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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#581

Post by phekunde »

ironman1478 wrote: post #48
d_silin wrote: post #7

A lot of people who are just as smart and motived as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs will never be able to start their own companies and get rich. Because they have family obligations that take priority. Because they live outside high-income countries. Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom. Because they may have made a crippling mistake in their pasts that now prev…

This. Poverty doesn't just cause immediate issues it can also cause long term issues that can effect not only adults, but the children who grew up in that environment. This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes. So even a generation later it can be difficult for…

> Poverty doesn't just cause immediate issues it can also cause long term issues that can effect not only adults, but the children who grew up in that environment.

This is absolutely true!

> This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes.

This could be true with some families, but most parents try at least not to go below the financial level they are at. I remember my parent use to get all jittery even at a slight stress on the finances fearing that they will not be able to sustain. They had prioritised education, food, clothing in that order. Unfortunately, after education and food nothing was left! I remember wearing same set of clothes for almost a decade. Even now, even though I can afford to spend, I got into that habbit of wearing same clothes most of the time. I still use clothes that are almost 10 years old! I remember we(I and my friends, they too were from the same financial status) use to wear same worn-out/torn school uniforms by doing something called "rafoo". That made us kids understand value of money and the determination to get out of the situation as soon as possible. The problem we faced was lack of information and support network. We had to build it ourselves from scratch, most of the time stumbling. It also dents the confidence as you don't know how long it is going to take to achieve your goals, if at all it can be acheived!

Re: Just Be Rich

#582

Post by adamhp »

SMAAART wrote: post #489

Can someone explain to me why "Wealth Inequality" is a problem? If my neighbor has more then me, how is that an issue? Now, I do understand that: * Doing something illegal is wrong, but if someone aquired wealth legally, I don't see the inequality a problem. * Poverty is a problem but poverty is a problem whether 100% of the population is poor, or is a minority of the population is poor, or the majority of the popula…

"Doing something illegal is wrong"

Is "illegal" the complete set of "wrong", in your opinion? I.e. is it possible to do something "wrong" that is legal/not illegal? If so, then it follows that it is possible that some have accumulated wealth "wrongly". For example, by exploiting laborers.

In those cases, it makes sense to really consider the implications of a system that supports that.

Re: Just Be Rich

#583

Post by TulliusCicero »

sturgill wrote: post #553
talliedthoughts wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the other comments here, I think the argument is that when most people say they came from nothing, they are ignoring roads, electrical grids, sewer systems, fire departments, police to enfore property rights etc. "Society" provided those - before the person was rich. Of course, there are some people who got rich without any of those things, but probably a lot fewer.

If one’s taxes only went to pay for this small subset of items, I think your argument would be stronger. A 40% marginal tax rate is not earmarked for these essential services, as evidenced by our decaying infrastructure despite the US government bringing in $3.5 trillion in tax receipts in 2019. The political left has been pretty clear that the aim isn’t solely a focus on essential (and shared) resources, but on incr…

Social safety nets contribute to earned wealth too, just less directly.

Re: Just Be Rich

#584

Post by TulliusCicero »

bkirkby wrote: post #561

As economist Russ Roberts often points out in these inequality discussions, the quintiles that are used to show growth only in the upper class does not refer to the same people over time. When you follow people over time, they generally move up into higher quintiles thus "getting richer." https://russroberts.medium.com/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-g... He also talks about "what happened in 1972" is more about demograp…

Wouldn't you expect that to be a one-off change that exhausted itself within a decade? And then a return to old income growth rates?

Like, middle class income growth has been stagnant for several decades now despite steadily increasing productivity, how can you explain that whole period using demographic shifts around 1972?

Re: Just Be Rich

#585

Post by prox »

api wrote: post #495
ramblerman wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the dysfunction and poverty may go hand in hand a lot of the time. There is strong indication that scarcity affects cognitive function. "Scarcity: Why having too little means so much" is a great book on this. In essence it is not that people in poverty have less innate executive control / cognitive capacity, but that the situation of poverty causes anyone to lose some significant points of executive con…

> There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by mentioning a hypothetical car repair of 2000 dollars before they take it. Modern humans have existed for something like 100,000 years give or take a few tens of thousands, and yet we only started building anything particularly innovative in the last ~10,000 or s…

Another factor seems to be becoming sedentary as a species and gaining more sugars favoured the energy needs of the brain. That in turn allowed for people to focus on land ownership and dominance over others to secure this income.

Re: Just Be Rich

#586

Post by TulliusCicero »

baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

Land use is inherently zero sum.

There are ways to mitigate the negative effects there, but you can't get rid of it entirely; there's only ever so much land around. The more money the affluent have, the worse off the working class are, even if the working class' wealth itself stays constant.

You tend to see this with home prices in booming areas: if your income stays constant as the metro's economy booms, you'll end up worse off than you were before, unless you managed to buy a house before the boom.

Re: Just Be Rich

#587

Post by greyhound »

Barrin92 wrote: post #49

I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself >" People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources,…

This is an amazing quote, thank you. Though, the more I read into it the less I see it applicable to the PGs quote, mostly because I disagree with this statement:

>Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison

Tech became a global catalyst for many people to get out of poverty. A lot of people in countries like India, Nigeria or Ukraine would never had a chance to get out of poverty otherwise. I do not observe any increase in the sentiment in them remaking people in their own images. Half a century ago Ayn Rand was getting enough followers well before tech was even a thing.

The quote that you have provided reminds me of the zealotry of communist regime that my country went through. As well as the arguments of the woke marxists that are sadly getting more frequent today.

Anyway, thank you for an interesting take on the problem.

Re: Just Be Rich

#588

Post by adriancr »

Barrin92 wrote: post #49

I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself >" People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources,…

> The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it.

Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn't fair by any means.

Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends.

New wealth in proper democracies at least has a proven track record of competency and general societal good, it can also do a lot of good when spent (see Bill Gates)

If you are all worried about wealth, just put 99% estate tax, will cover both old and new wealth.

Re: Just Be Rich

#589

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

wayanon wrote: post #554
donnythecroc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is all down to the basic human need of a home. In the 70s and 80s even 90s someone on a teacher's salary could own their own home in a major world city - say London. Now, literally zero chance. Because homes have become an asset class and the rich can outbid regular people so they are pushed out. That's the problem. I couldn't care less how many billionaires there are if regular people can afford a decent…

True - I'm in my late 40s in London and accepted some time ago I will never own a home. If UK renters had the same protections as they do in eg Germany it wouldn't be such a precarious existence.

What protections are you lacking in the UK that Germans have?

Re: Just Be Rich

#590

Post by Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL »

I couldn't find mention of Anand Giridharadas in the comments; He wrote a book called "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" ; I haven't finished the book yet, and I don't find myself agreeing with him on many things, and his criticism at times is more simplistic than I would like it to be, but I also found it to be an intellectually challenging read.

He argues that the rich do much for the underprivileged, but what they never do is challenge the system which made them so rich in the first place. Philantrophy and the associated virtue signaling has the perverse effect of keeping the very system alive, which is (so he argues) fundamentally broken to begin with, and needs major overhaul. I think it's relevant to the discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

I found his conversation with Andrew Yang to be quite interesting https://youtu.be/2Ye-Jkql_jA?t=1742 (not pitching it out of ideological / political affiliation to either).

I personally am torn. From "the left" I think that personal responsibility often gets too little credit. The last thing you want to tell people is "it's not you, it's your situation, the government will fix it". The government is bad at fixing things, and you create a race for handouts, and a perverse game of victimhood claminig, to get sympathy and handouts. "I don't succeed because of X and someone else has to fix it" is not an empowering message. But many rich and privileged people are really blind to the sociological complexity in what determines success. Abundance of wealth doesn't necessarily make one happy, but lack of wealth and financial security makes one unhappy. And stressed. Stress in and of itself diminishes intellectual reasoning, decision making, affects mood, can be associated with psychological disorders, etc. "Well he's a truck driver, unhealthy, fears for his job due to automation? Well, he should become an app developer, or something similar. There are free courses everywhere, there are so many things to do. If he applies himself, he will find something, it's competition and our market system, which has made us so rich to begin with..."

I'm caricaturing ... but I don't know by how much.

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