It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market?
How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned?
I like how you threw in the word "intelligently" like this investments was planned and thought out from the beginning ;)
Thresholds are are not that hard to decide: It is about taxation that takes macro-economic behaviour and targets into account.
We have a political party that wants to reduce capital gains tax in Denmark (currently 27%/42%). However, analysis shows that this would benefit only the wealthiest 2% so the consensus is that this is a bad idea from a macro economic perspective.
The value of money is relative. Your 1 million dollars are worthless if everyone else has 10 million dollars. The second people act upon and realise that, we can start to build good economic systems.
Even if success greatest factor is luck it still requires merit. By punishing success you're punishing people that put money into savings, that attempt to innovate and improve human society, that invest in promising areas. In the long term society will be stagnant. And I doubt that in the short term society will be more equal because forced distribution of wealth historically increases inequality.
Citation needed. No, Europe is not doing just fine. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
try to find some statistics around spending power https://x.com/dima_heyqq/status/1758508340953448525?s=48&t=H...
Singapore – 7922 $ / month
Qatar 5628
UAE – 5585
Kuwait – 5250
Switzerland – 5232
Denmark – 4894
Germany – 4667
Austria – 4484
Saudi Arabia – 4419
South Korea – 4076
USA – 4066
Canada - 4026
Sweden – 3666
France – 3556
Hong Kong – 3219
Spain – 3148
UK – 3127
Finland – 2827
Israel – 2770
Poland – 2753
Portugal – 2220
Russia – 2159
China – 1823 (urban non-private) 1053 (urban private)
Thailand – 1769
Indonesia – 1051And the conclusion is the US generates more wealth for the middle class than Europe does.
If things are so good why Europe is being dominated by authoritarian populists?
I questioned the US paradoxes on philanthropy and meritocracy.
For all I care, you can hold on to your "America first, whatever country second", "F*k yea, America" and all that.
you can derive from my statements that I don't think the current landscape in the US is entirely meritocraric or democratic as a single person can amass serious influence by investing in the stock market.
you respond that at least the US is richer than the EU, which is probably right. But I don't understand what belief it challenges? That it should justify a less democratic or meritocratic system?
please enlighten me :)
I think there is a broad consensus that talent won't make you a billionarie in the stock market, otherwise we had seen many more people become billionaires in the stock market.
If you really believe that that the person in question got billionaire on the stock market by their merits that’s just wrong.
We agree that we don't want a dictator. A single person with too much wealth can be almost as powerful, hence there are good arguments in favor of setting such limits.
If a cop in my city wants to ruin your life, there's a chance it'll be easier for them to do so than it is for a rich individual, not to mention the mayor of the city.
And unlike a billionaire, who'd have to spend money to actually "control people's lives" and is therefore limited by some constraint , an elected official gets to control people's lives with no constraint at all.
A policeman does not have the same impact over peoples lives as, eg., Jeff Bezos.
And obviously, a policeman is the lowest-power individual in this scenario - my city councilman probably has more impact than that.
Bill Gates improved the lives of countless people around the world. He could as easily made the lives of countless worse if he wanted to or as an unintended consequence of his projects.
As an unintended consequence, sure, but that's more true of scientific/technological progress specifically than what Bill Gates did, which was closer to business and tech popularization. If a scientist invents a super-virus that kills everyone, then yes, obviously, they've made the world worse, but that's not really tied to money.
As for "as easily" making countless lives worse in other ways - I kind of disagree there. He made countless lives better because people voluntarily bought his products. He didn't coerce people, they chose to do it. There's no analagously easy way to spend money to ruin people's lives, and especially not if you consider the kind of scrutiny and backlash he'd receive.
My friends who work in public health research despise the foundation because they are absolute gatekeepers on what can and cannot be funded. If you are trying to do research that is not part of the foundations priorities, good luck, they say.
The Foundation is essentially only accountable to themselves and can have global impacts on health research distribution. A recent example is that their whims affected the speed and distribution of COVID vaccines.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandem...
I think most people will agree the threshold to be in the few millions. Some will argue for 5 and few for 50, but nobody can produce $1B of value. Take control of it, sure, but produce, no.
What we could do (besides taxing it away) is configure a limit to what they are allowed to do with it.
I also see room for special titles with cosmetic privileges if someone accomplishes to pay the enormous tax.
It will be hard to find the right privileges. Something like a medal or an outfit is obviously doable. An annual fancy dinner for the group doesn't seem over the top. A daily 30 min slot on the TV for them to bid on exclusively, or each their own slot annually. Can grant 3 lectures in any university. It gets slightly dubious if we add special construction permits for locations no one else may build in.
The funniest I could think of, at 10 bl+ we seize all of your money and assets, you are forbidden to participate in the financial system. You get a robe and a cloak and a card with which you can eat any place, stay at any hotel, buy cloths, do shopping, take a taxi and take any flight with a maximum of 3 guests + partner and kids.
If you funded something with your taxes, you could hire the artist that made the sculptures. Say you build a new civic center with a theater. You have an incentive to hire a good artist to make the place in your preference, with your image, which means the city has more art. If it was an ugly building, it’d be an ugly building with your name on it. The rich during times of war would be separated into those that could fund a whole battleship and those that didn’t. If you shirked your responsibilities during war, you were viewed as a traitor who was so greedy they’d let the city fall.
Maybe we need to stop chastising the rich for building things in their names, but instead give them more opportunities to do so. Additionally maybe we should make all tax payments public, so you can see if your friends and family avoid taxes. Maybe people would become embarrassed to pay less taxes than their employees if everyone could look it up.
“That makes me smart.” - Donald Trump
I want to understand this. If I buy a Novo Nordisk share on the market I never gave novo nordisk a single krone. My counter part is the seller (who rarely would be the company itself).
Generally I would say that investors provide liquidity to the market. Ie. the action of buying and selling are the ones that provide the value. Not holding.
You can conclude that a person holding onto a share for 30 years did not provide any value. That person was merely a rent seeker based on other people providing value by doing the asset allocation – In Denmark these people would be punished by the progressive capital gains tax, while the people trading ones in a while would benefit from a lower tax bill.
Or am I wrong?
I believe the long-term holders of equity investment are the true investors, regardless of whether they bought the shares in an initial offering or a secondary offering.
The initial offering market doesn't exist without the secondary market.
My point is that the value provide is liquidity. Ie. the property that owners of a stock con transfer that stock into money to use on other ventures. People that merely hold a stock does not provide liquidity. You need to have an open order on your stock to do that.
Now, please oppose me! My question is: What value to does term holder provide in virtue of them being long term holders?
You start the thread saying what people ought to do with their money and presumably having it forcefully taken with little understanding of financial markets. This is [one reason] why nobody takes these suggestions seriously about personally wealth.
Then you should be able to make a well informed comment on the matter, as you clearly understand it.
> This is [one reason] why nobody takes these suggestions seriously about personally wealth.
What suggestions? Capital gains tax? I only know of very few industrialised countries not enforcing capital gains tax. So that idea is most certainly taken serious.
> You start the thread saying what people ought to do with their money and presumably having it forcefully taken with little understanding of financial markets.
Can you expand on this? Having money "forcefully taken" is a core feature of modern efficient markets whether you like it or not.
In that example, you provided the money; I was just a middle-man.
Except as it pertains to employee/executive comp and future fund-raising, the company doesn't care about the secondary market liquidity. They care about the money they used over that 30 years to grow.
But that value already existed as an intrinsic property of the company (eg. NAV). What the market did was to unlock these money for the company to use - Ie. they provided liquidity.
Example: I have a company that is worth $1000, but I need to spend $200 in R&D. I sell 20% of the company in the market for 200$. No value way produced, but the market transformed my 200$ from company to money - ie. liquidity.
Value that only happens when people trade, and not when people hold. So back to my initial point: Long term investors does not provide value.
Upon what is this based in a world where no long-term investors exist?
I certainly don't understand but there is no need. The mechanism (provided it is legal) isn't really important.
We need work, to earn enough to survive and have some quality of life. It must feel like you've contributed something useful and society rewarded you reasonably for it. Others will have to do work for you or it wont work. If there is no money for that it cant work.
I think 100 years before things get truly silly.
That is just, on the face of it, false. Did Stephen King not produce millions and almost a billion in value? Despite writing books that have been read by millions of people, have turned into super successful movies, including some movies considered some of our best art?
If my movie budget is 300m but 200m of that went to high priced actors (think JD, RDJ getting paid 50m~) did that movie produce that amount of value?
Corporations have perfected consumer value extraction, allowing them to pay themselves more and bid higher against the competition, further increasing prices to consumers in an endless loop. It produces nothing of value for us, but we're too dumb to boycott this behaviour.
This flies in the face of most economic theory, and also flies in the face of reality. How many corporations are out there with 90% profit margins? Very few, if any.
> If my movie budget is 300m but 200m of that went to high priced actors (think JD, RDJ getting paid 50m~) did that movie produce that amount of value?
I'm not sure what the high-priced actors have to do with it, but the amount of value produced has nothing to do with the budget - it has to do with the tickets you sell. If your $300m movie tanks and no one ever goes to see it, you've in some sense created 0 value. If everyone in the world goes to see it and you make billions of dollars, you've created billions in value, as decided by actual people choosing to vote with their wallets to giving you money for your art.
The budget only figures into it in the sense that you need to subtract it from the revenue to decide on the actual profit.
We can safely assume that she would have produced absolutely no value, had there been no publisher.
Maybe the publisher produced $1B of value and JK Rowling produced none? They did after all select her over other authors.
You are actually right that publisher produced most of the value... though only in the beginning when she was a nobody. I am sure publishing industry knows that too and read somewhere that their deals with new authors reflect that reality.
After the first 3 books when the series started gaining traction and people talked about lining up for the 4th one? It was absolutely the author who was producing the value. Publishing house couldn't have conjured up the remaining 4 books at the same quality - they are good at publishing, not good at creating. (Just ask HBO / Game of Thrones showrunners how it went after GRRM didn't write the last 2 books).
Absolutely. To achieve such results you need so much luck and such a headstart that any merits you might additionally have are drowned in everything else that contributes to "your" "success".
> How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned?
Rule of thumb. About $10 million.
But it's not about who deserves what. It's about how much influence can society safely let a single random primate have.
The actual number will be determined by the political process. It's a number that seems sufficiently unachievable for 51% of people so that they feel safe to vote to heavily tax those who hace that much.
Current barriers to that is that the very wealthy own the culture and they are selling poor people the illusion that everybody can be the rich and what they are doing is actually building value not extracting it despite the fact that trillions of dollars have been extracted from the control of democracy and market and placed exclusively in their hands.
You are severely overrating how much influence $10m buys you, and very severely underrating how much influence you can have without personally having $10m dollars.
And please feel free to have $10 million. Above that it's starting to look like you aren't into it just to secure yourself but rather control and impoverish others.
There are various ways of attaining influence. Money is just the easiest and least controlled. Morally and practically. So let's plug the biggest hole first then worry about the rest.
Thanks, but you don't get to tell me what I'm allowed to have. This is basic property rights.
>control and impoverish others.
This is quite plainly the fixed pie fallacy[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy#:~:text....
It's difficult to quantify but many government bureaucrats hold much more power than that.
Your "solution" replaces one problem with a worse problem while punishing sucess.
And why success should not be punished? Do you think people will voluntarily stay poor just because they might be taxed more if they reach 10 million?
And even if that would be the case. It's still good because inequality harms vast majority in the short term and everybody in the medium to long term so any disincentive to people getting rich at the expense of poor consumers is a win.
How would you solve the problem of wealth concentration in free-markets without incurring in greater wealth concentration under a closed-market?
> And why success should not be punished?
Because generally we want to reward and incentive the betterment of society.
> Do you think people will voluntarily stay poor just because they might be taxed more if they reach 10 million?
Maybe. It must be depressing to live in such a place. If you punish success, you reward mediocrity. But the thing is that those that reach 10 million or plus will always have the option to move their fortunes abroad, so it's the middle class that ends up paying the heavier burden in countries ruled by this mindset.
I'd have free market with punishingly progressive taxation and redistribute proceeds of this tax as a basic income.
> Because generally we want to reward and incentive the betterment of society.
Financial success is intrinsically rewarded and it's orthogonal to betterment of society. Tou can't really tell if a rich person improved society or damaged the society just by looking at their wealth. No additional rewards are necessary. And some pubishement would be advisable if the scale of this success causes harm to the system that spawned it.
> But the thing is that those that reach 10 million or plus will always have the option to move their fortunes abroad, so it's the middle class that ends up paying the heavier burden in countries ruled by this mindset.
The mere presence of those who have more than $10mln is the cause of the system collapsing. They price out the middle class out of the real estate that they hoard for investment purposes. And of other limited resources as well.
Rich are more than welcome to leave. Their leaving improves lives of everyone else.
Owning money just means that society owes you some goods and services.
If you move out and request that some other country pays this debt to you then the country of your origin is better of.
I can't think of any case in history where a brain or capital drain would be a positive think. Historically the US benefited greatly from European drains. Such an absurd idea requires a fantastical level of evidence supporting it.
While I agree that capital starved countries would benefit from additional capital, it is a tautology, there's a reason why those countries are capital starved in the first place. Corruption, bad to make business, etc. Capital moves quickly when there are favorable conditions. Also any billionaire can live at country A, B and C while paying taxes at D and investing in E.
Also it's very simplistic and wrong to put all the blame of home shortages on billionaires. It's more complex than that. Demand is high but why supply is low?
"How do you determine the threshold?" Somehow.
It doesn't matter how you determine it or what you end up determing nearly as much as doing it at all by any means, and working out good procedures and results over time.
Currently, we have nothing at all. A sub-optimal limit, a downright wrong limit, derived from sub-optimal, downright wrong methods is better than none at all.
The Bezoss and the Musks of the world are not doing anything we need done badly enough to be worth what we give them.
Those people who like to run big projects will still be full of themselves and still seek to be in charge of everyone else and will still command the same resources even in a world where that isn't expressed as personal private ownership of the resources.
If the change in incentives changes anything, if there are people who currently became billionairs and produced Amazon and Facebook, who would not have bothered if they couldn't own it all, I am prepared to call that only a win.
We'd still get anything that was actually valuable to us rather than just valuable to the owner.
The only problem is needing to incorporate enough ownership and capitalism so that there is any motivation for excellence. If everything is purely communist and no one owns anything, then all products and services suck. There does need to be some sort of reward for making the electric car and the charging network actually good, and some anti-reward for not making it available to everyone. Patents and copyright need to be somehow quite different. Maybe they still exist and confer some sort of benefit, but nothing like now. Rewarding people for inventing or improving things only to let them keep it for themselves, and even retain ownership control through drm and software over products that were sold more than nullifies the value of getting them to invent the thing in the first place. More than merely negates. Their existence suppresses everyone else who might have done it differently.
Where is the line and how do you determine it is no conundrum at all. It's nothing but some boring policy grunt work to hash that out.
It actually detracts from the entire purpose of a stock market.
It has also created our poisonous modern environment where companies chase record profits every year, endless unsustainable growth with the added side effect of ass-covering for all their bad investments.
A lucky investment like this guy is probably fine but the truth is that the system is set up so that wealth begets more wealth; the wealthiest people have so much money that they don't have to be careful with it, look at how much Musk spent on Twitter as a toy for him to destroy, it doesn't matter because record profits and valuations ensure that dumbfuck CEOs and investors are bailed out of their dumb decisions.
Meanwhile we live in a biological society where our evolutionary path has made it exceedingly easy to manipulate people to hate based on sexuality, gender, race, etc ignoring the class war going on. We're too apathetic and ignorant to vote together, we could all share in our species' accomplishments but no, the suit and tie ruling class can have all the Bentleys they like so long as I get to vote for the guy that'll let me hate the people I want to hate.
Don't conflate an in-equal system with capitalism. That would be untrue and un-wise.
Most people agree that a free market needs to exists in order to uphold a capitalistic system (what is ownership if you can not transfer it?).
You can make free markets that are regulated in a way that ensures that participants are, roughly, equal - in fact there is an argument that a market is not free unless this is the case.
When participants of a market can increase their profit margins it is usually a sign of an ineffcient market - a participant has an advantage that other participants can not compete with.
The US seem to choose their presidents not based on policies or track record but rhetoric. That doesn't seems better than capitalism.
Again, as an EU citizen, the two party system seems to be wildly un-democratic. In Denmark we have 10 parties represented in the parliament (in a country of 5.5million people). This forces decision making to be compromise seeking and represent more real opinions.
To become a billionaire you just need to be lucky enough to purely mechanistically attach yourself to a market phenomenon and drain it. Noone needs to agree to that.
It's common for people to vote in candidate B because they don't want candidate A to win and while they dislike B it is deemed as the lesser of evils as he is the only alternative with a good chance of winning. AFAIK this is the universal case in every representative democracy.
Also vote costs you nothing and oa the same for all people and your voting power in the market is directly proportional to how much money you can spend.
It's not similar. At all.
Not really. You can abstain from voting but not from paying taxes. And if you abstain from voting you will still will be subject to the authority of whoever get's elected and it will probably not be in favor.
> In the market for food, shelter and clothing it's not possible without serious harm to your health.
You can grown, build and craft your own. It's not always practical but you have those options. e.g. I cook my own food and grow produce in the backyard. And we all have way more and better options for food, shelter or clothing than we have for president, governor or mayor.
> Also vote costs you nothing and oa the same for all people and your voting power in the market is directly proportional to how much money you can spend.
I don't know in which world do you live but that just ain't true. Elections are super expensive. In Brazil public funding for political parties is a 10-digits figure. Money win elections. Rich rent-seekers "donate" massive amounts to candidates legally and illegally to later receive favors.
> It's not similar. At all.
Free market is the purest form of democracy. Representative democracy is garbage.
Would you be in favor of that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
Aren't you in favor of purest form of democracy?
I understand that you are a fan of anarchism but given that it's impossible shouldn't you be in favor of the next best thing?
Remember, umbrella companies are buying up multiple competing brands for ages now. Rather than shutting them down, they just make money from all of em.
We're doomed, lmao: https://blog.cheapism.com/brands-owned-by-same-company/
Problem is that you're right, people don't really vote for the right reasons and hence we'll never tax the rich. It's mutually exclusive imo.
In an unfair world it is taken away from me.
It is just numbers.
The difference I see between US/EU worldview is that in US the biggest emphasis is in what "YOU" did, disregarding luck, chance, environment factors etc. "Bill Gates created the wealth himself". People like feeling like there is a chance for them to become super powerful and important and that there is no system holding you back, even though they never actually do it but the hope/idea is very important for you. I can see this in Eastern Europe where large percentage of people dream of winning the lottery; I guess that is something from which people here draw hope of power and influence, while the same people are ok with strong social measures, high taxes, free healthcare etc. while I feel in US all these social benefits are perceived to prevent people from achieving astronomical results and hence shouldn't be.
Unfair is, if someone else grabs the stuff of the one brother and gives it to the other.
An example you probably should should think about: Who owns money and their value? What happens when the central banks decide to raise the interest rates to 20% and you loose everything? Just a shame? On the contrary, what happens when the central banks employ quantitative easing and that makes you rich? How does this interact with large-scale projects the government starts to create employment.
Not always are fiscal and monetary policies aligned. This creates either severe depressions or economic bubbles.
When an opinion is funded an understanding of to what extend the greater society defines the value of things it will have gravity. Until then, it is just noise.
You pay for stuff in the supermarket, you get a product. No strings attached. I would be surprised, if people like the idea, that if one buys a piano, that for each song being played, one has to give a dividend to the piano manufacturer. Usually the transaction is closed. Though, such deals can be made. Maybe you get the piano for free.
You pay a worker that what you think is needed to make a piano. If one worker makes a billion pianos, you pay him a lot. And if you sell pianos a billion times, you become a billionaire. And if your worker can buy stocks, he will also get dividends.
The idea that billionaires have to give a share is nice and good, definitly good for hackernews stories and their socialistic readers, but that the billionaire has already given societies wealth manyfolds, well, afterall people bought their stuff to improve their lives, that made him a billionaire, that is silently forgotten.
As usual, it is play with envy and greed, how dare someone has more than me!
Hell, mining blood diamonds is fair because the local authorities allow it, mining oil from under the impoverished residents of a corrupt country is fair, skirting monopoly laws to create conglomerates is fair.
Nothing is illegal for these guys, it all gets shoved under the rug. Remember the Panama papers? What came of those? Nothing.
(While others have identified religion as a way of avoidance, to not question the status quo. Ha!)
There is not a single billionaire who has made all that money fairly; wages do not rise with inflation, environment; tax dodge; etc costs are carried on to the consumer as well. What sort of world do we live in when people like you think it's okay for things to be like this.
I don't have a problem with people being successful and accumulating wealth, but I do have a problem with the ilegitimate and corrupt practices involved in accumulating billions and trillions.
Ofc everyone hates this idea, idk y'all think you'll be billionaires one day, or otherwise think that someone deserves to make more than $Xmn a year, in a way you're right, because nothing will change, we'll never actually tax the rich properly...so I suppose that means you win.
Individual doing a great thing is great.
A system that depends on hoping and begging for miracles is not great.
I grew up and did my education in Denmark. Here we have another sentiment on philanthropy than the anglo world has. Generally I don't like when a single person decide the destiny for many people, as in this case. It as anti democratic and concentrates power.
Stories like these are heartwarming indeed, but they also help keep status quo. In a more fair world a person should probably not be able to amass more than USD 1B by making the right bet on the stock market. That wealth is build in this way is anti-meritocratic.
Stories like this highlight an interesting paradox of the anglo world: The relationsship between democracy and large scale individual impact and the relationsship between allowing people to make their own wealth while the really rich people are merely early, passive, investors.
(It is hard to write critical comments like this when "The donor being a 93 year old doctor/alumni of that school that studied "learning disabilities and developed screening protocols"." - I hope you can forgive me.)