I would say it leads to the greatest form of wealth. We just do not measure it in $$$.

A society that has bad parents will soon be a bad society.

As a european, this assumption that everyone would value getting as rich as possible as their top priority seems really weird.

I don't know if I'm qualified to compare Americans to Europeans, but many Americans really are enamored with money and judge material wealth as the be all and end all goal of life.

That's probably because, over time, you become what you practice. So, even if you were not obsessed with money and work at 20, you might be at 40, after 20 years of chasing money and success to stave off potential disasters.

I mean take a look at rich (m/b)illionaires. It's a life style they can't give up.

like Europe, which has a level of public spending that many view as unsustainably high?

Edit: plenty of economists are saying this! It's hardly a controversial view

[1] https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/public-debt-...

[2] Sorted: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcH12ah_hJh...

And then lets take a look at the North: Germany employs the Euro to support its economy by decreasing the true cost of its exports, resulting in the impoverishment of the southern European countries already mentioned. France's economy has been facing calls for major reform for decades now and - not sure if you've missed it - the latest economy related political problems have led to a minor civil war. Both economies also now face the prospect of integrating millions of low-skilled, penniless new arrivals. Those are the two biggest economies by far in the EU (if UK leaves). And then there's no shortage of other economies snapping at Europe's heels, all perfectly capable of manufacturing products that are equal if not superior to what comes out of Europe. Many think that German automotive engineering dropped off a cliff in terms of quality in the early 2000s and never really recovered, as a consequence of superior quality from Japan and Korea. And now China are just starting to penetrate Western markets with cars that are plenty good enough.

Also don't forget the Euro does not have the privilege of being the world's reserve currency. This gives the US a massive advantage and lessens the impact of deficits.

I live in one of these high benefit economies and having been taxed for years feel I'm owed something in return. But I don't expect it. Given the trends afoot I think anyone below 50 in Europe that thinks the welfare state will continue to be like it is now over their lifetime is utterly delusional.

The OP might be incorrect, but you are using the wrong argument against theirs.

I am not putting my bets on a change in culture or government. I see what's happening to people who counted on Social Security/Medicare and discovered too late that it wasn't enough.

Talk about my fintech venture or trading and young people are visible apprehensive

Very distinct from the general awe and congratulations and “wow but you're so young!” that comes with completely misunderstanding what personal and liquid monetary wealth is

Outside of Monaco and Zug I just started telling people I was a student studying communications

I had to look up what this brand new slang term meant.

fintech = "financial technology".

Linguistic evolution -- be it wanted, needed, or not.

No bitcoin involved

I really appreciate the business climate of the US, the tax and accounting rules are so complex that even communists likely wouldn't achieve much if they gained representation. they'll focus on "income tax" and "wealth tax" because its all they know, and their state planning would never gain consensus.

Mark to Market elections on securities transactions at arbitrary prices causing Net Operating Losses forever no matter what the income tax rate is? 60/40 rule on futures trades? Its unlikely they would ever notice.

If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this. It’s a very big part for some people.

I’ve never felt that I’ve lack “smart”. What I lack is passion, willpower, and consistency. From where I sit, I expect that I’d be much better off both financially and emotionally if my situation were reversed.

Yes. I do a poor job of making that clear because I feel so strongly that physical health and mental health cannot be neatly separated. "A sound mind in a sound body."

To me, (a lack of) "passion, willpower, and consistency" really sounds like someone with low energy due to a hidden health issue.

I was called lazy until I got diagnosed with a genetic disorder in my thirties. I've often joked that life got a lot better "after they found a better name for my condition than lazy and crazy".

Oh, without question it is. The problem has been identifying and treating it appropriately. I’m seeing help, but it’s slow going. It will pass - I’ve beaten it before and will do so again.

But the odds are rather poor that you have what I have.

My children nursed me back to health after doctor's wrote me off for dead. It's supposed to cost about $100k-$250k annually to treat my condition conventionally.

My oldest has the same condition. Between the two of us, that's up to a half million dollars per year.

We were diagnosed over 18 years ago. You can conservatively guess that my kids have been worth at least $1.5 million to me, and potentially more than $9 million.

(That's just the dollar value saved on treatment. You can put no price on the improvement in quality of life that I got out of it.)

Those poor kids are just like every other kid in the world - other than they lack money. Their parents love them, and the best for them. What they define as best might not match my definition, but they want the best for them. And my son is well on his way to a second language, something that will be useful - in our opinion.

That's an unnecessarily reductio characterization. That kid might, say, end up working for a business started by someone without kids.

New people are only an element of a diverse, functioning economy.

For the record I'm a parent myself, and glad to be, but it's not right for everyone, and, I believe, not right for a significant percentage (>10%?) of those who do have them.

All things considered, that is definitely not a given.

Social security for instances is tied to one's lifetime earnings, throw in the correlation between life time earnings and longevity and it smooths out to getting what you put in (roughly).

There are also a lot of benefits, both employer funded and tax payer funded that goes to people with children.

And parents likely have lower lifetime earnings than non-parents. So its possible they're not only funding the future of social security, but also getting less for themselves...

It would be great if someone had a source if parents are net recipients of benefits beyond the societal benefit of having children.

Social Security payouts relative to withholdings are strongly progressive, such that the less that you pay into social security, the greater percentage you take out once you start receiving benefits. Absent a difference in mortality (or to a much lesser degree, the age at which you start drawing), the less you contribute, the greater percentage of what you contributed will be paid out to you.

Regarding social security, I'm fairly confident the system will collapse before I see a penny of what I'm paying in.

I dont think education is a subsidy, so much as an investment.

Also, most families who were eligible, maybe even your own, got the benefits of the tax breaks available to parents.

For some reason many people seem to have a blind spot where they believe that benefits for "parents" or "children" aren't relevant to them if they aren't parents right now. But every adult was a child! ... "like, sure, but what have you done for me lately?".

https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/estimator.html

So in a way everybody pays for their own education after the fact.

But seriously, I’m guessing you don’t have kids?

I've got no kids and no retirement savings. No one's going to support me when I get old. If I had kids there'd be a chance that they would.

Making progeny is not a ‘virtue’. Willing to procreate should not be considered a speculative way to raise monies for taxes.

This is well-said. James Hughes advocates families account their balance sheets on human, intellectual, financial, and social capital. For very-long-term (50-100+ years and >3 generations), the human, social, and intellectual components are arguably more important than the financial one, and it is essential to mitigate liabilities like divorce etc.

http://www.jamesehughes.com/articles/FamilyBalanceSheet.pdf

It's a tactless question, sure, but it should also be expected from a society that idolizes wealth the way ours does.

This is not true, (or if it is being taught, the professor doesn't understand what he is supposed to be teaching.) What first year economics courses do teach--what is meant by the term 'homoeconomicus'--is that in aggregate, people rationally pursue their own self interest. 'Self-interest' is defined here as a subjective utility threshold. So, for example, if someone cares about their children, they will work hard and make a lot of sacrifices to support their children. The idea is that the market follows the aggregate self interest of people and so we don't have to worry about the miss-pricing of goods because the market will take care of that.

The difficulty with this idea isn't that people have wrong values--modern economics presupposes that values are inherently subjective and thus cannot be judged--it's that people are capable of making consistently rational decisions in pursuit of their subjective goals despite information disparities and cognitive biases.

You could have reacted (slightly confused) like so: I pointed at my kids and said "I am."

You could more charitably think of it as a compliment and an attempt at awkward social critique of how life works. An attempt to ask someone whose intelligence she admired to try to explain why life doesn't work like she thought it was supposed to.

Thank you.

Wealth and privilege buy you (and your children) a lot of safety nets and a lot of second chances. People without those advantages are often in an incredibly precarious situation, just one tough break or one bad decision away from total ruin.

People without those advantages have to build them. That is what smart people do. That is what I (a poor black kid) did with an old used computer that my father left behind after leaving my mother alone with 3 kids to raise. That is what I tell the young-lings from my poor neighborhood (that I don't live anymore so to not be hold by past circumstances). They get much more motivated by that than by reading that they are going to be stuck there forever because circumstances. Most of them will.

You want to tell poor people to take responsibility for their own success, because that's the best way to motivate them.

But you also want to tell those running things that they have a huge impact on poor people's success, and things like better public schools would go a long way. Because if the people running things shrug and say "those poor people are responsible for their own success" then systemic inequalities will persist way longer than they do in places like, say, Finland that have widespread, high quality public education.

They already know it. They know that it would make sense to raise corporate taxes to offer free and good education to everybody. But in most of the countries, the people in power were not elected to do that but to lower the corporate rates.

That is why I focus on the individual side, although I'm ideologically communist. To hack capitalism and live well coming from a violent/poor background is one of the most revolutionary acts we can do and teach how to do currently.

The world is full of brilliant people who can't figure out how to handily resolve their personal issues.