
What the Rich Won't Tell You - ALee
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/sunday/what-the-rich-wont-tell-you.html
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newman8r
I don't have anything against the wealthy, but it kind of irks me when people
with inherited wealth try to maintain some illusion that they're financial
geniuses.

Personally, I grew up thinking my grandfather was a great businessman but
eventually realized he inherited everything from my grandmother's family.

~~~
andrepd
And even if you did, how much of that is luck? Is an "investor" thousands of
times more valuable to society than a janitor?

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Swizec
One could argue that an investor’s job is distributing capital. Capital that
provides the resources to employ tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people.

All a janitor does is keep a few offices clean. A task generally done by
janitors because the people working in those offices implicitly consider
cleaning to not be worth their time.

So ... yeah?

I for one would not have a day job and most of my sidehustle market without
investors.

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vbuwivbiu
I think cleaners are extremely valuable to society. It's always puzzled me
that we don't pay toilet-cleaners and binmen in proportion to how disgusting
their job is. Nobody wants to do that kind of work, yet we all greatly value
the cleanliness they provide us.

By contrast, and investor's job could be done by an algorithm.

~~~
Houshalter
Sanitary workers do get paid decently for unskilled workers.

People don't and shouldn't get paid based on some nebulous "how valuable their
job is to society". That ignores supply and demand. The fact is we have more
people that WANT to work as janitors than their are actual janitorial jobs,
and so the wage gets driven. Whereas there are tons of people that need
investors and can't find them (as anyone who gets even a modest windfall will
quickly find out.)

Or in other words, remove a random janitor from the world and the job will
quickly be filled and life will go on. Remove a random investor and entire
businesses will disappear/not be founded and the world will be noticeably
worse off.

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vbuwivbiu
If sanitary work stopped today, society would quickly disintegrate, whereas if
investors stopped working today the world would be improved.

Isn't supply-and-demand nebulous ? It's humans who place values on goods and
services, not some law of nature, and they do so according to the weather of
their emotions.

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Houshalter
>If sanitary work stopped today, society would quickly disintegrate, whereas
if investors stopped working today the world would be improved.

Society wouldn't disintegrate without sanitary workers. It would get grosser,
with people forced to do their own plumbing and dump their own trash. And even
if all sanitary workers united and went on permanent strike, they could be
quickly replaced within a few months. As I said, there's no shortage of people
able and willing to do that job.

If investors all quit we'd be fucked. Maybe not overnight, but eventually. No
new investments. No new businesses. No new jobs. The economy stops growing.
People can't buy cars or homes because there is no one to lend them money.
Businesses can't get loans to invest in new more efficient processes, or new
factories, or whatever. And no one can just come in and replace them, because
it requires a lot of money and risk tolerance among other things.

>Isn't supply-and-demand nebulous ? It's humans who place values on goods and
services, not some law of nature

Not some law of nature, but economics. The prices of things are not arbitrary,
they are set based on how strongly people value that thing divided by the
supply. If you have a huge supply of people who can do a job, then the wage
isn't going to be very high.

And this is a good thing. It creates incentives for people to take the jobs
that are most demanded. There is a big demand for programmers and a short
supply. If a sanitary worker can switch to programming, the economy would be a
bit more efficient. At the moment we need slightly more programmers and
slightly fewer sanitary workers. If everyone did this it would eventually
equalize and they would pay the same.

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cannonedhamster
While I agree with your generally well-written reply, one point of contention
I have is that of prices being set by markets. We don't live in a laissez-
faire market society. We live in a society with many government enforced
monopolies that limit supply arbitrarily and which routinely changes rules
that limit consumer rights without any real recourse due to the massive power
imbalance of the wealthy versus those not wealthy. Taken as a whole our
current economic system is little more than a way to protect those who already
have the most protection in the system.

Second thought is in relation to economics. Economics is not some hard science
where there can truly be said to be any kind of actual laws discovered. Supply
and demand pricing isn't even a firm reality as marketing can vastly dictate
market results. We really and truly are in the infancy of understanding
economics as it ties so heavily into human psychology and unpredictable
events.

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grzm
Discussion two days ago; 43 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15199197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15199197)

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SubiculumCode
If you feel embarrassed that your maid will know you buy $6 bread, buy $3
bread and give your maid $3.

Instead, they peel the sticker off.

~~~
sillysaurus3
There's nothing wrong with buying $6 bread or having many cars or whatever.
You don't need to flagellate yourself just because you have money. It's just
life.

Even if we tear everything down and rebuilt from first principles, some would
have more and others less. By six orders of magnitude. It's just inescapable.
Even communist countries were like that.

The rich person hate is pretty dopey. There's a subreddit
/r/LateStageCapitalism that actively breeds hate against rich people the same
way /r/coontown bred hate against blacks. It's just somehow more socially
acceptable to post online about killing rich people than minorities. There was
literally a comment that was talking over the merits of stabbing Musk just for
being a wealthy capitalist.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment other than to say it's a very
strange time we live in. The whole "us vs them" mentality isn't healthy.
There's no reason they should feel bad about buying $6 bread just because they
can.

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andrepd
There is wrong. Read the article. Most of the people interviewed are said to
have inherited wealth, in the millions of dollars. More wealth fell into their
lap than the maid will ever earn in several lifetimes. This is deeply unfair.
The economic system that promotes this is deeply unfair. Wealthy people
benefit from a system that perpetuates their wealth. They actively influence
decision making to favour themselves. They can buy power, influence, to a
point 99% of the earth's population can. Notwithstanding your opinions on
socialism (dirty word I know), Marxist class theory is real: the "owners" and
the "workers" are as clear-cut social classes as the peasantry and nobility of
yore.

Also, about that subreddit, I have never seen any post calling for "killing
rich people" or any nonsense like that. It's just a place to post examples of
capitalism gone awry. Perhaps it just touched a nerve?

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nnfy
You do realize that the concept of fairness is subjective and
multidimensional, correct?

Who are you to decide what is or is not fair? Is it fair for me to build an
empire and be barred from passing on what I've worked for to my children?

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zdkl
you must've picked the worst possible example.

 _You_ built an empire and you deserve recognition for that achievement, but
what precisely did your child achieve?

Did you earn the right to determine ex nihilo who should benefit from your
talent? Or did yoir chils by virtue of winning the fallopian race become the
optimal manager for the fruit of your labour?

~~~
nnfy
So what is the limit of what is acceptable to pass down to a child? Who
decides?

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zdkl
Local jury of peers, taking into account community needs and individual
factors?

Like if we want to go full hippy and consider the global situation on this,
the reasonable argument here is that children are owed f-all after education
and insertion into society. That's _fair_ , right?

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throwaway8341
My dad is retired, I'm 20 years old, he's 49. I just say he's an investor. I
used to explain to people how it was possible for him to be retired, without
being a movie star or lottery winner with index funds, but they looked at me
like I was selling a Ponzi scheme. I guess me making a throwaway for this says
something.

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ams6110
Not a scheme at all. My parents lived comfortably off their investments after
retirement. They had accumulated close to $2M. Combined income never topped
$75,000 in their best years. How? They lived modestly, spent money
judiciously, and always saved for tomorrow.

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ilaksh
One thing that many wealthy have that I hope technology will allow more not-
quite-wealthy people to have is someone to clean and cook meals on a daily
basis.

I think that this may even be possible before we have truly general AIs. My
own view is that the main thing holding this back is combining the latest
advances in neural networks with some AGI concepts and then more biomimetic
and performant artificial muscles and limbs. For one thing maybe activating
like real muscles, a bit away from the joints, to provide more leverage versus
motors in the joints. I don't know exactly but I think going more close to
biologically inspired mobility for robots can reduce the gap between robots
and animals in terms of dexterity and power-to-weight ratio etc which seems to
really be lacking.

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wavefunction
Cleaning and cooking builds character and allows time for reflection, in my
opinion.

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SubiculumCode
This is true for programmers and the like. But: Cleaning and cooking after
cleaning and cooking at the Denny's all day? Not so much.

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curiousgal
This kinda reminds me of how my mother used to insist that we cleaned our
rooms before the maid came because "What would she think of us?!".

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oculusthrift
i mean we had to do that too. (not maid but housekeeper) I always assumed it's
because their job is vacuuming and cleaning surfaces, not cleaning up the kids
mess off the floor

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nsxwolf
Exactly. How are they supposed to even know where all your stuff goes?

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SubiculumCode
I wonder if we'd prefer a system where the majority of wealth after death goes
back into a national trust and is immediately re-dispersed back and divided
among all citizens...the national inheritance if you will.

Of course there would be implementation issues.

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dec0dedab0de
so families would be thrown out of their house when the primary caregiver
dies?

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randyrand
Most rich people are rich because they are frugal, save money, and invest. The
person this is about is the exception not the rule.

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CaptSpify
source on that?

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randyrand
[http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-
millionaire.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-
millionaire.html?mcubz=0)

This article is about people with more than $1 million in assets (sample
median of $1.6 million).

"About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent."

" On average, we invest nearly 20 percent of our household realized income
each year."

" Our household's total annual realized (taxable) income is $131,000"

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SubiculumCode
Every child deserves start up money.

