Everyone who struggled financially at some point in their time intuitively knows how much harder it is to make (and keep) money if you're poor. Saving your first 10 bucks is _way_ harder than saving your first 100 bucks so to speak.

And this is even more true if you're losing money / are behind. Paying off a dollar of debt is monumentally harder than saving a dollar. And it is much more taxing and stressful to boot. If you don't pay off that dollar, someone (perhaps the police even) will come knocking.

This is one of the reasons why I believe a society should collectively provide the basics (like a family does) for everyone as long as that's possible. Even completely ignoring the ethical concerns.

We would progress much faster if nobody had to worry about fundamental issues like shelter, food, basic transportation, education and so on. Imagine all the Einsteins and Picassos we are missing out on, because they struggle to pay their rent and can't afford education. Even ignoring the geniuses, think of all the little compounding things that would happen. All the craftspeople who don't have time to tinker. All the nurses who don't have time (and energy) for bedside manners etc.

A lot of things we produce (and put a lot of energy into) would be less necessary, because they didn't have to fight the symptoms of a broken system.

unfortunately, the people who are able to make this a reality tomorrow also hold to a strange viewpoint:

they truly believe that, in the absence of some pressure, a person who has their basic needs provided will ultimately venture to do nothing

completely failing to see the greatest irony of their belief, that even doing nothing would arguably be a better life than the debt-ridden existence you mentioned...

"If we give everyone the vote then...", "If workers have protections then...", "If women had equal rights then..." etc.

It's interesting how stubbornly this false and negative image of humanity has persisted even though every time we made progress the opposite was found to be true.

Yes, we are lazy, greedy and dumb. But we are also disciplined, helpful and smart to a much higher degree. Not because someone holds a whip, but because we just want to. We should maybe stop optimizing society to cater to the few people (or circumstances) where this isn't the case.

The issue here is not if we should provide these things but actually to provide them to as many people as possible. Sadly, people think we can just agree to do it or something and it magically happens.

My take is move slowly. Anyone who doesn't food and housing, try to make that happen for them as best we can. That's different than just decreeing from on high that ALL PEOPLE SHALL HAVE HOUSING!!

They might venture to not work for the 5 richest men for starters. And we just can't have that happening now, can we?

We’re at a point where the majority of humanity is struggling with cost of living while others live in excess at their expense. This will cause species level decline if we don’t fix it.

Capitalism is abusive and exploitative; it abuses people and the environment to feed itself. It is a vampire. If humanity is going to survive we need to start acknowledging Capitalism for what it is: abuse!

i think if we hope to finally achieve our species' true might and leave biology behind, we have to question whether this too may be a fallacy

thermodynamics has the rest of the universe; maybe we can squeeze out of it?

The masses have to pay taxes but i've met plenty of wealthy people that reach this "escape velocity" when they can afford people to setup intricate schemes to absolutely minimise taxes, then their money become almost autonomous as other people are constantly working on increasing their small cut of it while you are doing very little.

So while most countries have some progressive tax system on the surface, this only penalises "new money", the middle classes and the naive or inexperienced founders - the really rich pay less than everyone else, so there is in effect a regressive tax system globally favouring old money or people well connected to the law and financial complexes.

A good example of these gates to the upper classes, at least in EU, is from a fundamental level like early tax brackets, because if any regular person "hits it big" in some way, a lot of the money will disappear into taxes and bureaucratic mazes, favouring the workers who average out their pay over many years staying in lower brackets or rich people who'd just put the money into a company or fund.

So the "system" really doesn't like people entering the upper echelons and will do everything to siphon your money before this escape velocity.

The financial elite gets the mercantile middle classes hit the hardest by their bell curve tax system to rally for their own tax exemptions and deregulation also making these ideologies easy to spread in bourgeois or even petite bourgeois society while they'll never really reap the benefits.

Also reading the history about the advent and transformation of neoclassical economics it seems it was exactly that, a well thought out scheme to dupe the middle and lower classes to accept a system never really intended to favour them.

Classical liberalism seems almost left wing in this context, and that is not weird when realising this was a project thought by a nexus of plutocrats like Rockefeller in combination with the dawning sciences of propaganda and control of the dangerous masses that could become enamoured with socialism.

A new ideology had to be spread and so the intelligentsia of the day met up very openly to discuss rebranding various older unnamable ideologies for the masses to steer them from collective power or true autonomy.

It sounds very conspiratorial like this if it wasn't right there in history in the culture around Edward Bernais, american oligarchs or italian fascists talking about the need for "A new liberalism" in the 1920's and masses that could be "moulded" with ideology or phantasms created top down.

I too fail to understand why it's so polarizing for the 99.5% not benefitting from it.

Most western European countries have implemented roughly all Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, although some of these have been rolled back in the neoliberal era.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45311779

And as we know, fascism is capitalism in decay.

Socialism is one of those heavily mis-defined/used words. I tend to stick to the economic definition. As in "A socialist economic system is characterized by social ownership and operation of the means of production that may take the form of autonomous cooperatives or direct public ownership wherein production is carried out directly for use rather than for profit." (quote from Wikipedia socialist economics). one of the downsides of discussions about socialism is inevitably someone starts using long convoluted sentences like the above.

Socialism as political definitions have been merged and smashed together with communism and fascism in Nazism and conservatism etc. etc.

There's a fundamental lesson here that Marxists still don't seem to understand: an economy can have lots of inequality and very little poverty and, while not perfect, this is a good place to be.

> I too fail to understand why it's so polarizing for the 99.5% not benefitting from it.

Normal people see a rich guy and think "good for him, he worked hard, is smart and lucky" not "he isn't any better than me, it's unfair that he has more than me". For some reason Marxists think the second thought is admirable.

The marxist analysis had a major effect to how capitalism was reigned in to make the working conditions and living standards better. In the 20th century almost all European countries had major socialist and communist parties, often in power, and enacted major socialist policies. E.g. almost all concrete policy demands of Marx and Engels[1] have been implemented in most (western) countries and most of them are nowadays taken for granted.

Marxism has very little to do with envy you described. The luxuries aren't really a problem. The problem is the economic (and political) power of concentrations of capital whose interest it is to make working conditions worse. You're attacking a strawman, and most likely against your own interests.

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm

Marx was clear that capitalism produces booms and busts, which implies non-monotonic development. He did predict that, when left on its own devices, capitalism will in the long term collapse on itself due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Collapses where huge governmental intervention in economy is needed happen quite consistently. E.g. in the USA the market mechanism collapsed in 1893, 1929 and 2008. And it is arguably still on central banks' life support.

What Marx and revolutionary marxism was maybe a bit too sceptical of was sustainability of social democratic states, known also as mixed economies. Altough it does seem that most mixed economies (e.g. the nordic countries) are regressing towards more capitalist domination.

Capitalism and socialism aren't some specific systems and no country is 100% either. Even USSR didn't say in its dogma that it has achieved full socialism, let alone communism.

A) In the class struggle the workers conquer more rights using strikes, organizing themselves, etc. There are several pages in Marx's writing detailing this happening.

B) Like any other commodity, the labor force could became more expensive, entirely following capitalist rules. This would be the case if the price of food increases: you cannot pay for your workers less than the needed for their subsistence in a sustainable model, which means that increases in the living price requires more wages. But this also could happen in other scenarios, like if the society becomes more complex. If now the workers need more things to properly function just because the society is more complex and they require more things in order to produce more complex labor. Then they would get more wages to buy their computers, TVs, pay for education, etc. As a bonus, now these things can also be sold, helping capital to reproduce itself. Marx says that what the workers need in order to produce their own livelihood, the standard of living of their day, is socially and historically determined. This is not a fixed thing.

What Marx says is not that wages cannot improve in capitalism, but that the surplus value would always increase (except for changes caused by scenario A). Which was a perfectly correct prediction: if you check how worker productivity increased over time and how wages increased, you would notice that there is a gap that is always increasing. Moreover, the workers also could not own the relevant means of production: they always would need to sell their labor force.

But you are not really correct.

> The latter part hasn't happened

It's true that Bezos doesn't own the whole USA but 3 men has more wealth than 150 million people. https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...

And the working conditions in Amazon warehouses are horrible. Workers in 50s or 70s had definitely better conditions and purchasing power. Despite all efficiency improvements, purchasing power of US workers is stagnating since 70s https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

The conditions improved because of Marx's teaching, without worker actions nothing would improve, it didn't happen out of capital owners' voluntary decision. It happened because of strikes and many were violently supressed. Just a few in USA: https://www.history.com/news/strikes-labor-movement

> Normal people see a rich guy and think "good for him, he worked hard, is smart and lucky"

Normal people are often hardworking (much more than capital owners) and sometimes smart as well. However to get rich, you must be lucky (usually you get born into wealth). Sometimes you need to be lucky just to get out of poverty.

I think majority doesn't care that their doctor is kinda rich and can go heli-skiing. They are angry that someone is so rich they can't even spend the money while his workers are struggling. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-...

It's not normal or beneficial for society that 3 men has more wealth than 150 million of people.

Conditions were in some ways better in the 50s. They are in some ways better today than in the 50s. And they're way better today than in Marx's lifetime. But my point is that there's no reason the pendulum can't swing back without the overthrow of capitalism, and that is contrary to Marx's teachings. Therefore it's true and ironic that Marxists played a role in improving working conditions.

In terms of class resentment, I think you're wrong. It's mostly upper-middle class people who hate the "ultra rich". And there's nothing unnatural about extreme inequality, though it's not desirable in every way.

> The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

> Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and ... the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, ... a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

But still there's no better governments than democracy right now.

It's a political topic, so, vehemently contested.

The above comment is referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

When I was undergrad 20 years ago, we had to calculate the “escape” velocity which was ~7.5 million at the time, where one dollar is more likely to become more than one for an average person’s expenditures. It was probably the point where a T-bill investment return passes median net income, something like that. It definitely wasn’t exactly rocket science like the rest of the metaphor.

Especially consumer electronics and cars are surprisingly bad “assets” if you do the math. New phones lose about 20% of value per year. So if you combine that with credit card interest, the return on investment is spectacularly bad.

Maybe I look at history with rose tinted glasses but my experience tells me people are spending more and more money. We are a consumer society on steroids. I see so many individuals driving around in $60k cars, living in massive homes, buying tons of junk on Amazon. I wonder if that has more to do with it.

As for preventing escape capital. The issue is, I am not sure how you do it. It is easy to had wave and say a tax but I believe its very hard to create new rules without unintended consequences. I am not opposed to the idea but I am not sure what other consequences will be felt.

Where more wisdom could come in is for much of the lower and the increasingly nonexistant upper middle class. But this is a fraction of the population.

If you want to tell a family with two adults working in lower wage jobs and two kids, and renting an apartment, to "save" there is usually not much margin, and their saving amounts to building up a small emergeny reserve which is eaten up by any family emergency or damage to car or housing. Little chance to save for old age ..

The mind isn't great at groking just how much money we're talking about here. The people making the money are a combination of things: Not doing it for the money, doing it to rack up a high score, doing other things while the money does it's thing.

But the big takeaway is that money is effectively removed from the economy. When you can afford 200 100M yachts...you're not GOING TO BUY 200 100M yachts, so the yacht builders aren't going to use that money to further stimulate the economy.

"Hey man, I made a company that pays me $200B"

No, you didn't, you got in front of a money hose that shunted a crazy amount of money into your coffers due to gaming a market. You got lucky, and you can't DO anything with 99% of those funds, you just can't use it fast enough.

Money is a claim for resources that mostly don't yet even exist. To make use of money somebody has to do the labor and extract the resources to produce something useful.

But, in reality, that amount of money, while non-trivial (~$3500/year) over a lifetime (not counting inflation) saved is still a fraction of a running error on a billionaire’s wealth. Over 40 years at current 5% is <$500,000.

Personally, I’d have the avocado toast.

Endlessly avocado for personal austerity while the super wealthy consume in ever increasing amounts is nonsense.

1)We need education or something similar to help the poor from getting poorer.

2)I am not opposed to the idea of transferring wealth but I believe it is easier said than done. I don’t believe it’s something that would happen anytime soon in America and I get the feeling it’s the same in the UK. Because of that, I like to explore other solutions.

The UK has been such a finance powerhouse for a long time because it ignores all the issues and foibles of the super wealthy customers it serves.

As soon as they start punishing them with taxes and rules they’ll just move. It would only work with a global alliance which would never happen. You’d end up with even more wealth moving to small specialized off shore jurisdictions.

I largely agree with what you mean, just not the way it was expressed.

I actually think something closer to name and shame, or setting better examples would work better. Trying to get Musk to emulate Carnegie setting up the libraries, Guggenheim and his art. Encourage and reward the behavior that sees the wealthy spending money to create great and lasting public institutions, rather than great and lasting private wealth.

All coupled with an insane inheritance tax without loopholes.

They are... On rent. And food (even the exact same food). And everything else. Wages haven't kept up with housing for some 30 years and we're seeing the consequences now. The housing crash didn't help either.

Likewise, stuff got more expensive over the pandemic. Gas is triple the price now, streaming services is starting to approach cable prices once again, Dollar menu fast food isn't a thing anymore. The best coupons I could find is $4 for 2 burgers. And a typical combo can easily cost $15 by itself. $20k new cars aren't a thing anymore, and the used car market also inflated. The $3500 used Nissan with 140k miles bought in 2018 is seeing 9-10k on Craigslist.

I'm seeing the opposite effect you are. People aren't going out anymore: they can't even afford a monthly bar crawl where what used to be weekly or multiple times a week outing. Much less traveling happening. People who used to live alone are rooming up again because rent keeps increasing. Spending power and QoL is going down.

Perhaps if you captured all of someone's wealth when they died, dole out maybe a $1M to each child/spouse.

Throw in some social accolades / parades / public acclaim for people who pay the most taxes.

If it were based on interest, this is unlikely to be a problem unless interests rated exceeded tax rates.

The real issue is that most of the net worth is equity. These unrealized gains are not taxed. In some cases, a lot of the value is driven by speculation and not actually tied to the current profits of the company. This is why wealth taxes are brought up, or at least changes to capital gains taxes.

"As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing."

This assumes that the ultrawealthy do not serve a purpose. Yeah, taxes should be increased on the top end, but probably not to the point of completwly eliminating the ultrawealthy. These people tend to use thier capital to fund other ventures. This can be important to startups and other organizations. Oftentimes they donate large amounts of money to charities or start charities in areas the government has neglected. There are alternatives to these, but I'm not convinced they are actually better. I think we just need to tweak capital gains tax on the ultrawealthy.

Of course, equity is still useful. One can borrow money using the assets as collateral, and rather than paying taxes on the (borrowed) money, one instead pays a comparatively small interest to the bank. Moreover, those unrealized gains never need be taxed so long as they are never converted to cash. The capital gains on the assets are then reset when the owner dies (the so-called "buy, borrow, die" strategy [1]).

I would venture that this is a massive loophole in the tax system that ought to be patched-out.

---

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

I don't disagree the ultrawealthy serve a purpose, just wondering, as most of us do — how much ultrawealth is enough?

In theory at least, the idea of taxes is to use our societies collective excess money to pay for things that we as a society would benefit from. Perhaps it's infrastructure, perhaps it's a modern high speed rail system, perhaps space exploration.

Instead though we have chosen to allow the billionaires to be the arbiter of where their excess capital goes.

This is one of the alternatives I was thinking about. Unfortunately, the way our current politics are, there's no guarantee that our system would actually allocate that money to what we actually need any better than the billionaires are. Given that the needy are a small minority, it's possible they fair even worse in a democratically controlled funding system, especially if the larger segment want more for themselves and have more influence.

I think the parent is suggesting a money threshold beyond which you can't really feasibly spend it fast enough (without being deliberately wasteful), so 'the rich get richer'.

"Fuck everyone money" is when you can just buy Twitter.

Not a single US billionaire will ever have to lead a regiment in war.

It should be impossible to survive from saved money? Wouldn't that mean that everybody has to work until they die?

>I totally fail to understand why this is a polarizing issue as 99.5% of people are on the same side of the threshold...

For me it's mostly the "work until you die" part. ;-)

And if the 20-30 years isn't enough, do we re-employ 80-year olds that have been retired for 20-30 years?

I'm nowhere near the mentioned 0.5% and still don't think this is a good idea.

In fact I think society should do the opposite, "escape velocity" should be made attainable by more people, not fewer.

If people can retire by 50 (instead of 70 or whatever it will be after another decade of this economy) more young people will get employed at better salaries, and 50 year olds can still come up with cool things do do with their lives.

Come on, it depends on the duration, and it is long stretch from parent poster's thought to your "cannot live of saved money" for some time (though would claim, the states that have/had this guaranteed by the state had it more right anyway, basic survivability for retire time should not depend on savings in modern society, only luxury).

I mean the opposite, what you seem to want, that you can live indefinitely off a certain amount of saved money, we all know cannot be similarly true for everybody?

As I see it, we’d be stealing from the rich and giving to rich lobbying interests in some fashion.

I feel, for the US, the Covid stimulus was pretty telling in how money gets allocated to us and to them.

Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem but rarely hear a good reason. Just because one person is richer, does not mean another is poorer. Wealth is not a limited pie where everyone only gets one piece of it. Wealth is created. If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth.

This is where you're mistaken, because wealth is not simply a collection of material goods. Wealth is power, and power is a zero sum game. You don't have power over someone else unless they have less power than you.

The ultra-wealthy already have all of their material needs and desires met. They run out of things to buy with their money. You don't actually need a billion to buy all of the houses, cars, boats, and other stuff that you want. Beyond a certain point, the only thing left to buy is people. And that's what the ultra-wealthy do. They exercise power over other people. That's precisely why they're never satisfied with their level of wealth, and continue to accumulate it despite not needing to buy any more material things. The more wealth you have, and the less other people have, the more power you have over others.

Wealth buys politicians. It buys laws. It can buy entire countries.

If you really want to fix the voting in a somewhat realistic way, you will completely do away with campaign spending, allocate a government website with a page for each candidate to display their positions, have the site searchable by your address, and have an alternative that you can request by mail if you don't have access to a computer. You also need to ban the news from reporting on the campaign to get around this, including the observation biases that come from all those early polls. Suddendly campaign funding becomes a non-issue, and we're likely to see less manipulation.

Even if you eliminated the wealthy altogether, you could still have outsized impacts by many groups due to the most extreme people being willing to donate more. This is essentially what we see primary elections due to the low voter turnout - the most motivated/extreme people have a larger say.

Arguably, there is always SOMEONE doing this, even without ultra-wealth. Perhaps the argument could be made that the ultra-wealthy are the least malign manifestation of power-hungry sociopathic megalomania?

It's not like Stalin in the 30s or Mao in the 50s were using wealth to buy people, for example. But they sure as Hell led to really negative outcomes for the people they influenced. Far more negative than any damage that Musk/Bezos/Buffet/et al are doing now, IMO.

Just because you don't have a paper stating you own something doesn't mean you don't control it.

What I was arguing against was this: "If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth." It's not clear that they do bring up the standard of living for everyone else. For example, poor people can't afford to buy a Tesla, so what has Musk done to raise the standard of living for the poor? Let's be honest: Tesla caters to the wealthy. Moreover, as I argued, it's not just about material goods. It's about power. It's also about personal freedom for the masses; how much personal freedom would you trade just to have more material goods?

Whatever people or person has the authority to prevent individuals from acquiring great power over the masses.....has great power over the masses.

The power-hungry don't like being told they can't do something. Another possible outcome is the uber-rich start converting their wealth into men-at-arms to secure their power. Every time my wealth ticks over from $998M to $999M I burn $1M secretly acquiring the loyalty of violent men. Eventually my wealth goes from $999M to $1B and the Equality Enforcers pay me a visit....only to find out the hard way that they didn't bring enough bannermen. I don't think its particularly far-fetched to conclude that eventually men with near-limitless resources and near-limitless egos will resort to armed conflict before they allow some paper-pushing bureaucrats to put them back in a box. Maybe that's not the character of Buffet or even Musk, but on a long enough timeline I consider it a certainty. It's better for everyone that they collect yachts and "atmosphere models"( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSvvvrKhx0w ) instead.

> For example, poor people can't afford to buy a Tesla, so what has Musk done to raise the standard of living for the poor?

I think in a system as complex as the world economy it's difficult to pinpoint this with any certainty. MAYBE one could argue that Tesla forced a paradigm shift onto other automakers and that the entire industry dragging its feet to produce EVs is a net quality of life improvement for the civilization in the aggregate due to reduced emissions?

Why are we judging the wealthy by their utility to the poor anyway? Belle Delphine isn't a billionaire, but at one point she was making >$1 million per month shaking her butt on a webcam and selling used bathwater to lonely males. Are we going to judge EVERYONE by how they've raised the standard of living for the poor? Where is the cutoff point? $1B net worth? $1M annual income? The market principles which have elevated Elon Musk to the top of his industry have similarly elevated Belle Delphine to the top of hers, with massively disproportionate earnings compared to the bottom-tier OnlyFans content creators. Do we have enough moral outrage for them both? Why or why not? Who has the authority to judge?

> how much personal freedom would you trade just to have more material goods?

I'm a military reservist who is considering returning to full Active Duty for several years so trading away my personal freedom is.....quite normal to me. That said....I have pretty modest material desires, and am mostly trading my personal freedom for.....wealth accumulation! If you're going to own something, own something that other people need, and that generates revenue.

I'm talking about the masses. The masses of people should prevent individuals from acquiring great power over them.

> Why are we judging the wealthy by their utility to the poor anyway?

That didn't come from me but from the person I was originally replying to: "If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth."

I guess it was supposed to be some kind of justification for massive inequality. That's not my criterion though.

The reasons why this system might be attractive may become more obvious if we consider some alternatives. For example, in Russia currently the power to control big businesses is given to politically well connected "oligarchs", and anyone whose business success exceeds their political influence tends to find that business is taken off them and given to someone much less capable but better connected. This does not lead to a functining economy. (There's a popular idea on the left that capitalism has oligarchs too which we just don't call that, which misses this important difference.) We could also imagine a system where this power is distributed democratically, and everyone in the country gets a say in how all the businesses are run. The problem with this is that in order to make decisions that are as well informed as even just some dude who happened to be in the right place at the right time, every member of the public would have to dedicate as much time to informing themselves as all of those random dudes collectively do already. That is, it's structurally impossible to just distribute this power out to everyone.

Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

It's crucial to note a couple of things:

(1) The world's wealthiest people accumulated their wealth from publicly owned corporations, not from privately owned businesses. In fact, there are famous cases where a publicly owned corporation ousted its own founder, e.g., Apple and Uber.

(2) The world's wealthiest people get even wealthier after they stop running businesses. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, et al., are wealthier now when "retired" than when they were CEOs! Gates even claimed he's giving most of his money away, but somehow that's having the opposite effect. Gates can't give money away faster than he makes it, despite "retirement".

The point is not necessarily to "socialize" businesses. The point is to limit the size of businesses and of individual accumulations of wealth, for the good of society as a whole, to prevent them from accumulating too much power over society. One of the ways to do that is via progressive taxation that heavily taxes higher amounts of income and wealth. It's not confiscating the business or individual wealth as a whole; it's just trimming off the edges, so to speak.

I personally feel that publicly owned corporations are a problem and should be discouraged. They're effectively the tragedy of the commons. I prefer privately owned businesses. And it's more difficult for privately owned businesses to become huge, because there's never an influx of public capital.

> control over businesses and the ability to dictate how they allocate resources is given to individuals who are in some sense "successful" at running those businesses

You've got cause and effect reversed. The control comes first, the success comes later.

> Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

My point was that the ultra-wealthy are motivated by power rather than material goods, because all of their material desires are already satisfied.

Of course non-wealthy people are motivated by material needs, because theirs haven't been satisfied. Indeed, wealth inequality results in hunger, homelessless, lack of health care, situations that we would not tolerate if everyone were equal and in the same boat.

LOL nice straw man.

> The world now has a cure for cancer.

Except it doesn't.

> We can't now say that you should have the same wealth/power as me because power/wealth is bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.

There's only so much inhabitable space, only so many resources and only so many people on earth. You only have so much time to live and even thinking over generational legacy, we're fundamentally limited by time. Infinite growth doesn't exist in any meaningful and practical sense of the word.

And if we're coming back to the original argument: You can't be ultra wealthy without exploitation. Someone, somewhere has to generate all the value you feel entitled to have, because you inherited a bunch of wealth. And "someone" is a vast understatement.

There is some line where power and wealth not only become completely unwieldy, because the disconnect between responsibility and power is too great, but also parasitical.

I have no idea where that line is and how to solve this problem. But it _is_ a problem and I'm tired of hearing ideological platitudes that try to naturalize and defend it.

I say this all with a caveat: I have nothing personal against people who are wealthy or even ultra wealthy. Ultimately they are just part of a larger, hard to solve issue like everyone else.

Historically, most societies where this happened ended up with large violent episodes as a response, so we should want to prevent that.

While it's possible to enlarge the pie for everyone, to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy. In some cases the economy is zero-sum, especially with things that are inherently limited such as good real-estate.

Land is very much a limited resource. But most of the problems today are due to the distribution and consumer wants. In much of the US, you could easily buy some land and put a trailer or small manufactured house on it (or buy forclosed, vacant, etc). The problem is the jobs, especially the good ones, are concentrated in a dozen or so major metro areas with higher population density. The. You have the preference of most people who want good public schools, yards, big fancy single family houses, etc. Most people don't want a small house, and due to the job distribution can't live in the less populated areas.

Also, resources are not infinite. Eg: There is a limit to the number of the best doctors and their time. Fresh air is locally finite, and jets do pollute more per person.

So despite the fact that in theory we are not playing a zero sum game, practically at the scale of one life, many things can be approximated as such.

how would that be proved - that is to say there is probably a reasonably causal line to say that their ideas and actions brought up the standard of living for themselves, but the causal line to determine ideas and actions bringing up standard of living for other people would probably be difficult to calculate.

Why obscene wealth is a problem? Even my 10yo knows that. Extreme asymmetry and inequality. From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences.

How this has to be explained to someone on this forum is beyond me, but here we are.

All the things you mention are problems that need solving, but they are wrong in themselves separated from the wealth. A wealthy person might not be doing any of those things.

Wealth in a free capitalist society is generally the result of increased economic activity which often benefits many more than the billionaires that appear as side effects. This is a good thing which should be kept, but we need to ensure that society isn't corrupted in the process.

We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.

I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...

You mention disparity as if it is a problem but ignore that most of the population is much better off. Your source clearly shows that in 1800 the world population was mostly poor, while in 2015 it was mostly _not_ poor. This despite the population being 7x larger.

Which is exactly my point - the system that generates billionaires has done so as a side effect of generating enough wealth to lift a several times larger world population above the poverty line.

Is disparity itself so offensive that we should let everyone be poor just to avoid billionaires? I can't get behind that, but I do want better laws to prevent corruption.

What does that mean to you?

I'm not talking about pneumonia though, and surely the bigger picture is that the average person in the world is better off today than they were before?

I think the mechanism that caused that has billionaires as a side effect, which is hard to eliminate without also eliminating the thing that makes everyone better off.

>An average young person is now much less likely to afford housing than the generation before them and even less likely then their grandparents. What does that mean to you?

To me it means that the housing markets in many countries are poorly regulated and speculation fueled by low interest rates have inflated prices.

Unequal societies are low-trust societies. Low-trust societies are less capable of providing public services efficiently. They are less capable of making and achieving long-term goals. They are more prone to corruption and criminality. If you don't trust the agents of the state to keep you safe, you are more prone to taking matters into your own hands, less prone to cooperating with the agents of the state to address crime. And so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...

There is no "hanging the rich" because their is no need to. The rich are getting richer, and the gap is increasing. However, the poor and middle are continuously increasing as well (Important: Assuming we stay on track after the COVID dip), there is no need to eat the rich so it doesn't happen.

Because 99.5% of the people are not on the same side. There is a class of bureaucrats and military that benefits from this status quo. It's currently happy, as it can easily stage a coup. (most billionaires are old people). The money is going to the right people; the reality is that 60-70% of the world population is disposable. In the US, 40% are already inactive. 20-30% are probably holding jobs that we can live without. Most of the other 30-40% could be out sourced though the "elites" are now re-thinking that because they can't trust off-shore stuff like before.

But that's the US, a developed country. The rest of the world is poor and useless and no one is quite interested in doing anything about it. (Except for China, though they are a bit obsessed about control to the detriment of their goals).

Automation has made a vast majority of our jobs irrelevant, and ChatGPT looks to make a much larger component similarly irrelevant, but you can't sell your crops if people can't buy your crops.

Our current model is capitalists get rich selling piles of cheap stuff to the labor class.

I think the future might be petite bourgeoisie selling high-end, long-lasting products to each other. Picture the guy who has his own AI company selling AI to the guy who has a robot company, who sells robots to the guy who owns a coachbuilder such as [1] or [2], who sells cars to the AI guy and the robot guy. Then the car guy buys a watch from a watchsmith in Switzerland. Watch guy doesn't have any robots but maybe he uses AI to help him design new watches, which he builds by hand himself. Then all four of these guys eat by buying meat from a guy who uses robotic cattlehands to coral his herd of free-range grass-fed bison or something. Each of these five people work at the companies they own. They have no laborers underneath them that aren't AI or robots. They are just exchanging a small amount of high-value goods and services between each other.

The HUMAN labor class is gonna die or be subsidized just enough to keep from revolting.

[1] https://singervehicledesign.com/

[2]https://www.fj.co/

You've also got to remember that by focusing on the richest people in the world right now the article is effectively cherry-picking the people who've done the best in terms of wealth whilst ignoring those whose wealth has failed to grow so well.

Well yes, but that's the point of the article. The systems we have in place allow for, and ensure, insane wealth concentration in a few people. It doesn't matter who they are or if they change.

Most people are doomed to live from paycheck to paycheck. There is no room for improvement or optimization.

Once you have your yearly needs on a bank account and more to come plus enough time you can invest in random ideas when they come, buy things in bulk and safe a lot of money or go for the expensive thing to safe money in long term.

Basically there is a 'point poor' where you are doomed to stay poor, where you have to little to change anything about it.

Besides, preventing this outcome is silly unless there is solid evidence that the alternative is more economically efficient. Jeff Bezos being rich doesn't diminish the quality of my life in any way. Same for all the other wealthy folk.

By "capital" do you mean "intelligent robots"? Because otherwise, who is going to do the work when everyone is idle?

The answer in 2023 could be yes or no.

I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sounds totally false.

At this point, arguably, very few people need to work. They persist regardless, and we are better off for it, but maybe growth in robotics and AI will some day force people to stop. And that would be a good outcome. Even now, if people don't need to work that is arguably for the best. The only concern I have is government policy encouraging productive people not to exert themselves. Either way, identifying people who are highly productive but not working and making them waste their time is stupid. We should want less people to need to work.

No it doesn't. There are 2 million farms in the United States, and they don't just take care of themselves.

Moreover, besides the farmers themselves, there are many people working in farming-related jobs, e.g., manufacturing farm equipment. Not to mention, how do you think the food gets from the farms to your table? The trucks don't just drive themselves yet.

> At this point, arguably, very few people need to work.

That's ridiculous. Ruthless capitalists would have gotten rid of employees already if they could.

I'm not abreast of the stats for the US, but it would appear those 2 million farms employ order of magnitude 2 million farmers [0]. Which averages 1 farmer per farm, and while that seems a bit low it isn't inconceivable to me when considering the productivity of farmers in this day and age.

The population of the US is 333 million people. Factor in geography, there may well be people who have literally never talked to a farmer in person. There are not a lot of farmers out there, the industry has been eaten by capital.

That leaves around 99% of the population that may literally does not need to work to sustain a lifestyle that would be considered typical through most of human history. No intelligent robots required.

> The trucks don't just drive themselves yet.

They do drive themselves. Eg, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-19/autonomous-trucks-hit...

> Ruthless capitalists would have gotten rid of employees already if they could.

They have. Industries have been all but wiped out for employees by capitalists. The only thing keeping people employed is they refuse to be satisfied with what they have and keep finding new jobs. Although if they were a bit more savvy they'd invest in capital and stop wasting time working. Capital wins when it comes down to it.

This insistence that people should put the foundation of their lifestyle on work instead of capital accumulation is a habit that is sorta silly. The expectation should be that the average person owns capital and policies should be aimed at enabling that. Forcing successful capitalists to work is the opposite of clever.

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor#size

This "conversation" is becoming ridiculous. Do you think we need no physicians? No nurses? No dentists? No hair stylists? No home builders? No plumbers? No chefs? I could go on and on and on, but I actually don't want to go on and on and on with you.

No TEACHERS. No librarians. No electricians. No sanitation workers. No engineers. No mail carriers. No maintenance or repair people. No sales people. No cashiers. No snow plowers. No architects. No SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS. No journalists. No writers. No actors. No musicians. No police. No lawyers. No airline pilots.

How in the world do you think the world works without people?

Perhpas you're putting a lot into "sustain a lifestyle that would be considered typical through most of human history", but why would we want to roll back the clock and live like it's the Dark Ages?

Now that is a long list, but a several the jobs you're listing there might be on the verge of extinction as a practical matter. Software developers in particular; it is clear that LLMs are about to do something big to the profession. It isn't clear if the job title will survive. Engineers more broadly I'd put in the same bucket, the category is at risk as an employer. ChatGPT is already outcompeting a lot of teachers I know in terms of being able to explain & tutor concepts. Airline pilots we should probably make illegal fairly soon; I wouldn't want to trust my life to human judgement when we could automate that away. We're on the edge of self driving cars and presumably self driving planes is either the same or easier difficulty because navigating the sky is easier than a street. I haven't talked to a cashier or salesperson in a long time because my local shopping centre has self-service or I buy things online. Etc, etc.

And I don't know why you think all those jobs are so important to preserve. If we can get rid of them we should, and as far as technology goes we're in spitting distance. The software is a matter of years, so really it is a question of where the economic limits are for robotics. I don't think we will; I imagine work will be found. But in terms of should we replace these people with capital, we should. And in many cases we will. And the goal should be to remove people from the workforce altogether through capital ownership because that is a much more comfortable lifestyle.

> but I actually don't want to go on and on and on with you.

As a style point, I'd recommend putting that at the end of the list, rather than the middle. I got a bit of a chuckle out of that, so if you did it for effect I thought it was a nice touch.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

It isn't a useful goal anyway. If you have all that you need, someone else having more than that isn't a problem.

Because I had a good father and a good mother who taught me that stealing from someone else is not okay, even if they have more things than me.

Pareto Principle, offering some of the best market options on a planet with 8 billion people? Let's say I make a product that is 10% better than yours (maybe I burned more midnights engineering it, maybe I just had a radical trip on some DMT that gave me special insight, whatever). Let's say my product costs me $.90 to make, yours only costs $0.75 to make. We both sell at $1.00.....but 90% of the 8 billion people buy my obviously better product, and only 10% buy yours (maybe they hate something about me personally, or maybe my marketing simply didn't reach or convert them). I make $0.10 * (0.9 * 8B) = $720M. You make $0.25 * (0.1 * 8B) = $200M. I'm already over 3x richer than you, and ALMOST as close to billionaire as you are close to being impoverished ($0 net worth in this scenario). What part of my competition wasn't fair? What workers were mistreated?

THAT SAID.....I don't disagree that many wealthy families are scummy thieves with a sheen of respectability (like the Sacklers, for example).....just, I prefer that we not instantly reach for that excuse and dismiss the entire concept of extreme wealth accumulation as "well OBVIOUSLY they've got to have done something evil, there is no other explanation, so let's collectively punish their entire class" which is how most of these conversations conclude.

Why stop at “escape”?

Because for most people (especially in the US), this is emotional. As soon as you start talking about “taxing the rich” many people have a prepared inventory of feelings that get activated, and these feelings are telling them that even if I’m not rich, I could be some day, and this isn’t right.

If you want an example of the almost religious cult of personality around people with immense wealth, look no further than the people simping for Elon. The idea goes that surely these people are special, there’s a reason they have so much money, and by taking their money we'll accomplish nothing except crucifying these inventors that humankind relies upon.

Entire books (or perhaps libraries) have been written on the subject of the routines and life patterns of extremely rich people. They’re not like us.

With that said, I do think that there is a reason they have so much money and that they are inventors that are pushing the boundaries. I don't understand why people refuse to accept that some people are smarter, work harder, think at a grander scale.

That is indeed happening in practice, through the influence that money gives them, though not sure how this argument fits into the discussion.

When's the last time you've done manual labor full time?

I'm so tired of this "hard work" meme. The hardest job I've ever had was to stack shampoo bottles in boxes for shipping. After 8 hours of that, I had to curl up in the fetal position. And the job paid crap.

I also don't believe that Elon Musk is smarter than the engineers who work for him and make nearly infinitely less money. In any case he's certainly not orders of magnitude smarter.

Throwing manual labor into the conversation is disingenuous since nobody would ever make the argument that some tech billionaire has a harder working life than someone shovelling gravel 16h per day. It's obvious that's not what anyone means, so why even point this out?

Elon Musk may not be "smarter" than the engineers who work for him, but then why didn't they start a company like Tesla? The argument for Elon's success is built into the results themselves. There's no going around that, without serious mental gymnastics.

> It's obvious that's not what anyone means

I disagree. Citation needed.

Regardless of what other people mean by "hard work", what exactly do you mean by it, and how exactly do the wealthy work harder than everyone else?

> why didn't they start a company like Tesla

Musk technically didn't "start" Tesla, but anyway there are several reasons. For example:

1) They didn't have the capital. Musk himself didn't have the capital to invest in Tesla or SpaceX until several previous businesses were acquired by bigger businesses. eBay acquiring PayPal was the big one.

2) They didn't want to? The smartest people in the world tend not to be motivated primarily by money and greed. Also note that Musk started out working on websites and financial services, which is how he made his initial capital, but that wouldn't necessarily interest auto or space engineers.

Remember that Steve Jobs made most of his wealth from Pixar and selling it to Disney rather than from Apple. Was Steve Jobs "smart"? Sure, but WTF did Steve Jobs know about making films in 1986? Nothing. He was just a rich dude with some capital to invest. Why didn't some indie filmmaker become a billionaire instead? Because indie filmmakers don't have the capital.

You get too caught up in the meaning of "hard work", as if your only purpose it to use its pedantic definition as a gotcha.

Hard work in the way you define it is not and should not be rewarded just for the sake of hard work. It cannot work this way and you don't want it to work this way, regardless of what you may think. If we did that, the world would stop working. So whether the wealthy work more or not is irrelevant.

> Musk

The anti-Musk sentiment is now at cult-like levels and I'm afraid that rational conversation is not on the table anymore. Somehow Elon's name is associated with some of the most revolutionary companies of the past decade, yet still you'd argue that he doesn't work hard, isn't smarter than his engineers, is basically just lucky. Whatever makes you feel better about yourself. If the guy who created SpaceX is not impressive to you, then I'm not sure who is.

He is kind of a moron in his tweets and has done some despicable shit, but I am able to separate this from his accomplishments.

No, I personally don't use the phrase myself in normal conversation and would be glad if it simply disappeared entirely. I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.

> The anti-Musk sentiment is now at cult-like levels and I'm afraid that rational conversation is not on the table anymore.

The submitted article is about the "Five richest men", of which Musk is one, so it's not like I'm bringing up his name out of context. He is the context here.

> yet still you'd argue that he doesn't work hard

I didn't argue that. I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here, which is why I'm asking you. You're the one who said, "I don't understand why people refuse to accept that some people are smarter, work harder..." Yet you seemingly refuse to say what you mean by that. If manual labor isn't hard work, then what is hard work, exactly?

> is basically just lucky

He is lucky. You don't think the following is a lucky set of circumstances to get a massive payoff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal

"Even though Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year. In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition, as the latter's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service. Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and eventually led Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel to resign. With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000. Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—PayPal's largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million."

Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.

> Whatever makes you feel better about yourself.

I don't really care. I'm not a "failed billionaire". I've never in my life even aspired to wealth. It's not among my priorities. What I do care about is the disproportionate political power exercised by the ultra-wealthy, and how it makes our whole society worse.

> If the guy who created SpaceX is not impressive to you, then I'm not sure who is.

A lot of people are impressive to me, but I don't give a damn about SpaceX. I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds, and I wouldn't bat an eyelash if SpaceX folded and stopped operating tomorrow.

> I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.

I do think that there is probably too much inequality for it to be healthy for society, but I am not of the opinion that "billionaires should not exist" or that anyone rich is some version of evil.

I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output. Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.

> I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here

In previous replies you associated hard work with physically strenuous work. I think they are orthogonal concerns. Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities. By your definition, someone shovelling bricks for 8 hours is working harder than someone working 8h in an office. By mine, that is not necessarily true.

Also, even if your definition was true, paying someone purely on how 'hard' they work would still not be a good idea.

> Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.

This sentence does not sound as good as you think it does.

Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".

> I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds

Me neither, but have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX, in a field entirely dominated by national agencies. No matter which way you cut it, SpaceX has ushered in a new era in space exploration. I won't even bother arguing more about this, this is honestly ridiculous.

Half the population has better than average work ethic.

Does Musk have a better work ethic than his lesser paid employees? That's dubious. After all, he infamously demanded that Twitter employees be "extremely hardcore" and work "long hours at high intensity". But these employees are not compensated nearly as much as Musk. They're not even rewarded at all in many cases. He still fired a bunch of them afterward, even the women who tweeted a photo of herself sleeping in the office.

What about the work ethic of the poor people who work multiple jobs because one job doesn't pay enough? How is there any relation whatsoever between work ethic and income? Note that Jeff Bezos, one of the other five richest men whose income doubled, actually quit his job! You don't make massive money from working for wages, you make massive money from owning assets and waiting for them to appreciate. This is how Musk got his PayPal payoff despite having been removed from power by other investors.

There are countless people in the world who are extremely smart and have a great work ethic. But that doesn't automatically bring great wealth. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time. Do you need to be smart and have a good work ethic to take advantage of the opportunity? Yes, probably. But most people aren't lucky enough to get those opportunities in the first place.

It also helps to ruthlesslessly pursue wealth with no regard for ethics...

> Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.

He makes more money than virtually all of us. That's beyond dispute, and indeed the subject of the submitted article. It's basically a tautology though and not an explanation.

> Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities.

Well, as I mentioned, loading shampoo bottles into crates for 8 hours was definitely on the edge of my abilities.

> Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".

You're missing the point. Musk was kicked out of his own company not just once but twice for incompetence. Yet he still got a $175 million payoff. That's failing upwards.

He ought to be kicked out of Twitter for incompetence too, but unfortunately he can't be.

> have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX

I did, and I already said I don't like it: "I think there are too many rocket launches polluting the atmosphere and too many satellites being put in orbit."

At this point, more than 24 hours after the article submission, which is apparently now flagged, and 14 hours after my previous comment, nobody is reading this thread except for you and me.

You can call me stupid if you want, though you would be sorely mistaken, but don't call me a liar.

To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth. What you've done in previous replies is a typical reductionist approach, which is to pretend that a multivariate problem, with those variables on various continuums, can be presented as "Elon Musk doesn't work harder than someone stocking shelves with shampoos". I honestly do not understand how someone frequenting HN could genuinely think that this is a valuable argument.

In simpler terms, if you exclude all the obvious counter-examples like inheritance, crypto pump and dumps, lottery winners and so on, it is empirically true that richer people work harder than poor people. Before you give some example of how some billionaire simply got lucky, I did say about that this is a multivariate equation. There are many, many things that go into it, and luck is one, hard work another.

The simple logic is: you work harder -> your productivity is higher -> you make more money. You may find some exaggerated counter-example, but this is the truth.

If Elon had just been involved in the PayPal business, yeah, he would be some forgotten rich dude living his life on some island. It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.

There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.

I don't "play" contrarian. If my views happen to be contrary to yours, or to the majority's, that's just how it is, how I am, and how I've always been from a very young age. Nonetheless, there are plenty of subjects on which I'm in agreement with the majority.

> hate for the rich

Well, my view is that our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless, so if there's any hate, I would argue that it's a rational hate rather than an irrational hate. In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.

> To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth.

To me, it's not an axiom. I don't consider it to be self-evident or even true. If you don't want to argue over your axiom and defend it from criticism, you're free to walk away, but you shouldn't be surprised when someone doesn't accept your beliefs as evidently true.

> It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.

The word "impressive" means "evoking admiration through size, quality, or skill". The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike? If a person that I vehemently oppose gets elected POTUS, am I supposed to "admire the accomplishment"? Only 45 people have ever been President, so in that sense it's an accomplishment, yet "admiration" is not really the appropriate attitude in these case; more like "horror". I understand that if you admire Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, then you might admire Musk too, but I personally don't give a crap about any of them and even consider aspects of them to be a negative for society.

Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler? He did have a major impact, changing the world forever, doing some unprecedented things, and greatly affecting tens of millions of people. (I'm reminded of the sarcastic conversation that Paul had with Stilgar and Korba in Dune Messiah.)

Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.

> There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.

I was happy to ignore Musk as much as possible until recently, and to me his followers seemed very much like a cult. Unfortunately, Musk acquired Twitter, which was my social network of choice, and then proceeded to wreck it in many ways, which is mainly why I hate him in particular. Again, it's not some weird "irrational" hate but rather a direct reaction to his actions.

Finally, we agree on something. This is exactly it. The problem is the system, which I am happy to change. The people who get rich are simply playing by the rules the system allows.

Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.

> To me, it's not an axiom.

I struggle to understand why anyone would think this. So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money? That would be an incredible statement to defend.

> The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike?

If you have subjectively decided that Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI are not impressive, then I'm afraid we simply view the world differently. I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress.

The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures. I can.

> Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler?

Anther clue that we simply think very differently. Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example. Imagine if this same amount of work, ingenuity, scrappiness was applied from 'good'. Then we might have had two rich entrepreneurs that you'd find just as despicable simply for being rich.

> Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.

Back to what the real problem is - the system. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.

The rich also tend to have the power to write the rules themselves, for their own benefit.

> Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.

This is not true at all. Individual businesspeople vary vastly in their ethics. I don't actually try to maximize my income, by any means necessary. I have personal standards that can't be measured in dollars, and I try to avoid actions that could profit me if they would screw over other people or harm society.

> I struggle to understand why anyone would think this.

It's unfortunate that you appear to have such a limited imagination, an inability to comprehend the possibility of other people rationally disagreeing with your beliefs.

> So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money?

Why do you present a false dichotomy? There could be little or no correlation, as opposed to an inverse correlation. In any case, I still don't know what the heck you mean by "hard work". You've already rejected the notion that manual labor is hard work, yet you refuse to explain exactly what it does mean, apparently because you fear that explaining would be some kind of "gotcha".

> I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress. The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures.

Again, there's an unfortunate failure of imagination here. Have you considered, for example, that I don't necessarily view them as "progress"? The irony is that I've already given some indication, mentioned more than once: "I think there are too many rocket launches polluting the atmosphere and too many satellites being put in orbit."

Anyway, since you're having such trouble comprehending, have you considered, you know, asking me, instead of putting ideas in my head?

On the other hand, you seem to believe that I'm obligated to admire Hitler, so given that starting point, I'm not sure there's anything I could say to explain my views to you in a way you'd understand.

> Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example.

You're welcome to your views, but I think you'll find, if you state them explicitly to many people, that I won't be the only one who feels differently, and you're not necessarily even in the majority.

> Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Why not both?

> Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.

Musk is already the wealthiest person in the world. To say "I'm sure there are better avenues" to making money just seems ridiculous to me.

This is correct, and the 'poor' do the same, within the limits of their abilities.

> This is not true at all. Individual businesspeople vary vastly in their ethics. I don't actually try to maximize my income...

This is the Internet and saying this is free. Even so, I don't care about you specifically, I am talking about the average behaviour at the level of the society. There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.

Typical employees (the 'poor') have way fewer levers to do this, as well as less financial education, due to the way the system is structured, but the desire to keep more of your earnings to the detriment of everyone else is the largely the same.

> It's unfortunate that you appear to have such a limited imagination, an inability to comprehend the possibility of other people rationally disagreeing with your beliefs. > Why do you present a false dichotomy? There could be little or no correlation, as opposed to an inverse correlation.

In retrospect, it is true that I presented a false dichotomy since I never considered that your defense might be "there is virtually 0 correlation".

I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.

> you're not necessarily even in the majority.

I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.

> Have you considered, for example, that I don't necessarily view them as "progress"?

Yes, I did, but then you are simply wrong.

> Musk is already the wealthiest person in the world. To say "I'm sure there are better avenues" to making money just seems ridiculous to me.

You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term). So Musk is greedy and vain. After he got his 100+ millions from the sale of PayPal, would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth? Probably not.

That's the crucial distinction. Specifically, the ability to buy politicians and elections.

> This is the Internet and saying this is free.

Once again implying that I'm a liar...

You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.

> There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.

It's true that there are a lot of unethical poor and middle class people. (Also a lot of ethical poor and middle class people.) My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".

> I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.

You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work", so how would it even be possible for me to make any argument or defense at all? It ought to be clear from how I earlier characterized hard work (e.g., manual labor) that there's no correlation. You claimed that my characterization was silly, but it's become ridiculous how you won't say anything more about it.

Perhaps what you want to say, or at least ought to say, is that some people have more natural abilities than other people, which is absolutely true, and thus some people are capable of accomplishing things that are impossible for other people, which is also true. But I wouldn't characterize that as "hard" work, at least not for the person with special abilities. To the contrary, things come easier to them. It's only hard for the people who don't have those natural abilities. I could work as "hard" as I possibly could, to the very edge of my abilities, and never become a professional guitar player or a professional tennis player (much to my dismay), because I simply don't have enough talent.

> I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.

It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.

> You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term).

Pathological. But I didn't say "simply".

> would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth?

Why would it need to be "obvious"? There's no obvious way to become ultra-wealthy, otherwise everyone would do the obvious.

And that's great, but your specific example is not what we are discussing here. We are talking about averages, not particular examples.

> My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".

Hmm, I think we can agree here, I don't think I've said anything that would suggest otherwise.

> You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work"

Because I'm not sure it's worth it. However, your example with the guitar is good and actually fits exactly into what I'm trying to say.

Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.

Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".

In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.

> It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.

Not all of them. I'd be perfectly okay with having to explain my stance on the accomplishments of Bin Laden. However, yes, I do find it axiomatic that working harder is correlated with more wealth.

On the contrary, the submitted article is not about averages but rather about particular examples, namely, the five richest men in the world. I would say that happens on average is largely irrelevant here, because the average person will never become a billionarie or come anywhere remotely near the vicinity of affluence.

> Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.

> Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".

> In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.

Now we're making progress, if we've defined "hard work" to mean "long work", i.e., hours of work. However, there's an ambiguity in your discussion above. First you talk about "on average", but then you switch over to "all things being equal". Those are two very different concepts. I actually agree that all other things being equal, people who work more hours will make more money. This is practically an axiom, if their hourly wage is among the things that are equal. On the other hand, I think the "on average" claim is dubious at best.

One major problem is that there are strict physical, temporal limitations on how many hours a human can work. There are only 24 hours per day, which you must spend not only on working but also on sleeping, eating, and other necessities not related to work. God forbid you have any free time! There's not a huge variation in the number of hours that different people can possibly work in a day, though certainly family responsibilities can take up a large chunk of hours. (Wikipedia says that Elon Musk has 11 children, but I couldn't say how much time he spends with them.) There's a somewhat broader variation in how many days per year that different people can work. It's worth noting, however, that on average (your favorite notion), poorly paid workers have the least generous vacation packages.

Another factor is the availability of work. Those who make hourly wages can't just automatically work as many hours per day and as many days per year as they desire: the money has to be in the company's budget, the hours approved by the company's management. And if the business itself runs on strict hours, opening its doors at a certain time in the morning and closing its doors at a certain time in the evening, then it may not even be possible for the employee to work more hours! Moreover, there's typically "overtime" pay, which is more costly to the employer than "regular" pay, so there's a natural reluctance to grant too much overtime. Of course it's possible to work more than one job; indeed, some people have to work more than one job, because one job doesn't pay them enough to cover their expenses. But this phenomenon calls into question the idea that hours of work are strongly correlated with higher wealth.

What I'm suggesting is that you may be reversing cause and effect. It's largely the job itself that determines how many hours per day/week/year that a person can or does work, and it's largely the job itself that determines the compensation. The "hard work", so to speak, can only vary within the confines of the job. Of course you can try to change jobs to get one that pays more — and finding a new job is itself "hard work", albeit unpaid work — but that's not quite the same thing as "working harder"; it's merely working for higher compensation. Those with a yearly salary (on average higher total compensation than hourly workers) may have more opportunities to work more hours, but it's also axiomatic that if you're working for a yearly salary, your salary for that year doesn't change no matter how many or how few hours you work. You have to hope that your bosses recognize your "hard work" (or whatever traits they happen to recognize) and reward you with bonuses and/or promotions. (I would say, by the way, that it's more important to be regarded as a hard worker than to actually be a hard worker. It doesn't hurt to brown-nose either...)

Let's go back to the wealthiest person in the world. Mr. Musk is subject to the same physical, temporal constraints as the rest of us: 24 hours per day, 365/6 days per year. Presumably, as a human, he must sleep and eat. We know that he seems to have quite a bit of time to tweet, and also quite a bit of time to read political conspiracy theories. And we've seen him photographed or recorded at parties, sporting events, interviews, podcasts, and other activities during which he's clearly not working on cars or rockets and such. So the available working hours per day are significantly less than 24. The biggest problem for Musk, though, is actually what you seem to admire most about him: his many companies. Given the strictly limited number of hours he has per day, and given that he owns so many companies, it's just numerically impossible for him to work a ton of hours per day at every company. I think it's safe to say that Musk actually works fewer hours per day at any given company than many of his much lower compensated employees at the company. Tesla engineers are working "harder" (longer) than Musk at Tesla, Twitter engineers are working "harder" than Musk at Twitter, SpaceX engineers are working "harder" than Musk at SpaceX, etc. The math just doesn't work out otherwise.

Thus, I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that "hard work", i.e., hours of work, are rewarded as much as you think they are. And they certainly don't explain the inhuman variation of wealth in the world, how one person can be worth $200 billion, while another person can be worth $0, or be in debt. The range of wealth is way out of proportion to the humanly limited range of working hours.

Incidentally, I'm in the top quartile of earners in the United States, yet I appear to have a lot of time to spend arguing with strangers on the web. ;-)

We could talk about entrepreneurs (of which am I one). But most new businesses fail, so the number of hours worked was for naught. And it's not clear that working more hours is the magical solution to making a business succeed.

"I disagree. I think that we should not do that, as it is morally wrong."

"You fool! Don't you understand that it's not your rights that would be squandered?! It's only the rights of people who are not like us!"

Of course it would. If you had $500M instead of $500k then none of those things would affect you in the slightest. Inflation could run at 20% for a decade and you could lose 80% of your capital in a series of bad investments, and your day to day quality of life would still be just fine.

It's like an american dream, but for poor.

Even backtesting using a moving-window average should show different figures.

If you stay in good health, never have to purchase real estate or car then perhaps... but then you'll still have to live somewhere, commute somehow, and the life quality will be... of a poor person.

You say 300k is the maximum anyone should have, people reply stating it's way too low. Ok, so what is the number, 600, 1M, 10M? Hint, we'll never agree and it's as clear as day to me.

Comments are also stating why 99.5% don't see why we take the "rich's" money. This thread is proof of why.

> in a parallel to the existence of an event horizon at the perimeter of gravitational black holes, the possession of extremely large sums of money sends a person into an altered zone of consciousness where, though they appear to others to be acting normally, their own perception of the universe is completely altered and incommunicable to observers

No offense but we don't need a new economic concept. We need to adjust or priorities. Take this article, note the headline is not "The five people who gave away the highest percentage of their wealth" or "The five people who saved the most lives in 2023". Etc. You get the point.

We've collectively have bought into and become fixated on a single currency of measurement. We say "success" and don't bother to preface it with "financial" as if there are no other forms of success. There are.

Words create worlds. We have the words. But we don't use them to our (i.e., 99.5%) own advantage.

IE: My capital and your time are equal; thus a person who has much more capital has the buying power of many people.

it's mildly irritating that we know that in a relative closed system with finite resources the inequality rises (the entire point of Monopoly is to show this), yet we forget it in our day to day lives because we can't relate the microeconomics to macroeconomics for some reason.

Per another comment I left on this thread, we need to be aware of the language the rest of us use, as it does create worlds. And we keep creating a world that favors the systems, metrics and paradigms of The Few.

So we are saying it is a problem of perception? If we didn't know about the top 5's wealth, and the bottom was rising in wealth (Maybe lower rate than the top, but we don't know). There would be no problem?

Imagine you collected Fubar Widgets and the media promoted you as having a Fubar Widget collection with 50+ billion such Widgets...most would look upon you as being a weirdo, with some sort of personality disorder, etc.

Do that with money, and the concept of normal and decent goes out the window. Your obsession...your hoarding (if you will)... Perfectly normal. Perfectly acceptable. But ultimately, textbook bonkers.

Mind you, I don't have a philosophical issue with excessive wealth per se. To me, it's strange, but what do I know? However, in the context of poverty and a slew of countless other ills in the world, such hoarding feels disturbing and disconnected. I don't see such behavior as being enviable, let alone put on a pedestal as we do.

Because one day it could be you on the other side. You’re gonna pull yerself by your bootstraps and are totally going to become one those filthy rich people. Everyone can make it in America. All you need is hard work and country music. You wouldn’t want to tax your soon-to-be fellow rich men, now would you? What are you, a commie? A socialist? Why, one day that could be yourself you’re taxing there, buddy. Take the government’s filthy hands out of your money. Yeehaw!

I appreciate the sarcasm of your comment, but seriously though... if I end up with Bezos wealth, found myself on the other side, I would part with $176B if you just leave me the remaining $0.9B.

I mean I might bitch about it, but, yeah, I'll survive.

I have zero doubt there are many of us who have no desire to own that much money to the detriment of our fellow human beings, but the point is there are also many people who do not think like that and want it all. They phantasise about being able to snub other people in an undetermined (and unlikely) future when they’re rich, even as they dislike being shunned now. That’s why (to the point of the original comment) there’s polarisation of opinion even thought rationally most people should be on the same side.

Because people who think like they deserve a piece of private property of someone else, when they get to power, are never satisfied with going just after the richest. They eventually imprison the whole society in a dark, Soviet reality. Someone should introduce an economical concept for this.

I'm actually curious here.

Taxes and inflation one can measure (reasonably) objectively, but personal spending is always going to vary wildly. Say one gets 10% in the stock market over the long term, let's say inflation is 4% so that's 6% after inflation, and say 4% after taxes[0].

Median personal income is $40k, and median family income is $75k (2022 dollars). That means an individual would need $1M in savings, and a family would need $1.875M. Which is a fair bit of money, and anybody who accumulates it will probably be accustomed to a higher-than-median lifestyle.

>As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing.

No, we shouldn't, because in normal language this is called "retirement". Somebody who has saved enough to retire has reached "escape capital", and this is something we should be trying to encourage more broadly. As you say this is out of reach for most, so what we should be trying to do is get more people to reach this threshold, not less. Many have suggested a wealth tax; I'm personally in favor but I think it's unconstitutional (in the US)[2].

[0] If one is funding their lifestyle they would need to sell stock/collect dividends, which would be taxable.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255222

[2] I am not a lawyer or constitutional law expert. Although I'd be willing to bet that the current SCOTUS would find it unconstitutional.

Retirement is: you set aside as much as you think you need between the time you stop working and the time you die.

Escape capital is: the amount of money necessary so that interests >> what you consume

Check this video, specially the "trading game" simulation (about 5:24 into it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZMBdRfbk6A

>why this is a polarizing issue as 99.5% of people are on the same side of the threshold

are we? I earn way less than mid-level programmer in SV and I'm pretty sure I'm on the "rich" side of threshold already. Granted I'm relatively frugal, live alone, and live in a (capital of a) low cost of living country but fact is a fact. I'm sure every single homeowner in California can achieve financial independency (if they sell their property and move somewhere cheap).

It's a good thing when your money starts working for you instead of you working for your money.

--

Escape velocity is when you can actually set some money aside to invest in a profitable venture and have the discipline to not spend what you have.

75% marginal tax rate on income over $1 million (in 1935) which is 22,241,021.90 today. Crazy to think how “low” that is relative to the top incomes today.

Piketty somehow wrote a 1000 page book about that, and a slightly controversial one, but an idea is very simple and, I think, hard to argue against.

But those are merely "temporarily embarrassed capitalists", John Steinbeck

But Jacobin.com disagrees: https://jacobin.com/2018/05/americans-class-politics-piston