Recently I was chatting with a friend who has a net worth in and around there (made his money in mining/exploration), he was in a kinda bad mood and I asked what was up... he was supposed to be flying to Italy, but his crew where late putting his USA Yacht away and they hadn't arrived in Italy yet to get his Europe Yacht unpacked and ready to go. I hadn't really considered before... he employs 6 people full-time to travel around the world and deal with his boats. Very different problems from my problems anyway, heh. :)

yeah that would be annoying

I have a friend that basically throws the high net worth welcoming party that’s missing from people’s lives

identify a friction and cater to it, this is an underserved field because people are not willing to validate wealthy people’s problems, or specifically invalidate them

I believe that these issues were handled by retainers historically. You would employ someone, then that persons children and so on. Thus some knowledge of these problems was built-up over time.

Unfortunately, if wealth inequality continues growing - these will be the most lucrative problems to solve. I'd be quite interested in whether there have been studies of where market forces begin to stop existing.

I don't understand. Your friend has a catering business that throws parties for wealthy people? Because wealthy people don't get enough parties? Or did you mean metaphorically. In that case, what kind of metaphoric "welcoming parties" are missing from wealthy people's lives?

yeah, not metaphorically, a lot of newly wealthy people are surrounded by resentful people and they spend a lot of cycles hiding it or trying to blend in rather than enjoying it, in comparison to generationally ultra high net worth people that already operate in specific locales and environments

there is no round of applause or red carpet for them, no “wow dude you made it”, and people are fine with that….. until you present them with that specific thing and new circle of socioeconomic equals that also like that specific thing

thats a friction he solves and it is very lucrative

I think you understood fine, its the entertainment and hospitality sector

>I think you understood fine, its the entertainment and hospitality sector

I think you should give the questioner the benefit of the doubt,

"I have a friend that basically throws the high net worth welcoming party that’s missing from people’s lives" was a little hard to parse for me too.

Seems like an interesting business though which demonstrates we often don't know what problems are out there in wait of a solution.

Thanks for pointing that out, I hadnt considered that phrase wasn’t conveying a message consistently

I think I still don’t understand what this service is providing.

It sounds like a debutante ball for the newly-minted ultra wealthy

Linking people up with other people in the same soceoeconomic class with similar interests.

If anyone's being that cagey about the "interests," it can only be one thing...

I thought it was pretty clear to be honest

They organise events and parties for people who have come into or made a lot of money.

The intent of the party is not to celebrate a birthday or occasion, but rather to get introduced to a new social group of similarly wealthy people.

The service would also construct a guest list and so on for you.

So you wouldn’t need to invite your old social circle, who probably now hate you because you are so rich! LOL ;-)

Yes, this sort of thing does sound utterly grotesque to a generation that can’t find a place to live or afford rent!

But here we are, and if there is money to be made from this, then it’s good that someone is making it! :-)

TLDR; we hate it when our friends become successful.

sounds easier and less expensive than building a music hall or museum

That is very interesting!

Thanks for sharing.

I hadn’t really thought about those sorts of social problems and how you solve them!

A good friend of mine built a niche to go into high value homes and test all electronics / internet before the owners arrive.

In addition to cleaners, landscapers, people attending to cars, etc.

He makes quite a good living.

Well, you need to be in proximity to wealthy people to get that information, and that's why it's under served. There's not really a public clearinghouse of unaddressed wealthy-people-problems to inform this market that I know of.

>They then realized that their two dogs weren’t allowed in the apartment, so they purchased a £10 million property opposite the apartment called the dog house, purely for the dogs.

I find that utterly revolting. Imagine how much good you could do with that money.

"Every billionaire is a policy failure." Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard

Reminds me of John Lennon. At the time he was singing "Imagine no possessions" he had an entire floor of the Dakota building[1] just for his and Yoko Ono's fur coats.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota

Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though.

this is the fundamental problem with society today. Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them, rather than pushing for antitrust enforcement to break up market power that allows incompetent offspring to stay rich rather than lose their wealth and return to average wealth where their capability says they belong.

It’s not the fruit of their labor. It’s a combined effort they’re disproportionately benefiting from due to the aforementioned policy failures/corruption.

A lot of us would dispute that anyone that rich "earned" their money. $1bn is an absurdly disproportionate compensation for any one person's work, whatever they do. It may be legal, but it isn't right.

Did JK Rowling sell too many books? Should they have banned the purchase of Harry Potter books after her net worth hit $999mm?

What exactly is your policy prescription here.

Taxes

What kind of tax structure? 100% for all income over $1B?

We need to acknowledge that 'trickle down' is a myth, and that the'rich gets richer' phenomenon is much stronger. And that is a massive democratic problem, which will destabilise our societies.

For our democracies to survive we must put many different taxes in place to counter the rich get richer, and the perverce gathering of power it causes. There won't be a single policy to fix it, and actually finding a good compromise which helps growth instead of hindering it is hard (especially giving the constant lobbying from the rich).

Personally I am quite for a high inheritance tax, but it's definitely not enough. I have no problem with JK Rowling being rich. But I don't think it makes sence that she has a wealth 1000000 times what a teacher makes in their lifetime. And it certainly don't make sence that her child (if she has any) should receive a wealth that size.

> But I don't think it makes sence that she has a wealth 1000000 times what a teacher makes in their lifetime.

Why? What number do you think “makes sense”? Once you pick that number, do you think it’s correct when you compare it to a teacher’s income in the DRC?

If it wasn't totally impossible to implement, you could replace all taxes with low single digit percent per year service fee on your total assets for protecting them from criminals and foreign dictators. (Piketty invented that. It was tried, and didn't work out well for pragmatic reasons like jurisdiction shopping.)

The service fee would be set so that the return on capital was equal to the overall growth rate of the economy. Naturally, it's higher, which makes it mathematically inevitable for a few family offices to end up owning everything. (Also from Piketty.) If the risk-free rate was 3% this year and the GDP grew by 2%, your service fee would be 1%.

Alternatively/in addition, significant inheritance taxes for the ultra-rich.

A lot of wealth is multi-generational and nepotistic (i.e. do we really think Jim Walton would have got the job if he wasn't the son of the founder, and even if he did, would he have earned as much as he has?).

Inheritance taxes don't work in a world where one can jurisdiction shop/utilize multiple different trust and other setups. What inheritance tax does accomplish is keeping the newly rich from becoming multi generational while protecting the old wealth, which is the worst possible outcome. On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive.

A better solution is much more effective antitrust enforcement through both breaking up monopolies/oligpolies and outlawing contract abuses by oligoplies as we see them (i.e. the myriad of things amazon puts in their seller contracts to ensure the prices elsewhere are always near amazon's price).

You asked the wrong question about Jim Walton. You should ask would Jim be able to pull off the same level of wealth accumulation if walmart had been broken up so that it could not have abused its market power for the last 30-40 years? Probably not, because he's probably not great at creating businesses people want to spend money at. You could say the same thing about guys like Bill gates (he would be worth at least 10X what he is currently worth if he had just kept his microsoft stock instead of diversifying bit by bit each year). When you look at it, it's almost always the market power abuse that is the problem, not the wealth per se (notable exception is Elon Musk, who has knocked it out of the park on multiple companies in starkly different fields, kind of impressive).

This is a false dichotomy - It's not one or the other, it's both and more.

It's the right question about Jim Walton, and there is a question about breaking up Walmart on top of that. Walmart can still be broken up in a world where inheritance tax exists!

> On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive.

Disagree with this - forcing billionaires (or anybody for that matter) to provide details of their estate for tax purposes is pretty well-trodden territory.

It's not a false dichotomy, it's actually what happens because the newly rich are often earning their new riches in a way that is not easily hidden away in any of the myriad of legal structures that can hide income permanently from the high tax countries. The new guys will get their wealth eaten by your proposed policies but the old wealth will not, calcifying the system.

It is the wrong question about Jim Walton because it only matters if walmart is still the obvious oligopoly abuser it is. There is a huge difference between someone who managed to get big enough to abuse market power in one space and collected monopoly rents to amass a large fortune (The waltons, bill gates, etc.) and the guys who appear to be excellent managers and have grown massively society improving businesses in disparate industries (currently only Elon comes to mind, I am sure there are other but they are rare enough and/or have stuck to a single business that they grew large enough to extract excess profits that I can't think of any other semi proven names). The good managers you want to be as rich as possible because they are deploying that cash well, the other guys not so much. This translates into much more concern about the children of the super rich (which is correct) but to which you are trying to solve with an inheritance tax, which will just make things worse and slow growth. It's far better to break up the monopolies/oligopolies/regulate away the most obvious abusive contracting and let time do it's thing to get the junk offspring back to normal wealth levels.

You don't get it. Reporting requirements are quite invasive now and they aren't working. The level they will have to get to to actually make an inheritance tax work is a place that is far too much power for the government to have and won't end well (because that level of power has never ended well in the hands of the government). You are trying to solve a questionable problem (billionaires) by feeding an obvious, terrible, and literally deadly problem with massive historical precedent (government power).

If Walmart is broken up and Jim Walton is forced to divest, he will invest his money elsewhere and still own the means of production (capital) just in other companies.

It doesn’t solve the underlying issue of wealth distribution.

Of course it will, just not on a very quick (and destructive) timeline. He loses a monopoly abusing company and its excess profits which fed inflated salary and stock compensation for him personally and is instead left with taking the equivalent of the S&P 500 return or trying his hand at actually being a good manager and growing a company from small to large again or investing in early stage private stuff and experiencing the huge risk of that. If he's actually a good manager/ entrepreneur he can still grow his wealth starting something new, if he's not then he, or his kids, or his grand kids will eventually put enough of the wealth into failed company ideas, up their nose, in their veins, down their throats, into bad real estate, etc. that they cease being billionaires and have to get real jobs. This is the classic way wealth was dissipated. It's non violent, slow, but effective. most importantly it doesn't ruin the calculus on whether someone should strive to be a great entrepreneur or just keep their head down because they can be sure the government will steal it if they succeed.

I think we should aim to do better than fixing it across a 200-300 year timeline.

It’s not particularly ambitious.

"Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, for instance, find that once corporate and estate taxes are added into the mix, the top 0.1 percent of earners paid 71.4 percent of their income to the IRS in 1960, compared with 34.7 percent in 2004"

https://slate.com/business/2015/04/top-tax-rates-why-its-abs...

Seconding this, stratospheric wealth is a side effect of long-standing race condition bugs in the way we generate and route value through society.

At some point there is absolutely no additional contribution made by one's own personal merits toward the amount of wealth that they generate, it's just a snowball effect with the same little pebble in the center of the ball that started it, sucking up and bashing through everything in its path.

This is a cute myth, but it is not true. There are plenty of billionaires who inherited their wealth [0]. One thing to note is this list (as most wealth lists often do) focuses on USA billionaires whose wealth is largely from industry, and their children who inherited it; it does not include the more internationally observed phenomenon of children of royalty or similar heirs of great wealth.

[0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...

Cool, yep, I'm also in favour of a 100% inheritance tax and abolishing monarchies.

Oh yah? Did Elon break into everyone's bedroom and steal 250 billion dollars from all our piggy banks? No, that's something the government does to our paychecks each week. Elon came up with multiple good ideas, implemented them in companies he started, which made the stock in high demand and caused large payouts to him personally in the from of stock based compensation that was lawfully voted for by shareholders. This also caused his original holdings to skyrocket in value. To think that any amount of compensation is absurd in this structure is in itself absurd. The market priced each one of these transactions based on what supply and demand was. What isn't right is random under achievers moaning about someone making money off of improving everyone's lives. Refocus your anger at rent seeking oligopoly behavior and pushing government to start actively enforcing antitrust laws again to stop those abuses because those are the actual nefarious problems facing society. It's not billionaires per se, it's when companies dominate a market to the point where they can get away with abuses that would not be tolerated if the market was competitive

You’re getting angry standing up for Elon Musk, of all people? I really don’t think an alternate timeline without his “ideas” would be any worse off. As for “implementation”, even if you do value the companies he’s headed or invested in, the bulk of the actual work will invariably have been done by others.

The private space industry would still be dead and electric cars would be set back a decade along with all of the environmental damage that comes from that. Elon derangement syndrome has made you delusional.

I don't care about the private space industry, and Elon Musk didn't found Tesla or contribute any "ideas". It's a shame that you seem to have to resort to childish insults like "Elon derangement syndrome".

There is nobody in any leadership position at Tesla that doesn't credit Musk for making Tesla viable.

An idea without that execution is completely useless. There have been and are thousands of ideas for electric cars that never made it or will make it past a prototype because they lack the leadership skill Elon has motivating people into making a viable product.

> I don't care about the private space industry

This just means you don’t have much foresight or you don’t care about humanity. The private space industry is what lets us launch satellites to do things like observe the climate (macro and micro), find and prevent people from getting lost at sea, get people to the space station, launch telescopes, etc.

Saying you don’t care about the private space industry is as dumb as saying, “I don’t care about the private computer industry” 50 years ago.

> like "Elon derangement syndrome".

There isn’t really any other way to describe the willful disregard of two huge influential companies led by the same person.

The guy has made multiple unicorn companies providing services that previously didn't exist to many happy customers across diverse product groups doing things most people thought was stupid (cost effective electric cars) and/or impossible (cutting the cost of getting to orbit by 90%+). Of course other people are doing the bulk of the work. His job as manager is to give direction on what to work on/ideas to solve problems and provide capital to be expended to do the work itself before the company is turning a profit. To imply that the work would have been done by others if he didn't exist is incorrect, faulty logic. To say that someone else did much of the actual work solving the problems is obvious and how the system works. If Elon wasn't there they would not have been working on solving the problem because some other company doing something else would have hired them. Those other companies could be in other areas or part of the group of companies in those spaces prior to Elon who haven't gotten the job done up to this point, some with decades of headstart on the project.

I don't care about any of this, I think how the system works is bad. It produces outcomes that are bad (in this case, absurd inequality), and I don't think that was inevitable. Moreover I don't think we (as a species, at least) are doomed and could learn something better, somehow.

The definition of "Earn" is what most genuine observers would debate. By definition, any interest/dividend bearing asset is a claim on a portion of societal output. As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited, a rational individual might challenge whether such assets were "Earned". It's easy to take the opposite claim that those "Earnings" are the property of those who produced via income, or even those who consume via net savings.

The fine balance between income and savings are well understood through inflation/deflationary cycles - however there are less understood profit cycles. There are many historic examples of the political problems which emerge from too large of a profit burden - such as the French Revolution, Shogunate, Bolshevik's, and arguably the US revolution and Soviet Dissolution.

Where did you get the idea “the majority of wealth is now inherited”?

I’m curious about your assessment of what fraction of wealth was inherited one and two centuries ago, and how you’re measuring the total stock of wealth.

Holding legal title to a thing is one extremely culture specific subset of wealth; being healthy, consuming goods and services is another, having status in your communities of choice is yet another, and control of the levers of societal power is yet another.

I am deeply skeptical of the claim that a larger fraction of titled wealth is now inherited than it was centuries ago, and I don’t see how you’d measure these other forms of wealth in a meaningful way.

I'm using a simplistic and quantifiable measure of wealth - capital assets. I'd also admit to using a short-hand of wealthy people as equal to billionaires.

I don't see the purpose in comparing billionaires quantifiable wealth to other forms of wealth considering the high probability that billionaires are wealthy in all other forms as well.

https://www.investopedia.com/more-billionaire-wealth-achieve..."

This is not a credible source for even the (vastly different from originally stated) claim that billionaires are more likely to hold title to inherited wealth “now”:

- it’s a survey. Rich people do not generally agree to do surveys. It’s a survey done by wealth management businesses looking for new clients

- it’s a survey across an incredibly short time period, 9 years

- it contains the quote “While more of new billionaires' overall wealth was generated by inheritance, the number of new self-made billionaires still surpassed the number of new billionaires who inherited the money.”

Finally, most of the effect this link claims to measure is in mainland China. I do not think billionaires inheriting assets is the main policy failure of mainland China, and it doesn’t seem very relevant for a context where you said “As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited”.

Ahh, yes the marxist slight of hand to turn compounding on foregone consumption into something evil rather than something that should be applauded and appreciated. Interest/dividends are not claims on societal output. They are voluntary payment for foregoing consumption and allowing that consumption to be used in some enterprise.

The profit cycle is just a dumber way of saying the natural outcome of a free market is monopoly, which leads to rent seeking and above marginal cost pricing. A revolution is the dumbest way to solve a monopoly, we have plenty examples of antitrust being used too effectively pre renquist supreme court and there's no reason we can't get back that direction.

> Ahh, yes the marxist slight of hand to turn compounding on foregone consumption into something evil rather than something that should be applauded and appreciated.

What's the foregone consumption on 1 Billion+ dollars of inheritance? These are sums that outstrip anything but the most conspicuous consumption. An individual who inherited such a sum could live with such consumption their entire lifetime.

>antitrust being used too effectively pre renquist supreme court and there's no reason we can't get back that direction.

This is likely a prime reason for US resilience to political instability. Recent moves have been to print money to make up for the short-falls induced by wealth concentrating at the top. However this only works provided that the folks to which wealth is concentrating fail to spend the wealth.

Someone didn't consume at some point and invested that foregone consumption wisely to get that billion plus dollars, at least in North America. There are still a few left over [hereditary dictatorships] monarchies in Europe that still keep their wealth accumulated through [straight theft] taxation. You're really obsessed with wealth passing from parents to kids and that really isn't the problem. Eventually kids do something dumb enough to dissipate that wealth if they don't have sure thing companies with monopoly power to abuse to shore up their wealth, it just takes a few generations. Go look at where the wealth is from the gilded age families who were mostly broken up by antitrust law for example. There are still a bunch with 5-15 billion in wealth but it's spread out among several hundred families with only a few of them still having real wealth (usually from a later generation descedent making wise business choices for themselves for a long time). They overwhelmingly give it away to charity, drink it, put it up their noise, waste it in other fashions and that's way better to me than the government ruining any incentive to try to become the next rockefeller or gates because it doesnt' involve coercion and confiscation by the government.

I think increasing antitrust enforcement and breaking up obviously monopolies/oligopolies is the actual thing we should be doing, it will b far better for society with far more immediate effect and without the outside profits from the private coercion that is an oligopoly it will alleviate some of that large profit you are complaining about being concentrated in a few hands.

> Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though.

This quote is interesting, as it supposes that you'll ever be in this position (and you may be. It's HN and I haven't opened your bio). Many people think the same way, which leads into my point:

A lot of policy failures arise from voters being wooed away from the certainty of a social safety net by the idea of obscene wealth. And therefore we end up overborrowing for infrastructure when we should be taxing based on how someone benefits from it.

> Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them

Not everyone, only the people who recognize that the infrastructure that enabled someone's success still needs to be paid for, and that many of those who thrive on such underlying infrastructure refuse to pay for it.

I would like to discuss your phrase: "..voters being wooed away from the certainty of a social safety net by the idea of obscene wealth".

Your preference for "certainty" may not be the OP's preference. The leap from their comment to "the idea of obscene wealth" is also troubling. It is entirely possible to have different preferences, without implying that the person wants "obscene wealth".

To me, policy success would be that we get to make choices - whether they lead to us living modestly and having to deny our family opportunities that wealth might buy, or whether they lead to you living with the margins that allow you to provide your kids the leg up.

Nowhere in my comment did I imply that everyone thinks this way, or that op specifically thinks this way.

I turned a very middle class upbringing into a fortune in the low tens of millions. I'm not in software or a traditional HN industry, I just enjoy technology. I don't plan on leaving much of it to my children, but that is and should be my choice and my choice alone. That quote doesn't suppose I'll be in any position, it supposes I am an individual and should be free to make my own choices regardless of your position (self inflicted or otherwise). That you are in some real or perceived negative situation does not mean I should be obligated to help you. Whether I help you or not is my own decision.

That being said, because I enjoy helping people (and I enjoy the positive network effects of many policies indirectly) I am often willing and happy to help and/or pay taxes to provide services I don't get the full direct benefit of.

I don't think you are right about a lot of policy failures stemming from people misjudging their ability to make lots of money. I think many policy failures come from idiotic first principles driving ideas around maximizing social welfare without taking into account who is paying for those policies because policy that has no/minimal direct or indirect benefit to the tax payer will be something the tax payer actively tries to avoid and often that avoidance comes in shitty political forms that only partly avoids the bad spending while also negating most of the benefit to the people not paying the taxes.

Instead we should be making some reasonably conservative assumptions about what the benefit flow to each tax payer looks like, targeting a net positive benefit to every tax payer and maximizing social welfare along that indifference curve

> That you are in some real or perceived negative situation does not mean I should be obligated to help you. Whether I help you or not is my own decision.

Since it's a core belief of yours, you should keep voting that way, whereas I'll keep voting to make sure the social safety nets exist since fairness and successful bootstrapping are never guaranteed.

Your problem is you think you have the moral high ground on social safety net and you don't. I'm a fan of the social safety net, it just has to be way less idiotic than it is today. To have any interest in paying for it, it needs to have far greater returns to me while costing less. That means refocusing spending on metrics that more directly benefit the tax payer (more effectively keep my employees healthy, more effectively fire shite teachers and raise education standards, keep my streets safe, provide effective transportation for both my workers and my goods to market, remove stupid nimby BS actively making all these services cost more and be less effective, etc)

Also, your vote is utterly ineffective other than annoying one time relocation penalties if the burden of dealing with this country becomes too high (not to mention, if you are in the usa both your options are coopted by people not good for me or for you). It would be far better if instead of thinking legacy social contract thoughts you started thinking in marginal cost and benefit terms.

I think you're assuming more about my policy preferences than I've let on. This conversation isn't likely to be productive as a result.

Ok, what's your policy preferences? You sound like a social contract kind of guy, which I obviously don't agree with. I would be more of a Rawlsian for legal system fairness and coercion minimization for social service provision (basically attempting to provide services that provide enough network effect benefit to the tax payer that the only coercion of the tax payer is for free loading avoidance rather than coercing tax payers into paying for things that are actively bad for them or negative value at current cost of provision)

This attitude leads to the state of society today in the US.

Your life is your own if you're on a remote island somewhere, but as long as we're living with you, please don't replace a middle class family in the city with your dogs...

The essence of your argument is "I don't believe in the same moral values you do."

That money replaced the other owner's wealth in that house. What changed? What changed for you? What changed for us?

What did change is the previous owner was taxed a boatload (yacht load?) on their capital gains on the house. And the new owner was taxed another yachtload on the capital gains they had to realize (selling shares) in order to buy the house. A lot of that capital gains tax was most likely postponed until someone's death - but still correct. Depending on the country, it's likely more than half the purchase price of the house went into taxes because of that transaction. Which is one of the reasons such purchases don't happen all that often (does that make you happier?)

But you can find solace in Victor Haghani's remark that most inherited wealth disappears in shockingly few years. Because most people are terrible at judging and managing investments (when they care at all). When with even with no-brainer investments it would keep modestly growing from generation to generation. See The missing billionaires - A guide to better financial decisions, Victor Haghani and James White, 2023.

They DID spend that money right back into the economy.

Do you mean to compare spending it versus giving it away?

Or would it be less revolting if they had listed the house on Airbnb or something?

Please explain.

That quote from Chouinard is awesome!

Buying property is a pretty bad way to put money into the economy, though partly dependent on your locations approach to capital gains (where I am it’s untaxed).

Since this is probably London, they probably had to pay stamp duty tax and property taxes. On a 10 million pound property, that'd be around 1.2 million pounds.

On top of that, there's annual property taxes for London. I don't know if there's any discount for primary residences, but they wouldn't be getting it for a property just for their dogs.

>> I find that utterly revolting. Imagine how much good you could do with that money.

I don't begrudge rich folk spending their money. I begrudge those who don't spend it.

When a billionaire spends money, it ultimately goes to people. Staff obviously, but also the entire supply chain for that staff. If they drop a million on flowers, we'll that goes yo flower sellers, who pay the flower growers, and do on. In other words it -is- doing good, its the economy.

Now I'm not advocating for trickle down economics. Thats not my point. But is it better to die with a billion dollars, or is it better to be an ex billionaire who dies broke?

If the money stays in the bank it can at least belendt out and used for productive stuff. If the billionaire instead decided 'I will use 50 million to make all these people do something which is a complete waste of time' then he had used his money-given power to waste a bunch of people's limited time on earth.

In the end it's the money actually used in their life which is the actual manifestation of their power. Some of them might use it to do good, but if it's just decadence then those money do more good in the bank.

That's not how money works.

Firstly billionaires don't have "cash" in some bank account. (They are more likely to borrow from banks than to have deposits in banks.) Their assets are likely to be in property or stocks etc.

Secondly there isn't a "limited" amount of money for people to borrow. Its not physical. As a first approximation you can treat the lending ability of banks to be unlimited (at least for Joe's like me.)

For your first point, I agree thats how their assets often are. And it's better that they stay there than being used for dog-chef's.

For the latter I must admit that I don't really know how it works in the US. In my country banks have rules about the ratio between debt and capital, and if someone put in 100 million it would absolutely mean that the bank would be allowed to lend out more.

But in any case the point is pretty much the same! That the billionaires money do more good where they are, not when spent on frivolous shit.

Dog chefs might disagree. :)

There are million lot of people (all the way down the food chain) that benefit from what you call "frivolous".

Indeed there are whole industries that could be categorised as "frivolous" depending on your point of view.

Flowers for example. Loads of people are employed growing, transporting, storing, selling, arranging them, yet nevertheless we have them, and people buy them.

Is me buying flowers any different to a billionaire buying a yacht?

Think about money as voting power for what the collective production force does.

You buying flowers is a tiny bit of vote for someone making flowers, giving you happiness. Someone buying a dog chef is a significant vote (enough for a whole worker) for... two happy dogs?

I don't think about employment as a 'gift' from the ones employing. The dog chef could, and would, have done something else if they did not cater to a couple of dogs. The billionaire gets to make another human waste their production because they have such immense voting power with all their money. And yes, the dog-chef might be happy, or maybe they are just a wage-slave doing what they can to survive.

> Imagine how much good you could do with that money.

With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot. Is there something you have in mind, specifically?

This kind of logic is just jealousy. "They have money I don't and spend it on things I don't value" is true of every entity wealthier than you. It's true of your consumption too: how many $7 lattes have you purchased that could have fed a whole family, as it were? It's true of corporations and bureaucracies and governments too, which is why libertarianism is so tempting.

But there's no world where everyone agrees on what stuff we should value, just like there's no world (or at least no feasible world) where people aren't able to spend wastefully, because both of those are at their core subjective decisions.

You can build a small school in a third world country, such as Nepal, for £10k. So you could build somewhere around 1000 small schools (or a lesser number of bigger ones).

Are there 1000 Nepali villages who have asked for a school and the local community thinks that’s what they’re really short on?

Or is that a thing you like seeing pictures of westerners building/staffing?

Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.

Your fellow respondent who mentioned GiveDirectly was at least advocating for a use of resources that has a strong chance of being net positive for the ostensible recipients.

>Are there 1000 Nepali villages who have asked for a school and the local community thinks that’s what they’re really short on?

Quite likely. Certainly if you include other developing countries, as well as Nepal.

There are small communities in Nepal that get very little help from the central government. Also much work still to be done to repair damage from the last earthquake, especially outside the tourist areas.

>Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.

Many of them are. However there are organizations like https://thejunipertrust.org that spend 98% of donations helping the intended recipients. Also they employ local to do the work. Which means money goes into the community which also makes the local community more invested in the project.

I understand GiveDirectly is also an excellent charity. But (egotistically) it is nice to be able to point at a picture of a school and think 'I did that' (or, at least, financed it).

That's a feasible individual expense. Have you built a school in Nepal? Do you have a link where I could? My guess is that, like most places, the fundamental limits to this stuff are not financial. You want 1000 schools you need 1000 schools worth of raw materials and 1000 crews to build them and roads to get all that stuff there and utilities to be extended to cover it. And then you need 1000 schools worth of teachers and staff, which you probably don't have either.

Economies don't work like this. They never have. If money was all it took to eradicate poverty then poverty wouldn't exist. Inequality in opportunity is an endemic problem with entire societies.

Including our own! Because that's exactly what you're complaining about: our society is set up to allow for billionaries and you think it should be fairer and that all that money should be easy to spread around more equitably. But it's not, and it can't be in any feasible way. You don't get that it's 100% cognitive dissonance to believe that Nepal is any different? The only difference is the scale of the numbers.

> Have you built a school in Nepal?

Yes. Sponsored the build anyway. I didn't lug the bricks miles from the nearest road!

>Do you have a link where I could?

https://thejunipertrust.org/

>You want 1000 schools you need 1000 schools worth of raw materials and 1000 crews to build them and roads to get all that stuff there and utilities to be extended to cover it.

If you had $10M to spend, then building 1000 small schools probably wouldn't be the best approach. For the reasons you say. But I don't have $10M to give.

>our society is set up to allow for billionaries and you think it should be fairer and that all that money should be easy to spread around more equitably

Yes. Rich people should be taxed more. Not a popular viewpoint on HN, I'm sure.

>But it's not, and it can't be in any feasible way.

We could fix it, if we wanted to. But the billionaires have the power, and they don't want it fixed.

>You don't get that it's 100% cognitive dissonance to believe that Nepal is any different? The only difference is the scale of the numbers.

Nepal is a poor country with chronic inequality. But, because it is a poor country, your dollar can do a lot more good there.

So, I clicked through. And while this looks like a worthy charity, you're spinning the numbers pretty badly. It's not $10k to build a school ab initio. It's $10k to REbuild an existing school damaged by an earthquake. Not the same thing at all!

I did say small school. Ours was a 2 room kintergarden, built from scratch to replace one that was made of corrugated iron and not in a good state.

https://thejunipertrust.org/jt_projects/bampti-kindergaten-s...

(the total cost was around ~£12k, of which we donated £10k).

10k must be the cost of materials and labor. But arranging this project, getting the local authorities on board, is extra.

In the case of The Juniper Trust, the vast majority of the organizing is done for free, by volunteers in the UK and Nepal.

Why would it cost anything to get 'the local authorities on board' to build a school - unless the country is totally corrupt?

> With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot

You could outright transfer it to some of the poorest people in the world (via https://www.givedirectly.org/, you'd add ~5% to their total cash transfer amount). They could then invest it in whatever they need.

Surely the billionaire in question does a ton of charity and philanthropy already, though, right? They all do. Is your point that they don't do enough, or that they shouldn't be allowed to spend 10M of what they don't give on a ridiculous dog house? Those are numerical arguments, so shouldn't you have to come to them with numbers to present?

Again, my point is that this is all subjective. You're simply saying that you don't value the ridiculous dog house and that they should spend that on something else, but they probably do spend on the thing you want already, or something very similar.

You don't get to tell people how to spend their money for the same reason they don't get to direct your own wasteful spending (which surely exists, right?). That's just standard western liberalism, you don't seriously disagree?

I agree jealousy can be present when the Have Nots look at the purchasing decisions of the Haves.

And I also agree that there is subjectivity in the decisions in whether the wealthy are self-indulging kings of the globalized era, or examples of the spoils the geniuses or innovators can achieve as they bring value to earth.

But the billionaires can justify their despotism and self-indulgence to the masses as they are marched to the guillotine. And the intellectual discourse on the subjectivity of hedonistic decisions be silenced. The French aristocracy learned the lessons of royal restraint the hard way.

> The French aristocracy learned the lessons of royal restraint the hard way.

"The French revolution was good, actually" is quite a take...

One Thomas Jefferson seems to have shared.

I am not sure why someone would downvote this. It is 100% revolting and indicative of a really rotten system that allows this to happen.

yeah, it was way better when you worked the fields for a duke who had dibs over your underage wife for the first night of marriage. and don't forget the round robin slave labour in the castle! and don't forget to set aside some grain for the taxes, who cares if this year has been bad and it all goes to the duke...

capitalism has its faults, but these platitudes about rotten systems really miss the mark.

I could get behind your general sentiment perhaps in the context of 19th century industrialism, or maybe even 20th century robber barons, but what paradise for the masses does the 21st century of “billionaires with no nation-state allegiance” bring exactly?

Also, concentration of wealth doesn’t reverse without action - so your initial remarks on fiefdoms and feudalism may not be too far from where we find ourselves in this century, which king do you bend the knee to: House of the dragon, Zuckerberg, or House of the camel, Musk?

I agree with your sentiment - I simply don't have a specific answer or I would be a very important person as I would have "solved" one of this century hardest problem.

I just believe that technology and innovation and creative destruction (in the schumpeterian sense) can (as they did) bring better resource usage which in turn drive better lifestyle for everyone.

I'm not sure where I would go from here; my brain is wired to my country problems (which is not usa, I hail from europe) which are completely 0 opportunities to actually get rich + complete domination of old money due to compound interest unstoppable force.

Heavily taxing inheritance in every form could be a start, but I'm not an expert in policy.

I mean, I suppose we're not chattel slaves or sending our kids into mines.

I mean, someone is, because that is the only way to get billionaires.

But it's not us or our kids, at least.

HN is great for getting a little window into how the rich sociopaths in this culture live.

When folks write ahistorical fantasy, as you've done here, it's a very useful picture to help understand what kinds of really bad things folks are capable of thinking about the world.

If you were to flatten a Mt. Everest and spread the material over the earth's surface, it would raise the height by 1mm.

But having such resource concentrated could spur individual risk taking and effort and thus innovation. e.g. Elon Musk

Diminishing returns. What extra risk do you take at $1b versus 100m? Now 10b vs 1b? Now 100b vs 1b?

Now, 1m vs 100k.

We should focus our systems on increasing more people from 100k to 1m rather than 10b to infinity.

The entire extra risk probably, actually. Some things like SpaceX does not happen because someone had a hundred thousand to contribute to seed capital. Some ventures are ambitious.

Giving money as charity doesn't help either. ask Bono.

Capital expensive projects like SpaceX require lot of money and wouldn't be possible by a group of 1000 individuals putting 1m into the bucket. Too many cooks.

Ok, but aside from Elon, how many examples are there of billionaires doing things like SpaceX (which had a very good business plan too don’t forget. It isn’t purely out of goodwill that he created that enterprise)?

My point is that the vast majority of billionaires seem to spend their money not taking massive risks for the betterment of humanity but rather they buy islands and jets and art and blah blah blah.

Whether a private individual puts in the risk or a nation state it doesn't matter. Ultimately your point is we should enrich everybody which is a fair point. But underlying that sentiment is the fact there should be products and services worth buying for that much money otherwise you would just be increasing inflation.

I think most people would like fewer Elon Musks, not more. Your Everest example also assumes that giving an unfathomable amount of money to Musk is more beneficial to society than using it for other purposes. I find that hard to believe.

I think it was about recognizing that Everest standing in one place makes it a convenient target. While the reality is that simply guillotining that everest and spreading the blood over the entire population achieves nothing (1mm).

One thing that this metaphor does not illustrate is that you cannot spread a billionaire's wealth in cash to the population to pay for rent and food. Nearly the entirety of that wealth is in shares of operating corporations. You would have to find other people / suckers to whom to sell the shares - in exchange for which billions in cash? Or you could liquidate the operating corporations, getting pennies on the dollars (again from whom?) and putting all the workers out of their job.

Either way, Musk et al are convenient targets but - aside from building SpaceX and StarLink and providing entertainment, they are irrelevant to your life.

Our greatest success was letting Elon get as far as he did. Our greatest failure was not removing the power the wealth enables once he weaponized it.

[Edit: Removed a statement that was interpreted in a way that was not intended] The concentrated wealth is undemocratic power (which is of course appealing to some mental models), it is not magic number goes up that is the concern.

As sibling comments says, optimize for innovation from more people, not enabling billionaire kings. Millionaires are fine; comfortable, and mostly harmless. Billionaires believe themselves to be gods, untouchable. This is a policy failure.

Whoa. I didn’t expect you to say something this awful. Would you mind considering whether to edit that out?

(If you’re wondering which part, re-read your comment and imagine it was about your father.)

My father dying would be no loss to the world either. It would be a loss to me, but only to me. These are inconvenient truths, regardless of the feelings you may have about them.

You and I have experienced life differently. Regardless, I have edited my comment to err on the side of caution, thank you.

I mean, that might be true, but you didn’t specify "to the world". Just that he might as well go die and nobody would care.

I’m not trying to give you a hard time, I was just genuinely surprised.

Your opinion on the topic is going to be based on the aggregate harm you believe a human to have incurred, and has the potential to incur going forward. I understand we may strongly disagree on this topic. I do not miss when harmful people are gone. That is distinct from "something bad should happen to this person," which is very different and I would agree exceptionally distasteful.

All I meant was, even if someone genuinely believes the world would be better off if X person dies, bluntly stating that belief is generally not appropriate for fostering intellectual curiosity. It’s also a bit depressing.

But I’m a fan of agreeing to disagree, so; agreed.

But I am intellectually curious (perhaps to a fault), and have arrived at this position from a curious place, first principles even. If someone is causing harm, and there are no mechanisms to box them in to not cause harm, what else are you to do besides wait for them to leave (and perhaps take a bit of solace that a harmful person no longer roams amongst us, inflicting harm on others without repercussions)?

Genuine question from a high empathy human. As I said above and to reaffirm my position: It's definitely not "something bad should happen to this person," (not good, I don't support this at all, and have said it nowhere in this thread) but "at least eventually they won't be here to cause the harm they cause." I don't believe that idea to be in poor taste, but I am happy to be challenged on it.

Kissinger comes to mind, picking from an extreme example for argument's sake.

“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow

> It’s also a bit depressing.

This is an understatement of current state. And yet, we go on. I hope this subthread has helped build context and explain my position with regards to the statement you took issue with (and that I removed out of an abundance of caution), which is not from a place of malice, but more pragmatic resignation.

"I mean, when you see the principal renting a chalet and spending over £1 million on a week’s holiday, and then you look at the full spectrum of the household, it can be jarring. You’ve got the housekeepers who might’ve come from a less developed country"...

Absolutely disgusting.

I like my exploited labor to be hidden through two or at least three layers of abstraction so that I don't have to feel sick about it: like electronics or clothing or produce harvesting or ... just about everything produced at scale. But scale feeds the wealth of billionaires' theft so my sarcasm is ourobourean.

I seem to recall reading a book about this back in the 2000's. Wealth was split into three groups:

1-10 million

10-100 million

100-1000 milllion+

The first group tends to be very conservative, as they worked extremely hard to amass that wealth (recall this book is from like 2003, not today where there are over a million millionaires in the US, albeit paper).

The second group tends to be inherited wealth and is more liberal.

The third group is absolutely cuckoo bananas. Once you cross the into the near-billion/billion range, you live in a bizarre fantasy world curated to your every whim.

Maybe David Brooks wrote it? I can't for the life of me remember, but it was fascinating. There was a woman who paid a young lady $100k a year to sprinkle birdseed around her house so that her indoor cats would be able to watch the birds. And there were a number of stories of kitchen staff servers who do nothing but show up and serve food in highly choreographed ways, but still need to go to a finishing school for a year to do this.

> The third group is absolutely cuckoo bananas. Once you cross the into the near-billion/billion range, you live in a bizarre fantasy world curated to your every whim.

Whenever I need a dismal reality check I remind myself that in our country, the people who for the most part can least afford to throw hard earned money into a fire have been habituated to do so gladly, willingly and regularly in a roughly weekly sacraficial ritual which has the effect of minting a new member of the class such as you mentioned above, from scratch, six to eight times a year.

These people, usually from backgrounds not exactly experienced in managing such sums, promptly (on the advice of lawyers) vanish from the face of the Earth for all intents and purposes, except for the generation of another pulse of trashy Instagram bougie bragging by various second and third order beneficiaries of this sudden transfer of wealth.

You’ve got skill with words.

The definition of conservative is flexible. The first category is probably not willy-nilly flying private jets and having a lot of dedicated personal staff today.

So, in that respect it does seem different from the other categories. Of course, priorities play a role.

Sounds like Richistan by Robert Frank

I don't know exactly how much money my friends and relatives have, but I suspect that several are in the second group, and none inherited that wealth.

A book written in the 2000s may pre-date much of Silicon Valley wealth creation.

August of 2000 is right when the first round of paper millionaires suddenly weren't. I was there with the rest of my peers looking at our options sheets going "damn... almost."

The article is fiction. The company launched less than a year ago. The founder claims that the company has had more than 100 clients, in less than a year? Pure marketing fiction — I doubt more than 10% of this article is true.

Could be fiction. But could also be that the people that launched the company have contacts going many years back prior. Not every company is started from zero.

Same site that published the story about the woman who 'got scammed for $50K'. https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...

i read the whole story. is it made up? what's wrong with it? it's at least, well written.

I may be wrong, but I think the alleged victim writes a financial column at one of the pretty big houses. And covered scams before. I would be really surprised if that person stuffs $50k in cash into a shoebox for an "undercover CIA agent".

Sorry if I confused this story with something else.

thanks, you got the story right! It does sound crazy, but that also seems to be the point: scam victims are shamed and it's worth level setting on how "it can happen to anyone" because there's very sophisticated psychological warfare going on here.

Not sure if fiction. But right from the start smelled like a 'submarine' PR fluff.

Reminds me of this -

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...