Bubbles are bad... but if you don't want to escape from one by yourself, you'll stay there forever, your bubble won't move by itself.
They used to keep these things amongst themselves rather than announce everything to the public.
They used to use hidden signals of wealth to show themselves to each other but not reveal themselves to the public —but now it’s a contest for crass popularity.
I guess Robin Leach opened the crack and Instagram et al opened the floodgates. It’s a bit pathetic.
What the hell happened to the “millionaire next door” types? Someone who had wealth but you’d never know it?
When did this happen? Do you mean the gilded age where the wealthy had giant, showy mansions built now used for various museums, or funded massive libraries and stuff in their name? Do you mean when the wealthy hung up painted portraits of themselves everywhere? Do you mean when the wealthy were building literal castles and starting literal wars on their name? Do you mean when royalty proclaimed to be a royal was to be divine??
I don’t think the wealthy have ever stfu’d about their money…
They're still around, and people still don't know it. Some of those older people you see working at the grocery store have been "retired" from executive positions and need something to do until they reach retirement age. Lots of diligent people working normal jobs and without vices manage to become quite wealthy while living unremarkable lives.
Some of my relatives were like that. Lots of money in the banks, 70 years old, yet his wife would chastise him for buying a small $16k Mazda truck to replace his +10 years old $12k Ford truck.
If you start inflating expenses "because you have money", you don't become the old guy with lots of money in the bank.
I'm confused - those are the same person.
Most "millionaire next door" types are not people who suddenly had a million dropped into their account.
They're the people who routinely make good choices with their money. That includes putting it in a diversified investment portfolio and taking full advantage of all the legal ways to reduce expenses (of which - retirements accounts are a great option - the tax savings you get filling your 401k compound to quite a nice bit of cash over a 40 year timeline, not even mentioning the principle you contributed).
So in this case - I'm with the guys wife: He's 70 already, what's he really going to be using that truck for? It sure isn't going to be heavy labor (he's 70). Couldn't a smaller more efficient car have done the same job? And it's a 16k truck - so it's either incredibly low trim and lightly used, or nice but heavily used (because 16k is dirt fucking cheap for a decent truck unless it's 10+ years old).
So is she nagging because he spent 16k, or because he spent 16k on something that's not really practical for that point in their life? I'd bet money it's the later.
Not even mentioning - a 70 year old might easily live another 25 years. Blowing all your savings now is a terrible call if you need long term care later in life (you want to talk about expensive, long term care makes that 16k truck look like a match box car)
That larger truck might be a waste of money, but it might also be easier to get into, save fuel and keep you safe in the case of a crash. Now, most people are clearly on the overspending side of things, but a large pile of cash won't make your corpse more comfortable either.
That doesn't change the fact that the people who end up in the situation the OP was referring to (decent amount of capital late in their lives) tend to be the same people who have decided that they can, in fact, live a comfortable life without having to spend a ton of money. They aren't always right, but my point is that folks without that mindset aren't the ones in that position later (at least not usually).
Best way to do it is to buy exactly what will fulfill you, and not a cent more. Maybe that 3 week trip to ___ will, maybe the expensive dinner won't. Etc.
Who's to say they think they're skimping?
Who's to say that they didn't buy exactly what fulfilled them, and it was only 20% of their take-home pay, so they just shoved the rest of it into investments?
Basically - money certainly matters, but only to a point. Once you're fairly comfortable satisfying your genuine needs (food, clothing, shelter, time) more money isn't really going to change how you feel.
It's a mental trap to assume that happiness can be bought, if only you had a bit more money. It leads to empty, hollow, soulless people.
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> Best way to do it is to buy exactly what will fulfill you
My advice? Buying things will never fulfill you. Real fulfillment isn't about having the next shiny ____.
I'm not saying you shouldn't buy that thing, but you should be doing it with intention - How does this fit into my life? What uses do I have for it? Who will I share it with?
I would say the main two goals would be to: have enough money to work when/on what you want (this could be like 500k), and the long term goal is have enough money to make a bigger impact on a community or even the world (prob like 10 mil - 1 bil).
I mean, the trust can (usually) invest money without it being considered a distribution. I suspect that happens a lot based on the trustifarians I see in capital-intensive businesses and crushing it (due to below-market cost of capital).
I feel bad for their competitors having to prove themselves to a bank or other arms-length financier.
The Guilded Age on HBO right now is a great show about this.
Remember your audience here. You're surrounded by them.
In 1904, $1M inflation adjusted is $31M now. In 1956, it's $9.9M. Seems to have peeked at 2007/8. The uptick to "billionaire" started around 1982 which is about $2.79M. Words are very discrete bins and usage lag.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Millionaire%2C...
While there is a very valid point that many who frequent this site may be considered millionaires and by some, considered wealthy relative to the median in current times, that isn't to say the median hasn't been falling in terms of the sheer scale of wealth these days.
The quality of life difference isn’t measurable in money.
Still happens.
See this $600 hat which is sold out, used as a wealth signaling mechanism. And also as an aspirational luxury good now that the masses are aware.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/succession-morning-show-luxury-...
As for "millionaire next door", they're still around. The US has 20 million of them. But most of the "next door" wealth is achieved through doing a "normal" job. (I.e. jobs that most other people can relate to, and could possibly achieve working in)
Ostentatious wealth is requiring arbitrage of some form, at scale. Celebrities arbitrage fame. And it's a smart business, because part of their payment is more fame. Hence the "crass popularity" contests. People pay them for that popularity and make them more popular.
People always seem intrigued by the lives of the rich and famous, and tabloids have been milking that for generations. Before the internet, that was the best way to keep up to date on celebrity gossip, and it was a lucrative market (see also: MTV Cribs).
It just seems like the rich are so much worse these days because it's so easy for them to get attention. Some have even turned it into an art form, knowing how effective ragebait is at getting clicks. (Remember Logan Paul's Japanese forest video?) Combine that with the reduction in our media landscape and increase in outlets which just report on drama, many of which get reposted with only minor rewording on more general outlets, and it's much more difficult to escape this stuff today.
All this said, I would agree that the rich generally are worse today, but that's a byproduct of capital coalescing in new forms to lobby for awful laws spurring greater inequality, and it would have happened without the internet. They were also bad in the past, but unless you went out of your way, it was difficult to get a grasp on how wealth multiplies and the horrendous practices of many large corporations. The popularity contest becoming inescapable, on the other hand, is a direct result of our hyper-connected world.
Just be.
Well, those are also crude nouveaux riches. Heck, they even had to somehow work for their money (even those of them that got some hefty support from their parents).
As opposed to several generations of old money.
I'm not even sure that many are really rich. I recently read that the average net worth of a Ferrari owner is less than one million pounds and that most Ferraris are financed.
Real wealth is what you don't spend.
It’s better to look at assets excluding debt. This also shows the problem with student loan relief, which is it mostly benefits dentists.
I wonder the same thing, especially with respect to the lower rung of wealth. I'm shocked at how much of the top 1% views themselves as victims of higher rungs of the top 1% instead of having attitudes commensurate with their wealth, privilege, and social status.
The "millionaire next door" also has low time preference, which is how they made their money. They don't spend extravagantly but reinvest that money into their business, stocks, real estate, etc. That's also why they're stealth rich.
Ref: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-...
"You tell me where a man gits his corn pone, and I'll tell you what his 'pinions is" -- Mark Twain
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-defi...
tl;dr think NY Times writer vs nerd programmer
Yes: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/11/19/have-journalists-and-acad.... Journalists, and academics in the humanities, have become more cleric-like.
Just curious, how old are you and what year do you believe this “used to be” ended?
I’m 40 and my guess is that this time is 25+ years gone by?
The former is a job where you are required to attend a physical place to cover a story, required to talk to people, required to gather facts. Of course, you might do all of these badly, you might even lie about having done them, but that's the structure of the job.
The latter is a job whose name comes from the practice of writing "journals", and has little, if anything to do with reporting. Journalists do not "cover stories", they write about things that are happening, informed by the work of reporters, but also other folk: researchers, essayists (an even less-connected-to-the-story form or journalism), lobbyists, politicians, and yes, their neighbors. They've been around for at least 350 years in European-linked cultures, and probably a lot longer than that if you take a broader view.
Why are you sure of this?
Perhaps the profession changed; my observations are dated.
I remember very distinctly watching an article - well, the ideas core to that article - he'd written percolate from New Republic to The Atlantic to The New York Times over a period of about a month. What was interesting was that in his original article, the concepts he presented were presented as radical, and as a thought experiment. By the time it made its way down to the NYT a month later, those same concepts were presented as obvious solutions that "both sides" should agree on as a matter of course, and any disagreement was just intellectual folly.
The conversation about these ideas had already happened on Twitter; NYT was just reporting the score.
edit: The New Republic was passed from a famous racist to a founder of facebook to a Democratic party bagman and banking heir. Characterizing it as an extreme left outlet is bizarre, because at times it wouldn't even count as center-left.
From the first paragraph of wikipedia: "Through the 1980s and 1990s, the magazine incorporated elements of the Third Way and conservatism."
Furthermore looking at who owned an institution 30-40 years ago doesn't really add any value to the conversation about what they are today.
The New Republic isn't a GOP outlet, sure. It might even occasionally slightly hurt centrist sensibilities, which would put it left of the NYT. But if you think that's "hard left", you haven't seen hard left, or even moderate left.
Try something like wsws.org, or The Jacobin. The New Republic isn't remotely that.
What are the actual ends of the spectrum on which you identify the NR's position as "hard left" ?
They’re about as milquetoast neoliberal as you can get, but they typically skew towards diversity and democracy which is probably enough to make you a steenkin pinko to some people.
This was after Fox and WSJ passed on the story initially. Once it got traction from NY Post, they ran with it. Sean Hannity even claimed to have the laptop in his possession. Then he said it was stolen. Then he got it back, but couldn't share any of the juicy details cause his "lawyers wouldn't let him" [1]. They wouldn't even let other news organizations look at the incriminating emails [2].
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/sean-hannity-says-lawyers-wont-020500...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/here-s-what-h...
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying... not doing these things is just groupthink in the opposite direction?
Edit: Maybe there's a better word for it: bubble building.
Edit 2: I do believe Twitter fosters the 'us vs them' mentality you mention; I tried to point out only the tip of the iceberg is visible publicly.
How would you recommend initiating a conversation to discuss when 'the actual paying "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted' but one actually can't 'see the same thing on Twitter' except due to intermittent OPSEC/OSINT failures?
"Authoritative Sources" are not the solution either, which is what most social media companies seem to be banking on as the solution to "fake news" but their chosen authority are just as prone to reporting non-sense as some random guy with a blog
Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage, there would be a bar where the journalists hung out. Listening to the conversations there would tell you what the story was going to be, as well as how it differed from the facts. The audience that mattered was the rest of the media clique; the actual paying "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted.