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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#721

Post by AlexandrB »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #510
pydry wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got cause and effect reversed. Bill Gates started giving his money away after he was attacked for his anti competitive behavior and attempts to kill open source, etc. The rich donate because they are protecting their reputation and for the sake of their own self image (everybody needs to be the hero of their own story). The only ones who can manage that and not be charitable are the utterly self deluded (e.g.…

I suggest you watch the documentary Inside Bill's Brain https://www.netflix.com/title/80184771 Bill is way too invested in this stuff for it to be a cynical PR effort. And he himself states it was his mother who inspired him to give: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-mother-inspired-p... If Bill's giving was a cynical PR play, why would he be pushing other HNWs to give through the giving pledge? Wouldn't it…

> BTW, did demonization of wall street in the wake of the 2008 crash trigger a wave of philanthropic giving from them?

You steal a loaf of bread - you go to jail. You commit fraud on a scale that destabilizes the global economy - you get to say that people pointing out your misdeeds are "demonizing" you.

Re: Just Be Rich

#722

Post by sbacic »

bluedino wrote: post #658
sbacic wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You can still have that. All you need is a real estate tax. But nobody wants that. People don't want cheaper homes, they want to become part of the home-owner elite and get their own appreciating asset.

Property taxes in certain areas of the US (most of the East Coast, for example) are already ridiculous. You could buy a house in the midwest for you what you pay in property tax alone in New Jersey.

Is the property tax higher than the yearly increase in value of that real estate?

Re: Just Be Rich

#723

Post by Spivak »

adriancr wrote: post #628
laurent92 wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entrenched money stabilizes the world. Imagine putting 10% of the billionaires of the world on a boat, those who pull the strings of their empires to keep their nations into status-quo, and imagine the boat sinks. A year later, all those entrenched interests dematerialize, fewer powers hold people together, diplomacy isn’t as balanced as it has been when billionaires weighed in, and war starts. That’s the story of th…

> Entrenched money stabilizes the world. It stabilizes the world into a corrupt distopia where those people rule only to entrench themselves and their friends (incompetent and malign as they are) What you are describing is the old feudalism approach where aristocracy controlled everything. How well did that turn out for the serfs?, then how did it work out historically for everyone?, how many are still around?

But entrenching themselves is a benign end. I don’t really care that very very wealthy people exist and seek to carve out exceptions for themselves to maintain that wealth. The harm that’s done is vague and more the realm of economics. But very very wealthy people who want to “change the world” are individuals with the monetary weight of tens of thousands of people and can do things that for others would require and naturally be tempered by cooperation.

Re: Just Be Rich

#724

Post by titzer »

Personally, I think anyone who amasses oh, say, 100 lifetimes of wealth and can't stop trying to get more has a mental illness. And I don't mean that for laughs. They have a sickness and are not well.

If you've got a $300 million fortune, why can't you just go enjoy life already? It's not like enjoying your life by spending your money isn't going to also create jobs for other people. You don't need to be "a job creator" and build some huge business empire. In fact, it might create better jobs, as you want to buy better things--better furniture, a better home, art--that are not factory-produced crap made by slave labor in other lands. We'd have a better society if rich people could chill out, IMHO.

Re: Just Be Rich

#725

Post by jimbokun »

mdorazio wrote: post #635
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…

You and Russ both need to take a look at [1]. Socioeconomic mobility has massively fallen in the US over time. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

This doesn't contradict Roberts. The chart at the top of your linked article shows that even for Gen X, poor people generally out earn their parents, and rich people are far less likely to out earn their parents.

Roberts just elides the fact that historically, an even higher percentage of poor and middle class people would out earn their parents.

So his statistics are not wrong, he just presents them in a certain light.

Re: Just Be Rich

#726

Post by McScroogy »

lou1306 wrote: post #539
McScroogy wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rich outbidding poor people is not what is causing a housing shortage. There are only so many houses a rich person can occupy. Even if you assume that every rich person keeps a number of spare houses, there are not enough rich people to cause a housing shortage.

The comment was about house owning, though. Owning a house is becoming more and more a thing for the upper classes, it wasn't always like this.

The basic need for a house is something different than owning a house, though.

If owning a place to live is too expensive, it follows by logic that renting is cheaper than buying. Otherwise for the price of the rent, people could get a loan to buy.

So it really doesn't seem obvious that this is an issue of rich vs poor.

Re: Just Be Rich

#727

Post by chrisseaton »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #701
chrisseaton wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Owning a house is becoming more and more a thing for the upper classes Something like 60% of US people own a home. 30% even own their home completely outright, with no mortgage. Obviously 30%, let alone 60%, of the population cannot be considered 'upper class', and 'middle class' is probably even a stretch. The home ownership rate seems broadly stable since the 60s to me, with gentle ups and downs with the economy,…

Now break that 60% down by demographic. Also, the rate has been going down over the past 2 decades, and I'd wager it will continue to go down.

> the rate has been going down over the past 2 decades

No it hasn’t.

In fact it’s up since 1990! And about where it was as far back as 1970. It seems relatively stable to me?

Re: Just Be Rich

#728

Post by McScroogy »

rychco wrote: post #663
chrisseaton wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Owning a house is becoming more and more a thing for the upper classes Something like 60% of US people own a home. 30% even own their home completely outright, with no mortgage. Obviously 30%, let alone 60%, of the population cannot be considered 'upper class', and 'middle class' is probably even a stretch. The home ownership rate seems broadly stable since the 60s to me, with gentle ups and downs with the economy,…

As someone in their mid 20’s with a tech job, it blows my mind that 60% of people own a home. I can’t imagine having enough money to own a home in a major city.

It doesn't say 60% own a home in a major city.

Re: Just Be Rich

#729

Post by daemin »

opportune wrote: post #643
rocqua wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note, that kind of zoning is US specific issue. The situation zoning wise is quite different in Europe. At the same time Europe also has a housing crisis.

Don’t most European cities have pretty strict building height restrictions? Of course that’s not as bad as banning multi family housing complexes completely but it does seem like basically the same core issue

Yes, but even with a 5 or 6 story limit you can fit 10x as many families living in the same area of land than you can with single family detached housing. The problem is that people that own these detached houses don't want to see more dense housing being built in their area because that will "ruin the community feel" aka lower their property values.

Re: Just Be Rich

#730

Post by ironman1478 »

WalterBright wrote: post #386
taurath wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they’re not talking about “those people”, aka the 63% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. When the ultra rich speak they’re only speaking to the upper middle 40%. We love a good rags to riches story but economic class changes less in the US than many other countries, despite this “ease”. Show me any group of founders and you can point to a few outliers but people who have had jobs like grocery store…

> 63% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck That doesn't mean they're poor. I've known many, many people with zero savings living paycheck to paycheck. They had new cars, nice houses, good furniture, expensive clothes, took vacations, and ate regularly at restaurants. They simply spent it all.

You are truly out of touch with people who are in poverty or near it. My parents each work 60-70+ hour manual labor jobs not including brutal commutes. We were paycheck to paycheck for over a decade until my mom became a nurse (being able to pay for it was complete luck). My father didn't take a day off for over a decade include the weekends it felt like (obviously slight exaggeration) and injured himself multiple times on the job due to the stress. It's truly insulting and saddening to see this sentiment expressed. It is so out of touch.
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