> I keep trying to tell [my kids] that money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It also does not, in and of itself, makes you a good person.
Being rich individually might not be morally bad, but inequality probably hurts society overall. "No drop is responsible for the flood" yada yada.
> Within a couple of years I was giving away more money than my parents, who had much more money that I had, which they told me was embarrassing to them... I really considered giving it all away at a certain point in my 20s, and I know people who did that. And I wish I could tell you that it was courage that kept me from doing that, but it was mortal fear. I didn’t think I would be able to survive. I was afraid I was a hothouse flower. I didn’t know if I could live on my own.
I think I have experienced this on a much smaller scale - the fear of committing to a career change (out of SWE) due to financial insecurities. Going backwards, financially, is incredibly difficult - it's so easy to get locked into a lifestyle that you simply can't relinquish it up voluntarily.
> I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self.
The innovative pressure produced by inequality is something that should not be unappreciated. Although it's a sore spot for many, so is any type of discipline or system that is necessarily harsh for it to work. HOWEVER, inequality that is so stark and dramatic hurts society. My position is that everyone should have the right to the basic necessities of life (as FDR was a proponent of [1]).
As a person from the lower classes, I'm fine that people live like kings and I don't. If I really want that life, I should have to work very very hard for it. What I'm not cool with and despise is having the fear of homelessness and hunger held over my head so that I am forced to dance for my rich masters. In an age of exorbitant wealth and excess, this is getting ridiculous. At the rate we are going, in the future we will have people owning planets with colonies of robots and still have starving people. At what point do we say enough is enough?
>As a person from the lower classes, I'm fine that people live like kings and I don't
>What I'm not cool with and despise is having the fear of homelessness and hunger held over my head so that I am forced to dance for my rich masters.
Being lower-class is a big part of my identity due to being the poorest kid in my class that I was aware of. Yet I grew up in a relatively well-off neighbourhood in a well-off country. I never went hungry. I never went cold. I even got a few luxeries like modern video game systems from well to do relatives. When I see the "We are the 99%" rhetoric it strikes me how much people focus on the few people richer than then and how little they focus on the many people poorer than them. I've looked at the numbers and in a world with perfect equality westeners would be poorer. There seems to be a lot of self-serving self-victimization with a lot of the fuck the rich rhetoric.
Yet I know that even if you aren't suffering grinding poverty being RELATIVELY poor on a local basis is really hurtful and isolating. It destroys you socially. You can't do what your peers can do and have to stay home. It makes you less attractive to the opposite sex. It hurts your quality of life. It limits your ability to change this. It makes it so merit becomes less and less connected to success.
I know that a lot of people even poorer than me are suffering. I know the people most able to afford to address these problems and those least needing for money are the wealthiest in society. I also don't see the growth of inequality as sustainable. We're at gilded age levels of inequality and things are still getting worse. It's going to lead to more and more social unrest.
> Yet I know that even if you aren't suffering grinding poverty being RELATIVELY poor on a local basis is really hurtful and isolating. It destroys you socially. You can't do what your peers can do and have to stay home.
This resonates with me. I tried explaining this to a relatively new friend recently and he told me "That's your white privilege talking".
People don't seem to understand that suffering is relative, and if you grow up poorer than your peers, it's still hurtful.
No I have to decide which will be better for my kids, the oldest of which is reaching school age. Bottom of a middleclass area or top of a lower class area.
Def agree. Dave chapelle said it best. If you grew up on the hood where everyone was broke, you didn’t feel as bad cuz you didn’t know any better.
But being a lower middle class kid in a rich neighborhood, even if you we’re better off than the kids in the hood, everyday at school you are constantly reminded of how poor you feel, more so than the people in the hood.
I don’t understand. You were saying you didn’t have as much money as your nearest peers and it was hurting your social life and making you insecure, and they handwaved it away as privilege??
The replacement of class politics with bloated Imperial multi-ethnic racial politics.
Often cheered by those who have never experienced actual hardship ie Homelessness, precarity mindset of being low income, being rejected at interviews because you have to use old clothes, social isolation of the lower classes, etc
Or to put it more crassly, the poor of America aren't "sexy". The poor of 3rd world nations? HOT. People who individalize their suffering by adopting "identities" (gender, sexual, racial)? HOT. The couple sleeping in front of the boutique candy store? TOTALLY NOT
Yep, "white privilege" to be precise, and that was the first time I'd heard the term. I was pretty surprised to hear it considering he knew I only had 1 parent growing up.
Your friend is not wrong but they were still being toolish about it. You mentioned your struggle, your problem; and instead of trying to commiserate they basically said "it could be worse". Know how you feel, most people can't relate with my life experiences either so in the past when trying to discuss them I received similar levels of dismissal. Something I realized though is that it goes both ways: in the moment they said " that's your privilege talking", you had a window to turn the conversation back to them, to ask about their experiences. Of course that direction for a convo isn't always appropriate, or it may be asked too awkwardly to get a thoughtful response, but I will mention those times I shut up and opened my ears were some that broadened my perspective the most.
> Yet I know that even if you aren't suffering grinding poverty being RELATIVELY poor on a local basis is really hurtful and isolating. It destroys you socially. You can't do what your peers can do and have to stay home. It makes you less attractive to the opposite sex. It hurts your quality of life. It limits your ability to change this. It makes it so merit becomes less and less connected to success.
I understand and this is a good point.
I have further anecdotes from being friends with an African American kid who lived in the government housing area in my town -- which I visited on occasion. Even though these people lived in decent houses, with all their basic needs being met by the state, there was a dramatic feeling of depression and anger there. What did their future look like? They didn't feel like they had any way to work within the system, so they turned to degenerate preoccupations. When you feel like the system "isn't fair," you are inclined to say fuck the system. This impacts African American's the most because not only do they see the system "isn't fair" today, but that it was really not fair in the past. The fact that it has improved dramatically isn't a saving grace for many.
I understand some of the problems of inequality, but I can't imagine it ever being different. Equality is in line with my morality, but I'm not a dreamer. Humans aren't angels. I do believe we could win the fight for securing the basic necessities of life as a right, but equality is a utopian fantasy. There is a certain level of suffering we must accept as being an unavoidable consequence of our nature.
Indeed. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when the most disadvantaged members of society have no other means to advance other than illicit activities and then those statistics are turned around and continued to be used against them. It's depressing that plenty of people fall for it, citing "the numbers" as evidence for thier hateful claims.
I agree so much with this. I really find the focus on inequality weird and sort of childish. Complaining about inequality strikes me mostly as an attempt to sublimate envy into a politically palatable narrative. What we really ought to focus on is not reducing "inequality", by pulling the ceiling down...but raising the minimum standard of living by pulling the floor up. I think UBI is an excellent way of doing that, but there are many.
There’s a huge difference between the “I’m a young single college grad making $50k a year and billionaires are the reason I’m poor” narrative and literally stepping over potentially dead unsheltered people on your way to the office of a multi-billion dollar company. How can we make sure that people don’t have to sleep on the street and suffer from poor healthcare? Because currently income inequality is creating developing country, slum-like conditions in the US.
> How can we make sure that people don’t have to sleep on the street and suffer from poor healthcare?
The first step is a cultural change. I believe the ball is in the court of the writers, musicians, philosophers, poets, celebrities ... people involved with shaping culture. To give an example of how how toxic our culture has become, I'll recount something that just happened 30 minutes ago.
There's this nice old lady near my hackerspace who operates a small food cart. Not many people visit her because where she's allowed to be is laughably secluded, so she mainly sits there all day waiting for customers. Another member of the hackerspace said he was going to Wallgreens to get a candy bar and asked if anyone else wanted something.
I said: "Hey, there's the food cart lady who has that stuff and she's just a 1 minute walk away, instead of the Wallgreens which is 10 minutes away."
Upon hearing this, another member grunted with disapproval. I asked what was up.
He said: "She sold me a disgusting sandwich, you shouldn't support a business that is run that poorly."
I replied: "She's an old lady! Did you give her any feedback on the sandwich, maybe she can improve?"
Him: "A business run like that is beyond help."
I'm still shocked how this person couldn't even see past the business into the person. This is a huge problem I see: we forget we are dealing with people because we classify them simply as objects of utility. Our consumerist abstractions are causing us to be quite nasty to others.
> There’s a huge difference between the “I’m a young single college grad making $50k a year and billionaires are the reason I’m poor” narrative and literally stepping over potentially dead unsheltered people on your way to the office of a multi-billion dollar company. How can we make sure that people don’t have to sleep on the street and suffer from poor healthcare? Because currently income inequality is creating developing country, slum-like conditions in the US.
How, exactly is income-inequality creating those conditions? It seems to me like the issue you're describing is one of a floor that is too low. Which is exactly what I said.
When people focus on inequality, are they doing so because they love the poor and want to do something for them, or because they hate/envy the rich? Too often, it's the latter.
Instead of UBI, a negative income tax is a much better approach. There's a lot of info out there about it, but here's a nice intro:
EITC is a hybrid normal and inverse means-tested, and also behavior (by source of income) tested, welfare program managed through the tax system that was loosely inspired by negative income tax, but it is not actually a negative income tax.
Unfortunately the issue with inequality is that it breeds more inequality.
Someone born into the .1% will continue to get richer and richer by literally not doing anything while others on different parts of the spectrum aren't in a position like that and many have negative assets.
If the playing ground was equal at birth and people were differentiated based on their hardwork no one would complain. The issue is the playing ground is not level and every day it gets more and more skewed.
> Someone born into the .1% will continue to get richer and richer by literally not doing anything while others on different parts of the spectrum aren't in a position like that and many have negative assets.
What you're talking about here is wealth mobility. And I think we should definitely be talking about policies to promote that. Especially in the upwards direction.
> We can't talk about this without talking about the inequality in wealth which is the biggest factor in economy mobility unfortunately.
That's an interesting theory. How does that work, exactly, though? How does wealth inequality squash income mobility? And if income mobility is the real goal, why are we talking about inequality, and not directly talking about mobility?
Honestly, I'm not an economist. But from what I've gathered from reading various opinions on this matter is that economic inequality is the main source of weak economic mobility in developed countries - especially in countries that don't have safety nets.
The theory essentially is that strong economic mobility requires some "base" value of economic power.
If you're born into a family with negative assets, thousands of dollars in credit card debt, bad neighborhood you're essentially starting your life with negative economic mobility and turning that positive is extremely difficult given the circumstances and in many cases you stay poor. For example, the effects of redlining is still seen to this day after nearly half a century has passed.
On the other end, if you're born into a family with a strong economic background and proper investments. You're already starting your life with positive economic mobility.
The way to think about it is, if you're on the bottom of the graph in terms of assets, you're going to be going further and further down (until where is the question?) and if you're on the top of the graph you're going to keep going up.
College, various inheritance taxes, social safety nets, etc etc try to offset these differences by essentially making the top of the graph a little "weaker" and boosting the bottom of the graph. But is it working?
I agree with all that, but doesn't that mostly argue for shifting the bottom up, rather the pulling the top down? What I see is people using the word "inequality", but then talking about poverty. Poverty is bad. But I don't really understand why the ratio of the top to the bottom is the important number, rather than the absolute value of the bottom.
Where does that info come from? I went to school with people whose wealth can be traced back more than 20 generations. They didn't seem to getting poorer.
Do you have data that isn't a blatant ad campaign consisting of pithy statements from a wealth management company trying to scare people into letting them manage their money?
Something like 65% of all land in the UK is owned by the same families that owned it in the Norman conquest. 0.3% of the population today. Since 1066-1100.
The stat you quote may apply to some broader definition of “wealthy”, but for the true 0.1% - 0.01% it is truly eternal, and accelerating.
You might want to pay closer attention to the complaints about inequality. What that focus is about is the degree of inequality.
Most people talking about it are not actually pursuing a world of absolute equality, but a world with reasonable levels of inequality, and with regulations that make a rapidly increasing spread less likely. I.e. we want floor and ceiling not too far apart, and not rapidly separating. Which means UBI alone, or minimum wage, or any number of floor-focused things are not the answer. Neither is a wealth tax, or any number of ceiling focused things the answer, by themselves.
> You might want to pay closer attention to the complaints about inequality. What that focus is about is the degree of inequality.
I pay quite a bit of attention to it. I'm aware of what it is people are complaining about. Everything I said stands.
> Most people talking about it are not actually pursuing a world of absolute equality, but a world with reasonable levels of inequality, and with regulations that make a rapidly increasing spread less likely. I.e. we want floor and ceiling not too far apart, and not rapidly separating. Which means UBI alone, or minimum wage, or any number of floor-focused things are not the answer. Neither is a wealth tax, or any number of ceiling focused things the answer, by themselves.
Why? What's good about that? What, exactly, is the benefit we get from pursuing a flat wealth distribution? People often promote this idea, making the implicit assumption that reducing inequality is somehow a good in and of itself.
The point of these things should be to improve the material living standards of as many people as possible. If reducing inequality is a necessary side effect of doing that, then fine. But I see no reason to pursue that as an actual ultimate goal.
The notion of "value" pursued and optimized by our economy is proportional to wealth. Feeding a starving poor person has no economic value, but helping a rich person drain middle class retirement accounts has enormous economic value.
To the extent that the wealth distribution is unequal, our economy will ignore real, pressing issues among the poor in order to focus on the increasingly esoteric "needs" of the wealthy.
That's why absurdly lopsided wealth distribution is a problem.
> The notion of "value" pursued and optimized by our economy is proportional to wealth. Feeding a starving poor person has no economic value, but helping a rich person win the game of thrones / bank accounts has enormous economic value.
If you feed a poor person so that they can get a job and contribute to society, that generates quite a lot of economic value. But yes, you're right, giving away food does not increase GDP on its own. But then, neither does zero-sum wealth transfer.
> To the extent that the wealth distribution is unequal, our society will ignore real, pressing issues in order to focus its energy on silly zero-sum pissing contests among the few individuals that matter according to said distribution.
Is that so? That must be why our technology looks the same today as it did 100 years ago. Or 50 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 10 years ago. All those zero-sum pissing contests.
> If you feed a poor person so that they can get a job and contribute to society, that generates quite a lot of economic value.
Not for you. Feeding a poor starving person does not make you richer. If they could have afforded to pay, they would not be starving. The economy fails to incentivize the satisfaction of a real need because it does not value the needs of those without money.
That, of course, is an extreme example, but the same principle applies to all the shades of gray.
> Is that so? That must be why our technology looks the same today as it did 100 years ago. Or 50 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 10 years ago. All those zero-sum pissing contests.
Any system of power can lay claim to the products of the society it governs, but I have always found those claims wanting, because there are so many other factors involved. Technological progress in particular. Capitalism's advocates are really good
The notion of incentivizing people to do important work is not unique to capitalism. Capitalism is not even particularly good at it, and is getting worse at it, as inequality in the wealth distribution drives capitalism's notion of what is important further and further away from what most people actually find important.
Capitalism on a somewhat level-ish wealth distribution is great: everyone gets a say in what's important. Capitalism on a super skewed wealth distribution is not great: only the lucky few get to say what's important, and everyone else is ignored. The wealth distribution is the problem, and policy to make sure it doesn't run away is going to be the eventual solution.
> Not for you. Feeding a poor starving person does not make you richer. If they could have afforded to pay, they would not be starving. The economy fails to incentivize the satisfaction of a real need because it does not value the needs of those without money.
It does not value the needs of those who have not contributed to its largesse. You are valued in proportion to your contribution, or the contribution of your parents.
> The notion of incentivizing people to do important work is not unique to capitalism. Capitalism is not even particularly good at it, and is getting worse at it,
Capitalism is certainly the best of any system i'm aware of. Is there some other system you're aware of that's done a better job of producing innovation?
> as inequality in the wealth distribution drives capitalism's notion of what is important further and further away from what most people actually find important.
Hm? Away from what most people find important? How do you get people's money if you're not offering them something in exchange that they find important?
Is the degree of inequality really the issue though? Personally, I like that there are people like Jeff Bezos who can personally fund a space company.
The real problems, for me, are the power imbalances (lobbying, corruption, tax evation by rich people), and rent seeking (e.g. owning real estate or entrenched businesses).
Power imbalance is directly created by the insanely rich. Bezos bought an entire newspaper. Sheldon Adelson buys his politicians more directly, but same difference.
And rent seeking is what enables the imbalance. Without rent-seeking, it'd be much harder for the gap to widen (because rent seeking captures wealth creation for the benefit of the rent seeker)
And of course, the two feed into each other - power imbalance allows for lobbying, creating opportunities to obtain rent. Which, in turn, widens the power imbalance.
Maybe you could theoretically fix those two without addressing inequality. I don't know. I suspect it wouldn't work - if you truly fixed power imbalances and rent seeking, I'd wager you'd address wealth disparity too.
I'd see all of them as tangled in the big hairy cluster that is laissez-faire capitalism.
Wealth inequality is the main cause of power inequality, and is thus a major reason why something like UBI won't happen just because it benefits poor people.
You can't make the world better if you are powerless, and you are powerless so long as you can be overruled by those with more wealth than you.
> Wealth inequality is the main cause of power inequality, and is thus a major reason why something like UBI won't happen just because it benefits poor people.
Poor people seem pretty powerful to me. In a world where rich people are infinitely powerful...what percentage of tax revenue do you think they'd be paying? 0%? 10%? The top 3% if earners paid over 50% of income tax in the US in 2016 [1]. That doesn't seem particularly powerful to me. Or, if it is, that power isn't wielded especially self-interestedly.
> You can't make the world better if you are powerless, and you are powerless so long as you can be overruled by those with more wealth than you.
Your inferences are correct, but your premises are wrong. And if you're worried about money influencing politics, well, i've got news for you: reducing wealth inequality is just going to make the influence of that money even less transparent than it is now.
> Poor people seem pretty powerful to me. In a world where rich people are infinitely powerful...what percentage of tax revenue do you think they'd be paying? 0%? 10%? The top 3% if earners paid over 50% of income tax in the US in 2016 [1]. That doesn't seem particularly powerful to me. Or, if it is, that power isn't wielded especially self-interestedly.
Oh, give me a break. This is silly statistic often dragged out by right-wing pundits. If the entire US population earned $0 and one guy (pick anyone!) made $1 Trillion per year and paid his ~$400 Billion in taxes each year would you see him as a victim, too?
Another silly example: New York, California, and Florida contribute 25% of the U.S's tax revenues, yet they don't account for 25% of congress. They don't get 25% of the electoral college votes in presidential elections. Poor them, right?
> Oh, give me a break. This is silly statistic often dragged out by right-wing pundits. If the entire US population earned $0 and one guy (pick anyone!) made $1 Trillion per year and paid his ~$400 Billion in taxes each year would you see him as a victim, too?
Did I say anyone was a victim? No. You made a specific point: That the wealthy are disproportionately powerful due to income inequality. My point is: They don't seem to be powerful enough to not pay the overwhelming majority of taxes. I didn't say they were victims, or that they shouldn't be paying more in taxes. It was a counter-example to your point.
> Another silly example: New York, California, and Florida contribute 25% of the U.S's tax revenues, yet they don't account for 25% of congress. They don't get 25% of the electoral college votes in presidential elections. Poor them, right?
Well, actually, I would argue that yes, poor them. California and NY should be better represented in Congress and nationally, through electoral college reforms and other things, but that is pretty far afield from this discussion.
"How much tax you avoid" isn't a reliable measure of political power. Firstly, if paying taxes can work in their benefit, then there's no reason they shouldn't pay them. Secondly, "I pay your wages" is a pretty good way to influence people, and I don't see why it would fundamentally be different in congress. Thirdly, wealthy people do have more ability to avoid paying taxes. Thus the concept of "Tax havens."
> "How much tax you avoid" isn't a reliable measure of political power
Erm, is it not? Do you think rich people enjoy paying taxes? I don't. The fact that the poor manage to force them to pay the overwhelming majority of taxes, in order to subsidize social services that they don't even consume is a tremendous defeat for them.
> Firstly, if paying taxes can work in their benefit, then there's no reason they shouldn't pay them
How do they work in their benefit? And secondly, why is it to their benefit to have a progressive tax system? If I were a rich person that could set the rules by fiat, i'd say "sure we should have income taxes, we should all pay a flat tax of 20%". And in fact, you see many rich people and libertarian organizations advocating for exactly this. They get precisely zero traction, because they don't have the political power to do it.
Well, gee. You got me. I guess all those rich people would just move to Somalia and pay no taxes, but they can't do it because they have no power. Poor them. Having to pay taxes to participate in a society that secures their massive accumulated wealth. What could possibly be the value in that, I wonder.
Why do you keep trying to argue against a straw man? I'll say it again: I'm not saying they're victims. I'm not saying that they have less power than they should. I don't feel sorry for them. You made a specific claim: That they had a massive amount of power. I made a counter-claim: That if that were true, they'd be paying less in taxes. Do you have a response to that? Because it seems like you don't.
If there weren't pathways for the application of scientific knowledge to people's needs, there wouldn't be as much funding for it. Science thrives today because people have used it to solve many problems, which generates massive wealth.
>>As a person from the lower classes, I'm fine that people live like kings and I don't.
The problem isn’t that they live like kings. The problem is they live like kings, and want to live like emperors. And their way of doing this is to put immense pressure on politicians and stack the system even more in their favor. Tax cuts are a great example of this. Who ends up paying for those? People like you and me.
Inequality does not hurt society, lack of social mobility hurts society. If we had a society as equal/unequal as we have today, but had perfect social mobility inequality wouldn't be a problem.
Politically this is a very hot topic and people are becoming increasing hostile towards rich people. I don't think there should be a problem with people getting rewarded by outsized sums if they create a business or add value in whichever way. I do think there should be limits to the amount of money someone can inherit - should it be possible for someone to inherit 10 billion dollars? that just seems too much.
This suggests that if I find a gold nugget while hiking, somehow that hurts society?
Inequality benefits society overall. It provides a motivator for people to improve their lot, thereby indirectly improving the lot of many others. (For example, in the 90's the newspaper reported that Microsoft had created 10,000 millionaires in the Seattle area, exclusive of home ownership.)
Edit: I think it's ineffably sad that whenever I post that people can better themselves, that life isn't totally random, one has choices, I get a strong negative reaction.
Inequality, but also mobility. A society with one rich person, or even an oligopoly, isn't going to motivate many people since there are only so many spots.
The height of wealth doesn't have much impact either - a person isn't going to work 1000x harder because someone has 1000x more money.
There's also inefficiency - rich people tend spend personal money in inefficient ways that other people can't, such as on private jets, luxury yachts, etc., vs. poorer people, who spend a much larger fraction of their income investing into themselves with medical care and investing in efficient things such as public transport or biking, efficiently sized homes and apartments, or energy efficient appliances, for example.
EDIT: the reason why you get a negative reaction is that you imply that it's good almost everyone to be poor - everyone is motivated to work hard, so that's the ideal society, right? People reacting negatively are thinking what's the point of wealth if practically nobody in society has access to it?
In a free market, everyone has choices. And those choices have consequences for better or worse. It's not about "access to wealth". It's about creating wealth. For example, it's never been less expensive to create a major business. You can start an internet company with a $100 pawn shop laptop. Getting a business license is mostly just filing the paperwork. Accessing the internet is free (from the public library). Accessing a worldwide market is free. Training materials in any subject you care to learn is free. You can take MIT courses for free. Advertising is free. What's stopping you?
If you do really need startup capital, there's kickstarter.com, gofundme.com. (I've successfully used kickstarter.)
You can invest in the stock market for $0 in commissions, even buying just one share.
If you're an able-bodied adult in America, you can choose to get started creating wealth, or you can choose to complain about how unfair everything is and revel in your misery. YOU get to choose. And that's wonderful.
A lot of people aren't aware of their options. That starting a business is super simple is something that I had no idea about, and even the prospect of dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork can make the whole endeavour feel daunting and off putting. There's also financial safety / lack of a safety net - ideally you could fall back to family, but no one really wants to fall back to friends, or worse, no one. This means a lot of people choose shitty jobs over rewarding but risky jobs or endeavor.
And for the stock market, working an average job means you should really be investing into a Roth 401k, though I know some people who invest into realty.
It's kinda like telling a depressed person "just smile and don't let the small things bother you!" Progress can be hard for people for various reasons.
That said, I agree with what some one else said else where, that I mostly actually care about is to make sure every one can afford what they NEED to without going to extremes - I know a person in the military who had to eat of dumpsters to survive as a kid, and someone who was living on the doorstep of their recruiter until they got in. There are places in the US that have third world living conditions: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-pov...
As a side, I had brought this up with someone before, and they told me that maybe it's a good thing for children to be hungry and eat from dumpsters because then they'll be motivated and work hard as adults.
Ah, thanks the comment back, I enjoy discussing things with purple who have a different opinion.
Then I'm happy to inform you, and you can pass it along.
> That starting a business is super simple is something that I had no idea about
It can be even simpler. Go door to door and offer to mow lawns, or clean, or tutoring. When I was a kid I'd mail order candy that wasn't available locally and sell it at school. My brother would tune up peoples' cars in their driveways.
> This suggests that if I find a gold nugget while hiking, somehow that hurts society?
Yes, if they sell the gold nugget and purchase wasteful goods and services, assuming they would not have purchased those goods and services otherwise.
If you use the money to purchase a tractor so that you can grow more food, then yes, you probably are increasing global productivity. At best, it is unclear whether private jets make you a more productive human and thus increase global productivity given their enormous costs - even if you include the motivational boost that it provides to non-private jet owners who look at the private jet and work harder as a result.
> When someone has money and spends it, other people benefit. Buying that jet employs how many people? Keeping that jet running employs how many people?
It is true that one person's spending is another person's income but that doesn't capture the waste. While wealth isn't a zero sum game, the time of the population as a whole and the low entropy (resources) of this planet is. If you employ someone to pilot your private jet, that person isn't able to do more productive things such as pilot a plane with more people on it. In capitalism, your wallet is like a vote: you get to influence how other people spend their time and how resources are allocated.
> Why judge what people buy with their own money? Isn't hard enough to judge what you buy with your own money?
I'll give the benefit of the doubt for most things. I'm sure people will judge some of my consumption as wasteful. I do think there is a threshold in which we can tell the consumer, "I think you can do better": imagine if you hired a person to burn trees all day - and I'm not talking about slash and burn agriculture or generating power using the resulting steam/heat - just literally burning trees. I'm open to be convinced that private jets are within the threshold but as of now I don't agree.
When those "things" are increasingly lobbying power, "freedom" to destroy the environment more (travel by private jet, large homes (multiple?) with always-on climate-control, large cars, etc.), Carol does hurt Betty by having these things Betty doesn't.
Nobody is particularly upset by people owning lots of money in a bank account (few speak poorly of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet). It's when people put that capital to use that they get blowback. Koch brothers, Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and our benevolent President and much of his cabinet are wonderful examples of the absurdities the wealthy do get away with.
I apologize for inferring more than you said, but I do think that the average case of Betty finding a gold nugget or more commonly winning a lottery ticket leads to wasteful consumption. And so it spurred me to give the answer I gave.
Extreme inequality does not benefit society. It's a sign that people aren't able to improve their lot, at least not without access to money. In a society where the poor can realistically improve their lot, you don't get people stuck in poverty.
Of course finding a gold nugget doesn't hurt society, but if you own the ground on which other people find gold nuggets, and that means they have to give half of their gold nuggets to you, then they benefit less from their luck, while you benefit from other people's luck. That's how you get extreme inequality.
Of course there's always going to be some inequality. Perfect equality is not something that's realistically possible or desirable, but taken to extremes, it does become harmful.
The paradox of capitalism. Due to the positive feedback loop of capital it naturally gravitates towards a system where a single individual controls all of the capital, at which point the system has completely collapsed.
In practice it would have collapsed before that point, but for basically the same reason. None of the capital is where it needs to be to be useful. This is why you need stuff like progressive taxes, public works projects, and social programs on top of capitalism, to pull money out of the top and re-inject it at the bottom lest the system get too top heavy.
The article itself shows that each Disney generation has less money. The Kennedys are another example. Are the Rockefellers the richest people in America? The Vanderbilts? The Carnegies? The Morgans? The Astors? The Gettys? Nope to all.
The richest today are first generation - Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Musk, Case, etc.
In other words, the only way to stabilize capitalism is for those with the money-piles to spread it around just enough that those without don't try to take any extra.
It's not about the gold, it's a reductio argument aimed at gaining your agreement that there's some line beyond which inequality is harmful, so the disagreement can move on to the topic of where the line is whether than is inequality even possibly bad.
The data suggests this is not the case. Particularly, when you look at the correlation between the gini coefficient and just about any measure of societal well-being available (life expectancy, child mortality, maternal mortality, suicide rates, many, many morbidities, WVS for happiness and life satisfaction, etc etc), it's quite clear that high level of inequality is inversely correlated with societal well-being[0].
Your argument about Microsoft is an argument about the benefits of capitalism, which I agree is very beneficial to society when channeled properly. However, capitalism is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
0. Yes, correlation isn't causation, but even if you assume that high inequality isn't the cause of poor societal outcomes, it's at the very least an indicator that something is going wrong and has a fairly high predicative value.
Au contraire. The US went from a nation of scores of millions with nothing but a suitcase to the wealthiest nation in the world with the tallest, best fed, and healthiest people. All from inequality.
(Of course, since WW2, the US has increasingly turned away from the free market towards socialism, and things have done correspondingly less well.)
Nothing but a suitcase, centuries of slavery-generated wealth, and a swathe of the world's most resource-rich land ripped from its inhabitants by genocide and forced migration.
Never mind that in the 1800s the northern economy prospered while the southern slave economy stagnated - a proximate cause of the Civil War was the south trying to economically protect itself from the booming north. The War then (literally) burned the slave generated wealth to the ground.
The end of slavery ushered in another great boom in prosperity in the US.
And, of course, attributing US wealth to stealing land from the natives doesn't explain why South America, which did the same thing, failed to prosper and remains a collection of countries people run away from on foot trying to get into the US.
Why do you think it is sad? Negative comment scores on Hacker News provide a motivator for you to improve your comments, thereby indirectly improving the quality of discourse for many others.
Votes on HN aren't totally random, you have choices on what sort of comments you make, and you can better your comments and yourself. Enjoy!
It's sad because people view themselves as victims of chance with little to no power over their lives, and don't want to hear otherwise.
When I look at my friends, none of them fall into that category. For example, I have a friend who is currently reduced to living in a trailer. He's a serial entrepreneur, alternating between mansions and trailers. I've never seen him discouraged, he just picks up and takes another go at it. He's also (unsurprisingly to me) a heluva lot of fun to be around, always excited about this new venture he's doing.
People who believe their lives are run by (bad) luck never want to hear about the choices they've made, and the choices that are open to them to improve things for themselves. They're boring, sad people.
The problem with this mentality is feedback loops. If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things, society will be heavily stratified despite any individual efforts to improve one’s lot.
I’m not sure that this is a natural state. Maintenance of capital is expensive. It must be defended, repaired, furnished access, etc. These costs are naturally distributive.
Consider that in our society, somebody must be paying the maintenance costs of ownership. Who?
It isn't a natural state. Rigid stratification needs to be maintained forcibly through laws. Free markets are a natural state, and not coincidentally free markets produce lot of mobility.
The Pareto Principle is a bitch. There's no way to remove inequality without trampling on the rights of the few lucky people.
|If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things
The vast majority of people with a lot of money are doing things. They are not idle, and it is not through idleness they wound up in their position. At least in the US.
This is doubly true for their money. It's not in a big swimming pool for them to paddle around in Scrooge McDuck style. Well, at least, most of it isn't.
|other factors = intelligence, hard work, lack of bad luck like disasters, unexpected medical bills, etc
How many of those can you attribute to luck? Winning the genetic lottery is one of the best things you can hope for. You have no control over it, and it greatly influences your outcomes. Born stupid and ugly? Tough luck, maybe in another life.
If you want to be the best cyclist in the world, training for it isn't enough, you need that extra 1% advantage genetics.
But for most everything else in life, you can be plenty good at what you want to do if you're willing to train for it. You don't have to be the best programmer in the world to make quite a good living by programming. It's hardly necessary to be the best businessman ever to run a good business. Etc.
Oh, and on the internet, you can be ugly as a mud brick and it won't have one iota of influence over your success or failure.
Maybe take inventory and look at what you can do, rather than obsessing about not looking like Keanu Reeves. Even so, Peter Dinklage, Danny DeVito, Kathy Bates, Bette Davis, are not the beautiful people. I've met a few movie actors in person, and without the makeup, lighting, and director, they look like ordinary schmucks.
I think you missed the point my post. I'm not one of the people on this board that like to decry success as just being a principle of luck, like it's some kind of lottery.
We're specifically talking about the wealthiest people in the world. The people who got that 1% advantage. I apparently made a mistake in describing those people as lucky (just meaning that there are only a handful of people that will sit at the top, so being one of those people is lucky; it's against the odds).
My whole argument is you can't just take their shit because you want it, and them having a lot of shit isn't a sign that they've done something wrong that allows you to trample on their rights. I think people concerned about inequality have lost the plot. Instead of helping people pull themselves up, they focus on taking from those at the top. Granted, we'll all be more equal financially, but it's hardly a utopian outcome, and no one's lot will be improved, only worsened.
It’s not about rich folks Scrooge McDucking it — it’s that if a rich person does a unit of work and a non-rich person does a unit of work, the rich person accumulates more wealth than the non-rich person as a result of the work. “Rich person work” is “decide how to allocate my capital”, which isn’t an option to many, but for those who have it as an option, it’s vastly more rewarding than actively making things.
Right. The Pareto principle is the observation that large amounts of resources tend to consolidate in a few 'hands'. It's observed in natural systems as well as human created ones.
So, back to your original point. You seemed to be saying that in order to reduce inequality (a good thing), you must trample of the rights of people, specifically the wealthy (a bad thing). But then you admit that it's largely luck which determines whether or not a person is wealthy.
I don't think it would be a big problem to redistribute a small portion of their wealth. Or, similar to what you said in a nearby comment, if society as a whole decides to redistribute a portion of your wealth then "tough luck" (although remember that you are still better off than most when considering how "tough" your luck is). So the original problem with reducing inequality seems to have been solved. It is not a great trespass on the rights of the wealthy to redistribute some of their wealth.
Most people in Germany lost everything in WW2, I mean everything. They were reduced to beggars.
But it wasn't long after the war ended that the people who had money before the war had money again, and the people who didn't before, didn't again. I.e. some people know how to make money. They make their own luck.
Well, I mean the government insists on only allowing rich people to invest and prevent poor people from doing the same, so the claim that his mentality is what's concentrating wealth while the government's own policies get away scot free is rather silly.
If you're talking about the "accredited investor" rules, I believe that those are both intended and have the actual effect of protecting poor and middle income people from scammers (by making the exploitation of them with some fantastical get-rich-quick scheme into a specific federal crime).
Does it also prevent them from investing in Facebook in 2004? Yes it does.
> If you're talking about the "accredited investor" rules, I believe that those are both intended and have the actual effect of protecting poor and middle income people from scammers (by making the exploitation of them with some fantastical get-rich-quick scheme into a specific federal crime).
Yeah, so the thing is that the wealth of a lot of the people with inherited wealth was made via investments by ancestors for whom a similar investment today would be illegal.
It is certainly true that many people lost a lot of money through bad investments before the accredited investor rules. It's also true a lot of people made a shit ton of money. The issue now is that today, they have the effect of ensuring that only the rich can invest in the most lucrative investments.
Anyone can invest. At robinhood.com, you can even buy just one share of stock for no commission. I know a person who scrimps enough to be able to buy one share of stock per month.
That's not what I'm referring to at all. I mean if your friend has a company and wants to take his company public, he can only sell the stock before the IPO to 'accredited investors', thus concentrating the bulk of the profit potential to those who are already rich. It's not just pre-IPO sales but many other investments. For example, if you live in a poor neighborhood and your friend owns a successful restaurant in your neighborhood, he cannot seek investment from you. Instead, he has to seek investment from a rich person, because the government does not think you are smart enough to invest in your friend's business. this again literally takes money from the poor and hands it to the rich.
The restrictions are completely onerous. Someone I know was soliciting investments of $25k for a business he owned in the community. I had the money in cash, and I was perfectly happy to lose it all (but hopefully I'd make some money). I believed in the business and wanted in. However, since I did not make $200k / yr, and I didn't already have $1m in wealth, I was not allowed. Why? At the time I was taking monthly vacations to Hawaii, New Orleans, skiing, etc. I was eating out every day. I was basically living a life of luxury. But, because of the amount of money in my pocket book, I was barred from taking one potential leap from the working class to the wealthy class. On the other hand, an already wealthy man would be more than allowed to invest.
Of course, I could invest in the public stock market, but the fact is that the public stock market forces people to only invest in certain companies. Many people feel skeptical towards companies over which they cannot directly observe.
Obviously, I understand the stock market exists, but if you think stocks are the most lucrative investments, you have a lot to learn about the financial systems.
> if you think stocks are the most lucrative investments
I didn't say that. But they are the easiest to get into and it's a level playing field (all the info you need about companies is online). Few will deny that early investments in MSFT, AMZN, etc., were incredibly lucrative, and anyone could have invested in them.
As for the minimum investment thing, that came about because of endless lawsuits people bring over failed investments claiming they had no idea what they were doing and need a nanny (i.e. the government) to hold their hand. I don't advocate such restrictions, so don't hang me on it.
> you have a lot to learn about the financial systems
I've done tolerably well investing in stocks, and so as you can see I talk about what I know.
They may be lucrative but since the same people were denied access to the more lucrative investments it should come as no surprise that the growth of their capital is less than the growth of capital of the rich.
This is not rocket science. Piketty says that when r > g, that is, when return on investment is greater than rate of economic growth, the rich get richer. It is not much of an extrapolation to conclude that if R > r, that is, when the rate of growth of capital of the rich people investments is greater than the rate of growth of capital of regular joe investments, that the rich also get richer
I am well aware of the reason the rules are in place. But in the same way the government cannot ban poor people from starting their own businesses, neither do they have the right to restrict investment by rhe poor. The governmebt simply has to put up with the lawsuits or declare by statute that certain behaviors cannot make someone civilly liable.
Im sure youve done well in stocks. I have too. However, given my time working in management consulting, i can assure you that you could be doing a lot better if you were allowed to invest like the rich do.
> They may be lucrative but since the same people were denied access to the more lucrative investments
Do you realize how much MSFT and AMZN went up since their IPO?
> neither do they have the right to restrict investment by rhe poor.
We can agree on that point, at least. Ironically, the government encourages the poor to invest in lottery tickets, which are not even investments, but straight up gambling.
> Do you realize how much MSFT and AMZN went up since their IPO?
Yes. But this is irrelevant! The point is that there were other, better-performing investments that the poor could have chosen. That doesn't even address the ethical question of whether it's right to restrict the already disadvantaged from the very mechanisms of wealth creation open to the rich.
She seems to be very thoughtful about this. Main takeaway is what I've read elsewhere: money amplifies your character.
If you were an asshole when you didn't have money, you'll be even worse with it - you can pay enough to not be around anyone who will call you on your B.S. Conversely, if you were charitable before, you'll be able to do a lot of good with a larger checking account.
Wow. This is an excellent thought experiment to picture being super rich:
> PERSPECTIVE. The wealthiest person I have spent time with makes about $400mm/year. i couldn't get my mind around that until I did this: OK--let's compare it with someone who makes $40,000/year. It is 10,000x more. Now let's look at prices the way he might. A new Lambo--$235,000 becaome $23.50. First class ticket internationally? $10,000 becomes $1. A full time executive level helper? $8,000/month becomes $0.80/month. A $10mm piece of art you love? $1000. Expensive, so you have to plan a bit. A suite at the best hotel in NYC $10,000/night is $1/night. A $50million home in the Hamptons? $5,000.
I always found this take a bit unbelievable as the details are off here. Most people in the $1m/y bracket can already live what this person claims is the $10-30mm liquid bracket. You can also net-jets it and fly anywhere first class just fine. Heck I'm in the sub 1m/y bracket and I already have access to any suite I want in most any city, and can get most any car if I want and fly first class.
At the 10-30mm liquid bracket you are quite rich and can already buy any car you want, most homes based on income (3-5m/y+). Already at this bracket you can ALREADY call and talk with local and state level politicians regularly. And if you are a real smart mover, national politicians occasionally.
After that you get bigger boats, bigger yachts and maybe more headaches around international trade issues and regulations, but broadly not much else. You can indulge in some things you maybe can't get at the lower level -- but the brackets this person made up seem fictional. The major differences are your ability to invest and create companies/non-profits with little effort.
This guy is still active on reddit too. If you look at the user profile. He's made a few posts over the years I guess on this. Also apparently he was a male model in case any of you think you might be so fortunate as to so day share his experiences ;)
When I was in college, I knew one of the more remote heirs to the Seagram's fortune. I don't know if his father was a billionaire, but they were extremely rich. This guy turned out OK professionally. He didn't have to work, but he found something he wanted to do, and it fulfilled him. I think the company he started did well financially, too.
But his brother. This guy could not attach himself to anything. On one hand, he really hungered for something to absorb him. On the other hand, he seemed to think: what's the point? I'll never earn a zillionth of a percent of what I'm inheriting. He asked me about what I did, and I explained software development. He was immediately very interested, asked lots of questions, asked if he should retrace my steps (BASIC, punch cards, ... -- this conversation was many years ago). And then he never followed up. Years later I heard that he married a vegan (many years before that was a thing), and became quite zealous about veganism.
I've been going through some German history recently, specifically Prussia and the Junker class. One theme that really sticks out, relative to our modern times, is the relations between the nobility and the military. Time was, the scions were always in the chain of command. Throughout post-Roman European history, the 2nd and 3rd sons of landed nobility would commonly be in the officer classes. The 1st Crusade was mostly lead by these 2nd and 3rd sons trying to grab some land for themselves. The flag of South Carolina has a crescent in the corner, possibly due to all the 2nd and 3rd sons that came to the Americas (a crescent is common in the personal heraldry of such nobles and kinda became a 'thing'). The military was one outlet for these men that had the upbringing, the education, the nutrition, and the cache, but were unfortunate in the order they came out of some woman's womb.
ROTC at the Ivies has been effectively excommunicated since 1970 or so [0]. Though we no longer have these primogeniture issues, we still have all these young men and women, these scions of industry and politics, that haven't a chance at making fortunes like their parents have. They can't be 'normalized' into their 'family offices' and fortunes. It's very similar to the issues the Europeans faced with their children and the issues about land and money.
Maybe some of the issues that we have today could be ameliorated via a stronger use of the military as a place where these scions could be, well, dumped. Bring back ROTC at Princeton? Yes, I know, you can't have them anywhere near the actual command of people. But you could dump them into 1st Lieutenants and have them shit-n-stink with the regular people of our country. Get them roughed up, dirty, and friendly with the regular citizen. Get that gold leaf rubbed off them. Look at Donny's kids, for example. They've taken to hunting and big game very well. It's not too dissimilar to military life.
Another rich person story: I came across a copy of Worth magazine once. This is aimed at the top 0.1% of the 1%. Ads for jets, watches that cost 6 figures, etc. There was an article about the four kinds of rich kids, helpfully arranged from golden child to train-wreck. Just above train-wreck is the child with "other serious pursuits, like being a doctor or raising a family". Such a child will still need to engage with the family business, maybe on the board of directors.
Managed to find some data on ROTC programs in the Ivies:
> There were 122 Navy ROTC midshipmen spread across six Ivy League campuses in 2016, compared to 53 at three Ivy League schools in 2011, according to Navy data. There were 42 Air Force ROTC cadets in the Ivy League in 2016, compared to 28 in 2011, according to Air Force data. The class of 2016 at Yale includes 10 Navy midshipmen and four Air Force cadets out of 1,300 graduates. [0]
Lets assume that the growth in ROTC members will carry forward at this rate. That means that the Ivy class of 2023 will have about 300 ROTC members across 8 schools, or about 35 per school. At about 1300 students per school, that's ~1 in every 40 students, give or take. So, about 1 in every other classroom.
In looking at other universities, that's about the same. It's hard to find numbers, but it's easy to find pictures. Most of the formation photos have about 30 or more people in them (per service branch).
So, though the current batch of scions in power isn't the most ROTC and military active, it does seem that these Ivies are getting to parity with the rest of the country, in terms of service.
> So that’s what you need to know about money, right? If that is your primary measure of success or value in life, then good luck with that, because it will never feel good.
This has the sound of a subject matter expert speaking with authority. And it makes me feel like my adult life so far has been a waste
Having no money in your bank account can definitely impact your feeling of self worth. It can make a lot of other people angry at you, like landlords, power companies, etc...
Money is a pretty objective assessment what's a person's worth. It's an actual measurable quantity, it's meaning doesn't vary from person to person like it does other indicators of worth (i.e looks, personality, altruism etc.)
I'm not sure anything about the question at hand, a person's worth, is objective. Money is easy enough to measure and compare though, and I think that's part of it's appeal as a measure. It's precise even if it's not accurate.
There's a fascinating documentary called Born Rich[1], which was made by the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, where he interviewed his friends who were also born in to incredibly wealthy families. It was interesting to see how differently they all reacted to it, some embracing their wealth and partying like mad, others rejecting it and trying to live a normal life. Highly recommended.
The documentary's director and some of the participants in this film and its sequel, The One Percent[2] (which was not nearly as good), got in a lot of trouble for talking about their family's wealth, presumably because the ultra-rich families really don't want a lot of attention. The blowback included lawsuits, and, if I'm remembering correctly, an adopted daughter of Warren Buffett's got disowned by him after her own participation in The One Percent, where she talked about him and what it was like for her to be part of his family.
"I have not emotionally or legally adopted you as a grandchild, nor have the rest of my family adopted you as a niece or a cousin" - warren buffet deals with family matters in exactly the scrooge mcduck like way i thought he would
It's easy to think not being an asshole is simple. But if you look more closely, what defines an asshole is subjective. For example, does not offering water to your guest make you an asshole? In some circles it does, in some it does not. What about offering food?
On top of that, one also should not be TOO nice, it raises suspicion, make you a doormat, and most likely make your social interactions more difficult.
So when the goal is walking along a subjective line of being reasonably nice, you'll see why so many people cross to the asshole side, according to one person's standard.
From my personal experience money’s main function is to give you more options to do whatever, which has nothing to do with happiness and given the “paradox of choice” can actually make you more unhappy with every decision because you’re always thinking about the opportunity cost of decision 1 vs decision 10000.
I can definitely see that point of view at a certain amount of wealth however I see its primary function as security and stability. It really does buy peace of mind when you know that no one is going to take your shelter away, your car isn't going to break down in the middle of the night, you can keep the heat on, and you'll be able to stay afloat in an emergency.
Other than these reasons (which should be considered basic, but I am aware they are not), I don't think I'll ever need money more than that.
To me, money is what you use to buy food, shelter, transportation, pay bills. If you can afford more than that, you are golden (in my book).
If you have that, and you still have savings, what's the difference between you and a billionaire ? All the rich people I know (I don't know many) are deeply unhappy. So, I know for a fact it doesn't buy happiness directly.
I live frugally, well below my means (except that I take vacations sometimes), and have a huge safety net; also, I never discuss my finances and I don't like to form opinions about someone based solely on (or heavily influenced by) their money. I cannot see the joy of having things as a status symbol, it just doesn't make sense to me.
People that buy things primarily to show to others that they can afford them, just screams self-worth issues to me. I guess it depends on the way you value yourself.
> If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.
> It wasn’t just the plane, but it’s not a small thing when you don’t have to be patient or be around other people. It creates this notion that you’re a little bit better than they are. And for the past 40 years, everything in American culture has been reinforcing that belief. We say, “Job creators, entrepreneurs, these are the people who make America great.” So there are people walking around with substantial wealth who think that they have it because they’re better. It’s fundamental to remember that you’re just a member of the human race, like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your money that makes you better than anyone else. If you don’t know that and you have money, it’s the road to hell, no matter how much stuff you have around you.
Wow. I'm very impressed with her. So many great quotes here.
> Money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person.
Money is opportunities, in the Bible Jesus says to invest our talents, and to give away our money.
Having money is having opportunities, wasting that and not making something of it couldn't that be morally reprehensible?
I'm no saint, and I'm certainly guilty of hording more money than I need (even if I'm far from super rich). But I'm not under some illusion that I couldn't help more than I do. Or that not giving away money is a neutral choice.
Note. I did give away around 5% of income after taxes last year (I'm just a regular overpaid nerd, so not comparable to the author -- but still privileged like most people here).
My cousin taunted me a few years that the Bible says you should pay 10% to charity after taxes and living expenses. I don't think I'm quite there, well, maybe if you do some creative a accounting, hehe :)
For me picking a number to donate was mostly about ensuring that it was high enough that I felt like I had said it like I meant it!
But maybe my savings could be smaller maybe I could help more people -- hording money certainly doesn't seem like a morally neutral thing to do.
that last little statistic she dropped was misleading.
Money does buy happiness, for most people. Think about it. Would you be less happier if you made half your current salary? Before you answer the question, think about all the life changes that would occur, should this happen: maybe you have to move into a bad neighborhood in a smaller apartment, no more eating out, no more vacations, no more dental procedures, etc.
Okay, sure there is a threshold, perhaps at 800K or more your happiness wouldn't increase greatly. The point is, the vast majority of people are below that threshold.
And, I've seen a number of happiness survey that show there's a pretty good correlation between happiness and earnings both at a macro level (comparing countires with high gdp per capita to low gdp per capita) and individual levels as well.
> Money does buy happiness, for most people. Think about it. > Would you be less happier if you made half your current
> salary? Before you answer the question, think about all
> the life changes that would occur, should this happen:
> maybe you have to move into a bad neighborhood in a
> smaller apartment, no more eating out, no more vacations,
> no more dental procedures, etc.
If you have the basic needs covered (shelter, food, medical care, bills), money will not buy happiness for you I think. Everything else is extra.
I agree that if you worry about the rent/food every month, and suddenly you get a lot of money - definitely, that would result in increase of happiness.
Money buys happiness up to a certain point. I believe it was around $70,000 per year; at that point, you live a comfortable life where you don't have to worry about basic necessities and have some money left over for fun stuff (obviously this depends on the basic cost of living where you live; it's likely to be higher in Silicon Valley than in Thailand).
I believe this study has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
There is no known (statistical) upper bound to how much more money helps people’s happiness. It’s just that it increases happiness logarithmically, and people are bad at reasoning about logarithmic growth.
Individual people may feel like they have enough, and not wish for more money, and that’s great. But when you look at happiness and satisfaction statistics (notably, not the same thing), the greater your windfall, the greater your long term happiness.
There are whole industries built around making money buy happiness beyond that point. Humans aren't ideal creatures - once you make a ludicrous amount of money you start REALLY indulging in whatever crazy indulgences you fetishize
> There are whole industries built around making money buy happiness beyond that point. Humans aren't ideal creatures - once you make a ludicrous amount of money you start REALLY indulging in whatever crazy indulgences you fetishize
Yes, but that's up to you. That has nothing to do with money directly, cause presumably you were already into insane things that you could afford prior to making obscene amount of money.
Interesting interview, but about the title: I really cannot imagine having more money than ways to spend, as there are so many things to do and get, like my new space telescope and moonstation and I heard those things are really, really expensive.
When you have a lot of money, you can do something great with it. Like reinvent the rocket industry. Or rid the world of polio. Or buy up land and create nature conservancies. Or buy a bunch of WW2 wrecks, restore them to flying condition, and make a wonderful museum for them.
The interesting bit for me is how she doesn't say a single interesting thing.
What has she actually done in her life, other than writing cheques that total 70 million?
I don't know, and I've read the entire interview.
We really have a crisis of imagination, both on the behalf of the poor and the rich. The poor want to be rich, the rich go to restaurants, buy shoes and write cheques.
This is the sad bit about rich people - they just can't seem to figure out that you can't make someone interesting, by sending them to Oxford, Harvard, etc. They're just bored, or maybe it's just me, bored and grumpy, of reading HackerNews :)
Now would be a good time for the return of the "gentleman scientist" of the 19th century. Not just passively giving money away to worthy organizations, but educating yourself enough to be an authority in that field. Wealth on the order of hundreds of millions affords your own private research team with a good enough budget for many fields, the possibility of pursuing high-risk basic research with no expectation of immediate financial gain and the ability to sidestep the trappings of the academic environment.
It will be impossible to have more money than you can spend in that scenario - the capital demands of global scientific research far exceed the liquid net worth of any single human individual.
You're right that she doesn't say much about what she's done, but I think that wasn't the point of the interview. The interview was intended to explore the lifestyle of someone who grew up in a super rich family, and the questions are clearly worded to get at that. None of the questions ask about her accomplishments, so of course she doesn't talk about them.
I count writing checks to charity as doing something with your life. If she wanted to do nothing at all except sit in her undies on the couch watching netflix and also give $70M away, that's a life well lived.
Being rich individually might not be morally bad, but inequality probably hurts society overall. "No drop is responsible for the flood" yada yada.
> Within a couple of years I was giving away more money than my parents, who had much more money that I had, which they told me was embarrassing to them... I really considered giving it all away at a certain point in my 20s, and I know people who did that. And I wish I could tell you that it was courage that kept me from doing that, but it was mortal fear. I didn’t think I would be able to survive. I was afraid I was a hothouse flower. I didn’t know if I could live on my own.
I think I have experienced this on a much smaller scale - the fear of committing to a career change (out of SWE) due to financial insecurities. Going backwards, financially, is incredibly difficult - it's so easy to get locked into a lifestyle that you simply can't relinquish it up voluntarily.
> I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self.
She's not the only one!