiation power.

This was just a guttural post, I'll probably need to re collect my thoughts and edit this or post something again more in line with the op

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