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More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

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Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#161

Post by walshemj »

jogjayr wrote: post #112
marxwasright wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rise of passive investment strategies has neatly proved that no skill and little luck is required to grow existing capital in the modern society.

OTOH passive investment will only track the market and return an average of 7-10%. Compared to that small-time landlording (which I define as 1-10 units), a popular side-income stream for many working professionals, returns 10-20% in return for higher risk and volatility (you could get bad tenants or have units go vacant). Also since passive investment requires "no skill and little luck" it's one of the few entry rou…

Its not fraking "income" for gods sake if you don't know the difference between income and capital gain you probably should learn it before commenting on this issue.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#162

Post by walshemj »

closeparen wrote: post #94
gbacon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How then is it possible that some four in five American millionaires inherited no more than ten thousand dollars, according to The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley?

A median-income household owning a median-priced house and making the standard 15% 401k contribution will clear "millionaire" by retirement age, easily.

your primary property isn't normaly counted in this case

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#163

Post by golergka »

raducu wrote: post #134
arkh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two extreme ways to remove the inheritance problem. One would be to forfeit personal property: you can't give what you don't own. The other would be to remove the concept of family: when born you are placed in a communal system to be raised by professionals. People start with the same chances, the same level of social knowledge, network and vocabulary, you almost get to a pure meritocratic society (there ar…

Not living with your family in you first ~7 years of life has disastrous effects on brain development and emotional health for the rest of your life.

I don't think that the parent comment was actually suggesting implementing these things, quite the opposite.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#164

Post by golergka »

vidarh wrote: post #145
golergka wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wealth became much more fairly distributed > clear trend of concentration of wealth These two facts only contradict one another if you have an implicit belief that "fair" is "equal".

Yes, that was the point the comment was making - that going back further shows that the common assumption of a more fair distribution is wrong.

It seems that you're mixing up fair and equal again - which was the point of my comment that you may have missed.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#165

Post by EliRivers »

julian_1 wrote: post #16
crdoconnor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A massive part of people's motivation to work is to provide for their children. >That an increasing portion of wealth is inherited rather than build in an individual's working life-time is indicative that the system is function as intended. No, it just signals that the tax system treats unearned income and wealth more favourably than earned income. Political choices. How you feel about that depends upon how you feel…

> the tax system treats unearned income and wealth more favourably than earned income. The income was taxed when it was earned. What reason is there to tax it twice? > how you feel about in increase in unearned income flowing to the wealthy I guess. Or about how you feel about the government's use of it's citizen's resources. Why should wealth earned by the breadwinner of the family, not remain with the family? It's…

The income was taxed when it was earned. What reason is there to tax it twice?

I paid tax on my income, so when I buy milk at the store, the store shouldn't pay tax because the income was already taxed and the employees there shouldn't pay tax when they get paid, because the income was already taxed.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#166

Post by rorykoehler »

adwn wrote: post #152
rorykoehler wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry it's not bullshit. Governments in Europe are especially renowned for the any work is better than none approach and therefore even make up fake jobs to keep their unemployed subjects busy. Protestant work ethic withdrawal is evident and drawn out. Having experienced living in numerous countries i can safely say that taxes are often (not always) poorly spent in Europe. The bureaucracy is over bearing and many job…

Not that I necessarily disagree, but what countries outside of Europe are doing a better job with regards to spending money?

In the bureaucratic civil service area Singapore is run like a slick SV startup. It's really a pleasure dealing with the government here. *For the benefit of avoiding unnecessary heated discussion I'm aware and don't want to get into how cheap foreign labour is subsidising the public sector.

Regarding social welfare I don't know anywhere that's doing it well enough to be considered a success. We should be able to provide housing and food for 100% of the people 100% of the time. For the edge cases that fall through mental health care should be provided for as long as necessary.

Not to want to seem like a downer on Europe the things I think they do exceptionally well includes investing in education, while they are also OK on the healthcare front (personally I'm a huge fan of the NHS model and would prefer if it was more widely adopted).

Housing is badly managed as is support for cash strapped entrepreneurs. The taxes nearly broke us when we started the last business in Berlin. In Ireland there is (the last time I checked) a possibility of a 2 year tax hiatus for new businesses in certain circumstances. In general these kind of incentives could do wonders for entrepreneurialism and the potential knock-on upward mobility it can bring.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#167

Post by topmonk »

arkh wrote: post #143
ramblerman wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a third (equally extreme) but much simpler way. Keep everything as is, but don't allow inheritance, or cap it at some number.

You still benefit from your parent's network, you learn a lot more at a young age at home, you profit from their money while being raised. That's a huge difference between people from poor areas and those from even middle-class families. And that's something advantaged people don't like to think about when they use the meritocratic word: most of them benefited from huge advantages by being born in the right family. O…

Why shouldn't we concentrate most of our effort on those whos' parents succeeded? If the parents had the right mindset and the right genes to succeed, they would in all likelihood pass those onto their children. This mirrors the natural world to a great degree, and to me would seem to allow for a lot more beneficial outcomes then some arbitrary guideline of fairness.

What is better, to give $100K in wealth to everyone, from idiots to geniuses, or concentrate our efforts on those that have more chance to succeed?

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#168

Post by contravariant »

gbacon wrote: post #54
kiliantics wrote: post #27

Piketty showed in Capital that most modern work about the trends in economic inequality was flawed. We usually think of the industrial revolution and modern era as periods where power and wealth became much more fairly distributed. However, if you go far back enough into the records, as he did, you can see a clear trend of concentration of wealth even now in the current system. The trend was briefly disrupted by the…

How then is it possible that some four in five American millionaires inherited no more than ten thousand dollars, according to The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley?

Clearly those four in five millionaires aren't responsible for much of the total wealth.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#169

Post by scotty79 »

This seems natural to me. Wealth might be either inherited or gathered from people that are not wealthy and that usually requires some excuse (for example giving them temporary access to some limited resource you own like roofs or capital or selling them something you can make cheaply in large quantities at low cost).

It stands to reason that most wealth is inherited as inherited part grows gradually by gathered part (which is limited by human lifespan and pace of development of technology that creates new value).

Some inherited part is list due to gambling (on business mostly) but that just lowers pace of growth.

Re: More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe

#170

Post by ondo »

adamlett wrote: post #146
rorykoehler wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these proposals about taxing more make me feel uneasy. The real issue i have with tax isn't how much i pay but how it is used. Before i need to pay even more tax i would like to see a concerted effort to automate civil service jobs out of existence (needing to queue at 5am in the morning to get anything done in Berlin is an inexcusable joke in 21st century) and two we need to destroy the unemployment welfare syst…

The real issue i have with tax isn't how much i pay but how it is used. Pardon my french, but that's such bullshit. Everyone who doesn't like to pay taxes has a noble excuse like yours. Sometimes they oppose to taxes being used to fund the arts, even though it's such a minuscule slice of the total pie as to be barely visible. Other times it's something else that they feel is frivolous or opposed to by some principle…

a "noble excuse" like "I don't want the goverment to spend over a third of what it gets in taxes on a massive ponzi scheme"?

I'm going to assume you are french, and invite you to come to Spain, where we have a flamboyant highspeed railroad service in which there's not a single line that covers costs (not even Madrid-Barcelona). And guess what, we keep throwing money to that thing.

As for "money not disappearing", you are falling for the "parable of the broken window". Wikipedia has a much better explanation for it.

Once you're done with that, I suggest you to look at how 10 years ago Spain redid all it's public walkways (that were mostly ok) to "improve the economy". It was a massive waste of resources.

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