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Are super-rich people just better at making money?

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Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#481

Post by mcculley »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #439
mcculley wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently lease my apartment unit in a 24 story tower from a corporation. My friend leases a single family home in a suburb from a corporation. Should both of these use cases be eliminated?

Does it matter that you lease it specifically from a corporation? I'm just going to guess that you are more interested in where any how you live than what the ownership model is of the place your living. For example given two properties in all ways equal except ownership models, you would take the corporate-owned one? I find that a bit far fetched. Even then, because we typically lack experience with a variety of own…

No, I don’t want a corporation. I am trying to imagine how renting would work in dense cities with restrictions on ownership. It seems it would be a less liquid market.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#482

Post by mcculley »

Eisenstein wrote: post #435
mcculley wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These details seem to make the idea unworkable to me.

Until someone comes up with a proposal I guess we will never know.

I responded to a proposal with no apparent thought behind it.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#483

Post by dsfyu404ed »

mrguyorama wrote: post #469
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Before Kennedy it was 91%. To which the common retort is "but nobody actually paid that because prior to the tax code simplifications of the 70s you could trivially reduce your burden in all sorts of ways"

Then surely, they would have no problem returning to that exact system right? No they want to avoid that by all means necessary? Sounds like they know how much it truly effects things.

As a purely theoretical concept I don't think it's a big deal. It wouldn't have a large effect on me personally. That said, society might hurt a bit from the tax shelter vs productive allocation of capital problem another commenter above mentioned. As a practical matter I have zero faith that the usual scumbags would not corrupt the process leaving everybody with higher taxes than either system and then gaslight everybody into thinking they're paying less. Look at how healthcare turned out.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#485

Post by theamk »

dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #475
burlesona wrote: post #377

There are two core insights here that are actually pretty obvious: 1. 20% of 1200 is more than 20% of 800. Duh! But the practical insight is simply that people with more wealth can afford bigger bets and expect bigger payouts. 2. Many systems are sensitive to initial conditions. In this model, the first coin flip matter vastly more than all others and determines almost the entire outcome. As others have pointed out t…

>A very simple distribution solution therefore is to stop privileging capital gains and tax all income equally. An even more simpler solution would be to take away the all wealth of rich people and divide it among all people. The calculations would be a lot easier. Taxes are complicated.

Someone tried this, it was called "USSR" (a.k.a. Soviet Union)! They started by nationalizing all businesses, and had all sort of interesting laws, like jail time for people without "real" jobs (to prevent people living off passive income). Or jail time for people who were trying to get rich by selling stuff for too high of a price.

Look it up, pretty interesting story. They did have to build a strong border protection force to prevent people from trying to escape the country, but the country still lasted 69 years.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#486

Post by impossiblefork »

foldr wrote: post #341
impossiblefork wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only a tiny minority of the working population could read Ancient Greek in Europe in 1800. In England, around 50% of the population were still entirely illiterate at that point in time. Surely that can't be true? Here in Sweden literacy was made mandatory for adults in 1686. It was not permitted to get married without being able to read. Surely England can't have been that far behind, as late as 1800ed?

It's entirely true, and England was not unusual in that respect compared to the rest of Europe. See e.g. here: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy . Or here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Literacy-rates-in-Europe...

The data you've cited is wrong though. It lists Sweden's literacy rate in 1800 at 21%.

People were interviewed by their local priests to see whether they could read and the results were noted down. From this we know that in the middle of the 1700eds the 70-90% of all people could read.

The law was also clear. You couldn't get married unless you could read. To be married you had to be confirmed, and to be confirmed you had to be able to read.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#487

Post by int_19h »

donatj wrote: post #195

The whole yard sale model suffers from the fallacy that there is a predefined amount of wealth. If that were true, we’d have exactly as much wealth as our cavemen brethren did, which is clearly not the case. Every time anyone creates something more valuable than the sum of its parts, value is added to the system. A bow is far more valuable than the wood used to build it. A hammer and nails far more valuable than the…

> We can all make incredibly informed decisions these day. Better informed decisions than ever possible by all the wealthiest royalty in human history, in literally seconds.

And yet there were numerous stock investing experiments in which random choice delivered similar or better results than respected investment specialists.

It's almost as if, at the end of the day, we don't actually make "incredibly informed decisions".

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#488

Post by int_19h »

0xmarcin wrote: post #460

So can this be generalized to other collectable items? If as a hobby I collect, sell and exchange X does it mean I will lose money in the long run? Recently there was a few articles about investing in Lego sets, from this article POV it may not be that good investment, the future price is hard to estimate and probably you will guess price increase/decrease about half of the time right. So using this model you will lo…

If you can only guess correctly half the time, then yes, it would apply to your scenario. But I don't think that's often the case with people who are seriously into collecting something. Chances are good that you know enough about what you're collecting to reasonably anticipate the things that will likely have more staying power.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#489

Post by int_19h »

robertlagrant wrote: post #264
IntrepidWorm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the work because it's enjoyable. If it's no longer enjoyable, enjoy your wealth while you have it, and retire.

This is what I mean. It's likely dangerous to disincentivise so many people in their most expert years from working.

Our goal as a society should be to maximize happiness, not maximize the number of people who are working.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#490

Post by int_19h »

nemo44x wrote: post #32
smilekzs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've noticed consistently, is when politicians talk about "taxing the wealthy", they almost always follow that with "earning more than $xxxk a year". This is conflating wealth with income. Being within this tax bracket myself, I do not deny that I am biased, but I do hope this bullshit gets called out hard whenever someone brings up yet another underhanded measure to milk us (typical SFBay SWE) above and be…

Is this a new form of NIMBY taxation? “Tax the rich but not rich people like me!”?

I think it's fair to complain when the "tax the rich" schemes that are actually implemented all still end up placing most of the new tax burden on people who get paid for working (even if it's a lot more than the average worker), and not on their bosses who get most of their money from economic rents.

Basically, I'm fine with paying more taxes, but only if those wealthier than me pay more still.

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