
What the Rich Won’t Tell You - bspn
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/sunday/what-the-rich-wont-tell-you.html
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molecule
Recent submissions and discussions:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20tell%20you&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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kafkaesq
_They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young
children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took the
price tags off her clothes so that her nanny would not see them. “I take the
label off our six-dollar bread,” she said._

 _She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the
inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a
household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars.
Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-
dollar bread is obscene.”_

Then how about paying your nanny enough so that she can _also_ afford six-
dollar loaf of bread now and then, also?

The remedies for this kind of "guilt" are ready available and quite simple,
actually.

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erentz
It doesn't make sense for individuals to martyr[1] themselves for a cause. The
same goes for people who pick on climate change campaigners who fly in planes
or still drive cars.

But it does make sense that if you, as a wealthy individual, feel guilty about
things like this support moves that improve equality overall in society:
Medicare for all, higher minimum wages, good labor laws, good social safety
nets, uniform access to education, maybe UBI, etc.

[1] this is probably a bad word choice but it's all I could come up with on
the moment.

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npizzolato
If you feel so guilty about how little your nanny makes, so much so that
you're pulling tags off everything you buy, maybe it's not a bad idea to pay
your nanny a little above the going rate. Partially for your own sake as well
as hers.

I also think _only_ supporting larger movements is the wrong way to go about
things. The more local the problem, the more impact you can have on it.
Support Medicare for All? That's certainly good to do if you feel that's
right, but that's going to be a long, drawn-out battle. Paying your nanny a
little bit more? That's very easy to do and can immediately improve someone's
life.

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davesque
I think the waters on questions like these have been significantly muddied by
a tax system that really does benefit the wealthy. This and we have around
half of congressional lawmakers wanting more tax cuts for the wealthy, as
though things weren't already easy enough for them. It's therefore entirely
reasonable to imagine that the average person would feel resentment toward the
wealthy and that the wealthy, in fact, _should_ feel self-conscious about
that.

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logfromblammo
The cleaning staff won't envy your $6 bread if you're also spending twice as
much as strictly necessary on your cleaning staff. That is, if you buy $6
bread instead of $3 bread, you should also be paying $21/hour to your cleaners
instead of $10.50/hour.

If the judgment you fear is "this person values bread more highly than
people", then just make sure you value people more than bread.

Don't peel the price tags off. They know how much they're paid. They can guess
how much your bread costs, because poor people are _required by economic
necessity_ to know what consumer goods are worth, and often also how much it
costs for market substitutes and DIY ersatz copies. If you buy a fancy leather
couch for $12000, the maid will know that you could have haggled the
salesperson down to $8000, and maybe also that the same factory makes a
similar fabric-upholstered couch under a different brand name, and sells it
for $2250, or $1500 if you rent a box truck and drive to North Carolina to
pick it up yourself. $500 if you ask Shady McLoadingdock about "damaged
goods". $350 if you also give him some of the finer varieties of cannabis
grown in your state. Poor people build and upholster all the couches. They
drive all the trucks that move them around the country. They work retail and
sales in the furniture showrooms. They have to hustle for everything just to
make ends meet. Don't think you can fool any one of them just by yanking off a
price tag.

The only thing rich folks should be embarrassed about is assuming poor people
are stupid.

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dfrey
They don't sell the $6 bread in the grocery store that the maid shops at and
they don't sell $12000 couches where she buys her furniture.

She lives in a different world, so it's very likely that she has no idea how
much a couch costs by looking at it.

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logfromblammo
She certainly _works_ in that world for a number of hours every day.

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nunez
> His wife, whom I interviewed separately, was so uneasy with the fact that
> they lived in a penthouse that she had asked the post office to change their
> mailing address so that it would include the floor number instead of “PH,” a
> term she found “elite and snobby.”

Sorry, but fuck outta here with that logic. If you're uncomfortable with
living in a penthouse, then you should've not gotten a penthouse. Y'all bought
it because y'all wanted it. (Or maybe her husband wanted it and she was more
whatever about it?)

Own your purchasing decisions.

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whipoodle
The problem with the rich is how much wealth they extract, not how much their
couch cost.

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danielam
And how that wealth is used.

The article begins with a dubious premise, namely, that how much wealth a
person has is of moral consequence per se AND a matter of public concern. It
isn't. (Side note: many people regard any discussion about income and assets
with people other than a few select individuals in poor taste regardless of
income.) As Harry Frankfurt has written, inequality is not interesting or
relevant per se. What is relevant are things like poverty or the buying of
influence.

An obsession with inequality per se stems from either confusion about what is
relevant, moral confusion, jealousy or fondness for ham-handed and even
immoral solutions to problems of public concern that the misuse or pursuit
wealth can create.

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whipoodle
No, no.

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plandis
This was already posted earlier this week, wasn't it?

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KGIII
Yup. The highest voted comment is even nearly verbatim.

What I will say is that it has become trivially easy to increase my wealth
since selling my company. I've been retired for ten years and make more than I
ever did, largely by doing nothing. I don't even manage most of my own
finances.

It's kind of rigged. On a whim, I bought $20k worth of Tesla at $24 - because
I could afford to risk the money. It was an impulse buy with my only research
being reading a bunch of forum posts.

Most people can't risk that, even if they could technically spend that. The
list goes on.

It's not 'fair' and very different than what I was used to.

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googletazer
Why is it not "fair"? You earned that money, its yours to spend or invest how
you see fit. If your company would have failed, you would have lost not only
money, but also time, and the opportunity cost of doing something else (aka
being an employee).

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KGIII
Yeah, that's why I put it in quotes. From an effort point of view, both mental
and physical, I don't really do a whole lot but I make significantly more than
people who do much more.

From a sort-of-physics view, I get more work out of less energy than most.
It's not equal. It's okay, it's just not well balanced from an objective
viewpoint. I am not sure if 'fair' is the right word.

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holograham
you are confusing "work" with "value"

it is possible to do hard "work" and produce zero value. Example: digging a
large hole in the middle of the desert.

Conversely it is easy to do little "work" and produce tremendous value
Example: writing a script in 15 mins that automates hours of tedious CSV
combinations and data grooming (I used this example bc I once did this and
saved about 15 weekly hours of a highly paid financial analyst's time)

So now we are clear on work != value in the real world

I'll quickly tackle your investment income -- that was a risk buying 20k worth
of Telsa. That easily could have gone to zero as an early stage tech growth
stock. When buying a stock you are putting your money on a bet that the
company will provide more value to the economy. When your bet pays off it is
because the company is doing better and presumably, if following all relevant
laws, providing enhanced value to the economy.

There is no law of physics in economics. In fact this thinking is practically
dangerous and at the least fosters the wrong attitude towards success. Your
success is not someone else's loss. In fact in a market economy, your success
will ALWAYS be another's gain since they voluntarily gave you money for a
good/service they couldnt do as efficiently as you could.

Economics is NOT a zero sum game. You can quite literally create value from
nothing and grow the proverbial pie of value in the world. If you work in
programming you realize this quickly.

The downside to a market economy is that work and value will never be a fair
ratio. While in some ways unfortunate the more unfortunate alternative is
everyone produces equal value from doing equal work. But take a minute to
think critically about how that would be possible. I'll give you a hint --
innovation and ingenuity would plummet to zero.

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KGIII
See, it wasn't really a risk for me to spend 20k. Comparatively speaking,
that's probably something like a minimum wage employee risking a dime.

That's the inherent unfairness in the system. I can just give 20k to my
favorite charity and not even be mildly impacted. Chances are, I won't even
save the receipt to give to my accountant for tax purposes. That'd buy someone
a nice new car.

It's not fair. I am definitely at an advantage. Now, I earned that advantage.
I worked for that advantage. That doesn't make it any more fair.

I'm not happy with the word fair, as it implies morality. I'm also far more
able to help those who need it, and I do. So, from a moral viewpoint, I'm very
much okay with it. That doesn't really make it fair, however.

What's Joe Sixpack going to do by investing a dime in a single go? Not much. I
made enough on just Tesla to buy Joe's house, spending the equivalent of a
dime.

It is what it is, but it's a huge advantage. I'm not suggesting it's morally
unacceptable, just a reality. I'm not even suggesting we can change the
system, just expressing the reality.

