The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel
Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best. But they still have to load/unload dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.
The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.
At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things. All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of. The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)
(The people I've known with serious money made most of it themselves, and didn't need a family office. Except for one married couple who blew through 8 figures and went broke.)
These are between multi-family offices and scams targeting new money. (The intersection between the best hospitality folks you can privately hire and the best money managers is roughly zero. Consolidating those functions makes no sense unless someone cannot afford them.)
That's a good way to look at it.
For small values of "personally". I once visited a rent-an-office place which had a live receptionist. She had a phone with about thirty line buttons. Each time she answered a different line, she gave a different company name.
So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.
The local economy pretty much depends on the influx of foreign money from the people climbing. A fit person would be physically capable of carrying their full load, but it simply isn't done because of the economic disparity between the foreign climbers and the local porters. I don't know if that was enforced by law or custom, but the presenter was quite clear that it's not really possible to climb without local porters.
On the mediocrity principle, I think this is how things worked in general. Necessary to the local economy.
My Filipino friend explained to me that back home, if you have more than a certain amount of money, it's seen as incredibly selfish not to employ people as housekeepers, etc.
I'd imagine that's true in a lot of places with income disparity and/or high unemployment numbers. It made a lot of sense to me.
Some places if you’re the only house on the block who mows their own lawn, you’ll be considered stingy or weird.
She told me the professor had a guy employed to open and close the gates for when he drove to work and came home in the evening. That's all the guy did. Full time job.
Sounded so preposterous at first, but after thinking a wee bit I came to a similar conclusion that the alternatives might be a lot worse. It was steady income, albeit not a lot.
It serves other purposes. That narrative is a convenient collective lie, full stop.
What is the current alternative? Are they any better?
When I was kid growing up (in Brazil), we had a live-in housekeeper. She moved to São Paulo from some poor rural area in the South of Brazil. As many people from poor rural areas, she was forced to drop out of school on 3rd grade to help her family.
If I remember it correctly, she was 21, 22 years old when she first moved in. The agreement was she would get minimum wage + regular benefits + free housing. She would work from ~7:30am until 3pm, get a break in the afternoon and then go to night school from 7 to 10pm. On weekends she was free, so she could either be out with her friends or coming along our weekend camping trips.
She worked with us for 5-6 years, finished school, moved out of our home when she got married. Had two daughters, the oldest one just finished college. I know all that because 30+ years later my mom and her still keep in touch.
Possibly stories like these are not the majority, but they were pretty common. Today, this would be unthinkable not because economic inequality has diminished, but because whatever we had that passed for "middle class" in Brazil got completely squeezed out by governments over the last 25 years.
There are many ways to give back to society
because it locks people in that status and heteronomy
I can tell you that here in the US, my somewhat upper middle class aunt used to clean homes part time. Husband was an engineer, she was a housewife, kids were away at school. Not the type of person with hobbies and such. Was a bit bored.
Not sure of the specifics but I think she pulled in a couple of grand a month cleaning. Pretty handy when you're putting two kids through college. Or so I thought. Thanks to you, today I learned it was all "a lie." ((giant eye roll))
It's not an uncommon side gig for bored suburban housewives. There are a few women in my middle class town that do it.
I don't think full time housekeeping, which seems more common in other countries, necessarily locks anybody into anything. Anecdotally I think it's a fairly common thing to do when getting an education. I also don't know that it's always low-paid, either, especially if it includes nanny duties etc.
Guilty as charged. I have the American mentality due to being raised here, and I would be horrified to hire a housekeeper or servant. The "well, it's better than nothing" argument, while true, feels icky and exploitative. "Better than nothing" is a terrible bar and a sign of a broken society, and I personally just don't want to be part of continuing that brokenness. Totally understand if someone grew up in a different culture, they likely have a totally different view on it.
And yea, I know there are other less visible areas in every product and service value chain where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.
Do you feel "icky" by going to a supermarket and having a cashier scanning your products? Do you feel "icky" by taking a taxi? How about by taking a public bus, train or plane?
Do you go to restaurants or bars? Do you feel "icky" about someone taking your order, cleaning up your table, pouring out drinks for you?
Do you have kids? Have you ever hired a babysitter? Do you feel "icky" about someone else being temporarily responsible for the well-being of your child?
> I know there are other less visible areas (...) where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.
I'm honestly more concerned about people who think that they should have "an answer to this" than all the exploitation that exists.
I can tell you what it's *not* the solution. Eliminating all sort of manual labor is *not* a solution. Eliminating manual labor will lead to even more isolation and atomized individuals. It will put us all in different bubbles and make us completely unable to relate to other people and it will make us even more susceptible to be defined by what we consume.
If you are part of a society, it will be better for everyone if you start participating in it. Instead of looking down on people whose work is not as valuable as yours (because that's what honestly your "feeling icky about it" seems to boil down to), look at these interactions as opportunities for mutual, voluntary help. If you think their work is worth more than what they are getting, tell them so and back it up with your generosity. There is no point in "feeling bad" about it.
You can, instead of paying for a housekeeper pay for machines etc. made in the country in question, thus creating technical jobs there that might develop people more than housekeeping does.
In the US (and Europe...) labor is expensive so it make sense to have technical people design machines.
Who know if or how long the above will continue, but it is still possible in many countries if you can get a job there.
On flip side he had to change 2 jobs because travel distance as ~20 miles but in term of duration it was 4+ hrs daily. And no such thing as peak hours there, day-in/day out, morning, afternoon, late night, week day, weekend, same worst possible traffic.
Any interaction with real world outside of home can wear people down specially the kind who keep multiple household helps. From traffic, to pollution, medical care, school admissions, doing groceries, shopping, parking and on and on.
One way to think is at absolute top level like senior most politicians, industrialist, CEOs, other types of super influential people, developed vs developing countries' lifestyle can match, but as one start moving down the ladder, the quality falls very rapidly in developing world and serious compromises can start just 2 step down from top.
Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.
https://www.aaprco.com/charter-a-private-car
Of course, if you’re really rich, you’d have your own. ;)
That has more to do with owning business interests than wealth. The guy who owns a small chain of a mundane business, has stake in another business via investment, etc, etc, his social circle looks roughly the same.
Signalling Status plays a big role in group formation/group maintenance/social cohesion etc.
The larger groups grow, the more complex the group dynamics get, keeping groups of people together and preventing them from disintegrating is one of the most complex problem we face, given all the differences in culture, religion, language, class, personalities, ambitions, values, needs, intelligence, skill, education level, interests etc etc
A short cut frequently used (cause its easy) is using Leisure and Luxury (see Theory of the Leisure Class).
"So you like what I wear, where I stay, what I eat, who my friends are, what toys I have and want to be like me or hang out with me then do what I say". This works pretty well. In fact Veblen's prediction in Theory of the Leisure Class was that since Tech has a tendency to eliminate waste, tech would eventually eliminate the need for a Leisure/Status signalling Class that keeps large groups from unraveling.
But social cohesion of large groups is such a complex problem, society even today requires all kinds of Status Signalling to keep the groups together.
If you find ways to keep groups together without status signalling you are onto something special.
The people I know with a net worth over 10m do not display it. Why would they want to. It only has downsides and no upside. Same applies to other forms of status/rank/belonging.
(Not contradicting your points, merely adding to them.)
If you want to experiment with that, try to NOT match other people’s style AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement. Do not hide your (other) insecurities; those with status don’t have to hide their authenticity. This may sound like a contradiction at first, but you can develop an universal sense of belonging that remains authentic. You will be surprised which people will suddenly find you to talk with you, once you stop seeking their attention.
> AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement.
That's also signaling status.
"Don’t be so humble — you’re not that great" -- Golda Meir.
And of course:
"You cannot not communicate" -- Paul Watzlawick
We should strive to remove ourselves from these games as much as possible and not to lean into them as LVMH would like.
Rejecting such superficial signaling only enhances one's life, IMO.
Veblen goods are the most simplistic and superficial form of intentional status signaling and yes, the world would be much better off without them.
Other kinds of status signaling are more interesting and more subtle. If I talk about my weekend softball team, I'm not doing it to impress anybody, but it unavoidably does convey some things about my status.
It tells you I almost certainly have a car, I have leisure time, people like me enough to at least tolerate me on their team, that I have a few hundred dollars to spend on gear/fees, and that I have some basic level of physical coordination/strength/ability. It also strongly hints that I grew up middle class or higher because those are the kids who were most likely taught to play baseball and continue with that as a leisure activity into adulthood.
Not sure how any individual or society could function otherwise, due to the limits physics places upon us.
They have Miele appliances, but having "same appliances" doesn't make justice to the fact that there are deeper differences. Yes, they're status goods, but I think one's life might greatly improve by being very wealthy - even if your life can still be shitty as a wealthy person
Nothing but good stuff to say in coming up on 10 years of use.
Would not recommend this to anyone who can't easily test them in a showroom and even then not really... They do the actual job well, but their UX makes me angry every day.
The biggest difference more money would make is that I could have someone else deal with those issues.
Firmware is an important part of the appliance. An appliance with Frigidaire hardware and third-party firmware is counterfeit.
Maybe the same thing happened with your Miele appliances?
The oven is mediocre at best, my Annova Precision Oven is much much better, much better control of temperature, heats up much faster, has more features, infinitely cheaper.
The range hood needs to be repaired because it makes a lot of noise. Repair of Miele appliances are super expensive.
The only appliance I'm impressed with is the wine cave but that's a white labeled Liebherr
You aren’t alone
There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.
There was no way to get to a smartphone without cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment in silicon, software, network rollouts, and so on. A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.
The very wealthy cannot get things that are that special and it’s actually pretty amazing. Warren Buffet has called out several times that he lives like a regular middle class American and the main exception is flying private, but if were forced to choose he would dump the jet over the iPhone.
Oh? What d'you call this, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator
Now, granted, most very rich people would probably not have _wanted_ one of these.
Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)
A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city
Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-network currency, you still have to find a conversion path with enough capacity, and pay a fee at each step, so maybe that's not it either.
People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.
The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.
Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc
If the government requires taxes to be paid in dollars, that sets a "floor" on the value of a dollar as a medium of exchange - for most people in the US living a "normal" life, you have to acquire some amount of dollars throughout the year, under penalty of jail/loss of property (property tax). Then, since you already have 300m+ consumers in a massive market using the currency, odds are you'll use it too.
The only way you'd truly render dollars worthless is through government action or malfeasance; the fictional scenario where every person on earth not only agrees dollars are worthless, but also agrees to forfeit all property in the US, all employment in the US, and interests in any US financial holdings is quite a few steps beyond the point where "the people just decide to rebuke the dollar's lack of backing".
That's more like saying "Dollars are worthless in a scenario like Fallout or The Road", rather than making any relevant point about government efforts to maintain fiat currency.
In the original scenario of "people decide dollars are worthless... nothing the government can do", my point was that the government has a lot of levers to pull to backstop value, albeit at a far lower level than today's dollar.
The dollar wouldn't become worthless, but it would become worth 2% less per year.
What you say is true of Bitcoin though, since there's so little debt denominated in Bitcoin.
"if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting
Consider the following scenario:
If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money.
Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person.
People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him.
After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on.
What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.
Goods, yes. Services, fuck no. Look at the Four Seasons and Amangani yacht and jet programmes for a <$10mm example of the sorts of experiences wealth opens up.
The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door. The rooms are basically the same, the fixtures at the four seasons are fancier, the bedding is prettier, some random furniture may be sourced from a different supplier. The four seasons will be in a location which has somewhat better views.
The four seasons has prettier and more attentive staff, and there are less "less well off" at the four seasons. And you get to brag that you went to the "four seasons" but it really isn't that much better.
It's almost all status.
If you want hotel employees to kiss your ass and pretend to respect you, then this is the place for you. But the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed.
I will give you a good example of something that most upper middle class people can’t afford or at least can’t afford frequently.
Disney World VIP tours. My wife has family who are club 33 members and they gifted us a VIP tour as a wedding present. The tour guide drives you around to the different parks and walks you backstage through tunnels and hidden areas to get you the very front of any ride you want to go on.
I broadly agree with you on their hotels. But I’d note that Four Seasons doesn’t compete on room quality, but service. If you planned your stay perfectly they shouldn’t outperform. But if you forgot something, or need help with something weird, they have a habit of being halfway legendary. (Colleague left his suit at home. They had one made overnight. Concierge apparently knew a suit maker’s cell.)
I’m not comparing the hotels, I’m comparing their yacht and jet programmes.
Status signalling is mostly an upper middle class game—the truly wealthy tend to use their wealth to buy power or privacy.
Regardless, at luxury hotels, the rooms are nice, sure [^0], but you're mostly paying for top-tier service.
If you want to travel somewhere within the US where you _know_ your room will be tip-top and don't want to lift a finger, the Four Seasons/Ritz/St. Regis is it.
[^0] They do have some huge, amazing suites that you won't find at a Westin, though.
I think it would be more fair to say that the Four Seasons isn't materially better than the _Conrad_ next door. I've stayed in some amazing Hilton-branded properties, but also some terrible ones. I guess I am expecting the hotel brand to denote the _minimum_ level of comfort, and there are some Hiltons that truly drag along the bottom, where I'd be very surprised to find myself at a shitty Four Seasons (or Conrad, which is the HHG's next step up from a Hilton).
I have nothing bad to say and everything good about how they handled our stay. Whether it was worth the price is (as this whole topic is about) relative to your means. I would say that it was more than we would have paid, but now that we've experienced it it's on my radar as a reasonable value. Their signature "Butler" service was beyond amazing; traveling with my son is difficult at the best of times and they handled everything.
They essentially allowed me to have an actual vacation vice allowing me to handle a series of challenges and let the rest of my family have a vacation (which is the normal way things go).
So... More plus influence.
I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.
I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.
The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.
I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was donating 99% to charity. The internet got very angry about it, based on flimsy reasoning: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-phila...
Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far less good, but keep a lower profile, get much less hate.
A common meme on the internet is "if your intent was truly charitable, you wouldn't care whether anyone said thank you".
But this is a false dichotomy. Many people find the idea of charity appealing to some degree, but most of us aren't die-hard saints either. When we see the good deeds of others get devalued or even punished, that makes us less enthusiastic about doing good ourselves.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Punishing do-gooders is one of the most anti-social things you can do. On the other hand, praising do-gooders is a very cheap way to incentivize people to do more good in the world.
I believe that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you start caring more about your personal reputation than your material goods. Sadly, there is so much reflexive skepticism towards billionaire philanthropy at this point that it's not even clear to me whether doing philanthropy is reputationally net-positive.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney
Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag." He did not own a car or a house and wore a $10 Casio F-91W watch
I suppose that's one way to avoid the bad press :-P
NYT article(1):
..when asked what had driven him into such deep secrecy:
“I feel it’s my life,” Mr. Feeney said. “I’d be the last guy to tell a wealthy person what to do with their money. They’re entitled to do whatever they want.”
quote from his kid: "...he sheltered us from people using the money to treat us differently,” Leslie Feeney Baily said. “It made us normal people.”
when asked why he had chosen to reveal himself:
“A lot of wealthy people, they don’t realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good,” he said. “If they knew it gives so much satisfaction, I wouldn’t have to persuade them."
https://lowendmac.com/myturn/02/0403.html
(Edited to add, another more detailed article: https://macfolkloreradio.com/be/)
People make this claim about a lot of software (Netscape being the poster child) but typically whenever I look into it, the nuanced answer turns out to be "Microsoft may have thrown it's weight around, but the product largely failed on it's own merits."
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer for free with Windows, essentially destroying Netscape’s business overnight.
1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.
2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)
The book of the battle - Competing for the Future - makes it clear how much of a mess Netscape was in internally
Essentially they had alternate code bases for every other version of the browser and we forever porting feature and bugs between the two (and often forgetting and so getting regressions)
Otherwise other billionaires will think: "If I get into philanthropy, people will take it as an opportunity to publicize un-flattering facts about me."
His actions since then have been far better.
The hate he gets now tend to be from people attacking his more recent actions. "Trying to cure malaria - clearly mind control" sort of stuff.
But that's not related to his philanthropy mostly. There's evil business stuff he actually did and there are some conspiracy freaks. Those would exist anyway. But I've never seen a significant number of people with criticisms because of the programs he enables.
Just the opposite. By engaging in positive-sum transactions, society as a whole becomes wealthier. That's how economic growth occurs.
Not everything is accurately seen through this nihilistic, conspiratorial power lens.
Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.
Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".
If you knew anything about NGOs and politics you wouldn't simply go for "They're asking for or donating money so they're obviously awesome, their intentions are great and it's a net positive".
Calling skepticism reflective is like saying that if you think your company doesn't have your best interest at heart like it says you're being paranoid.
Forbes estimates that Gates would be a trillionaire if it weren't for his philanthropy. Perhaps some philanthropists pursue the strategy you describe, but it's unreasonable to assume this is their strategy by default.
>Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".
In a free society, not everything people do needs to be authorized by the government. I believe that Gates has sincere concern about the well-being of people in the developing world, so it doesn't particularly bother me when he lobbies on their behalf.
Insofar as cynicism is justified, it should be easy to provide concrete and compelling evidence that Gates has bad intentions in his philanthropy. So why isn't there any such evidence in your comment?
If you rent a $10m house you pay $500k a year for it. With 50% tax you'd have to earn $1m a year to pay the rent.
If you own a $10m house you pay no rent, and have to earn $0 a year to live there.
That includes everyone who filed a tax return from the kid working at McDonald’s to Warren Buffet.
Not sure what you’d call a comfortable life but a single mom making $72,000 per year would be struggling in many major cities.
So all those people who sold $100M businesses are included in that $72,000 figure.
The comment I replied to referenced a “wealth cap” and “redistribution” so “everyone could have a comfortable life”.
My point is that take to an extreme of equal redistribution to everyone, people would end up in a barely comfortable position.
Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.
Work with incentives instead of against incentives.
There's yachts and fancy houses and supercars to buy for the rich. They make their lives better, in some way. A lot of people are employed to make those things.
I don't see how this helps anyone. If wealth were distributed more equally, those people would work on making the lives of everyone better, not just the lives of a small elite.
So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.
This stuff isn't life, it's just the random trinkets we fill our lives with. Time is life. The rich can do with their time what they please.
We do. It's just that "wealthy" is far past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to buying high-quality expensive items.
No, we don't need to come up with things for the rich to buy just to fix their incentives. We should be asking ourselves how to decrease wealth inequality, not how to make it more fair to those on top.
Maybe the super rich should take up training LLMs as a hobby.
Perhaps you also recognise this quote:
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
In what way for example?
In what why am I protective of rich people? Just by asking for what you mean?
Those are called philanthropic charities - research institutes or the like. Some of the very rich have them.
Edit: the town I was born in had a Carnegie Library[1].
Edit 2: the point being that the very rich buy social status and respect.
like
>Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back.
Funnily, my parents always call back within 60 seconds even midnight, while a certain someone get disowned by their kids.
>For a donation of $100k+ to his charity, you could probably play a match with him.
For a donation of 16k you can have a 1 on 1 zoom call with Keanu Reeves. He advertised this pretty well, so "ordinary people" should know this.
At this point, all the riches and riches are on SNS flexing their wealth, I don't think there is anything left that ordinary people just couldn't browse SNS and see what can you buy with those money.
That's why a lot of poor people who unlock large amount of money go broke quite fast, they still think like poor people
Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.
I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.
I'm not your level wealthy, but I don't work, live comfortably, and I'm happy.
I prefer not to eat at expensive restaurants, but I enjoy restaurants that serve good food. I don't really want to fly to an expensive city and spend lots of money. I'd rather spend time in nature, hike, try to ID plants, and spend time with my wife and our animals.
This is so strangely true.
I arranged a dad's dinner once, and we had a drug dealer there. Stereotypical hard man, wife dressed in branded clothes, fancy car, very obviously not in the line of business that he pretended. Trying extremely hard to flash how he used the private airport.
Seated with him was an actual billionaire, one whose family made their money a while back so you wouldn't know if you hadn't come across it before, like me. This guy just behaved like a normal middle class dad. Dressed like everyone else, ordinary SUV. No flashy moves.
Other two I know in that class are also just ordinary. No supercar, just a Merc or upper end car. They send their kids to private schools that ordinary top 5% people can afford, but no big arm movements.
> I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures
We must have a very different definition of "accessibility"
Let's say you make 100k a year in Berlin, you're already in the top 1% so "accessibility" is out of the equation at that point, that's 4.8k net. Let's say you manage to invest ~60% of your salary, that's about 3k a month, 36k a year. Now let's say you get 8% return per year (which you won't), you're barely above 500k after 10 years.
So yeah sure, if you're in the top 1% to begin with, and live on what basically amounts to your local minimum wage while investing everything else, you can get to 1 million after 15 years or so...
Ah, and don't forget the tax man, he'll take his 20-30% cut on your million.
Well first off £100 != $100 != €100
Sorry but you're completely delusional if you think literally "anyone on a programmer's salary" can make 1 million in 10 years. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm not saying you didn't do it, I'm just saying it's not "accessible", nor the norm, nor representative of the vast majority of devs.
https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/europe/
The median software engineer salary in Europe is under 60k euros, which is £50k. Show me how you make 1m on a 60k euros salary in 10 years, even if you paid 0 income tax and invested every single cent with an average 8% annual return you'd still be under 1m.
> Anyway, stay poor, I literally don't care.
Looks like you can't buy your way out of arrogance
If you can guarantee 20-200% of return per year consistently over 10-20 years go to wall street they'll pay you millionS per year to work for them
There is a big gap between "I'm in the top 1% earners and lucked out in the market" and "Literally every software engineer can make 1m in 10 years".
Most people aren’t wealthy because they don’t even try, and instead run on a treadmill until they drop dead.
I have no interest in going to work on Wall Street or anything similar.
My entire investing philosophy is basically based on this site. There is constant signal here on what will be big in 5-10 years, and all that’s required is that you get in before the press start talking about it, too.
A $10k investment in NVDA 10 years ago is worth $2.6M now - and if you were paying attention 10 years ago, when CUDA was fairly new and shiny and rapidly gaining mindshare, you would have noticed that they were inevitably going to own the ML/AI space, and that this shit was going to be huge.
This is also why I said $1M, not $100k - because I have managed exceptional returns - but with 10x the starting capital even moderately good returns can grow rapidly. I’ve also bet on some absolute lemons where I’ve lost every last red cent.
Either way, it seems that many would sooner be bitter than do something to improve their situation, which is sadly very common, and again, why not everybody is a millionaire.
Also, edited nitrogen fixers. Haber-Bosch is going to be hard to sustain with environmental targets.
Oh, and DRI, same kind of reason, as coking coal is likewise going to fall foul.
I could be totally wrong, but that’s seemingly the drift of things, and where I have lately been placing my chips.
Went long on nuclear power as soon as AI started to take off, and there’s still ample headroom there too.
As ever, only invest that which you can afford to lose.
That said I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It can pay off for some, but the future is unknown. I've been to funerals for several people who didn't live to 65. Your body starts declining as you get older so a lot of active things really need to be done young if you do them at all. Maxing a 401k seems like a good plan and then spend the rest today - you should still have a nice retirement if you live that long, but you can enjoy life now.
If you don't like the above, religion offers an afterlife if you choose the right one. However they agree choosing the wrong one won't... Good luck choosing.
The tax systems doesn’t create wealthy people, it just doesn’t cut their legs out from under them.
a) by disproportionally tax the poor vs. the rich. In the United States, "42 states tax the top 1 percent at a lower rate than the bottom 20 percent, while 46 states tax the top 1 percent less than the middle 60 percent of earners." https://media.itep.org/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf
b) by using the taxes to disproportionately benefit the upper income brackets, e.g. by investing more in universities than schools, or infrastructure in wealthy neighborhoods than poor neighborhoods (both true for the US).
Looking into it more, I was ignoring sales tax and some of those other, as they are more indirect, but consumption taxes will hit harder for those with less… it’s just not as easy to quantify.
Looking at big more it seems like the split between federal/state taxes for the bottom 20% may be 20/80, while for the rich it’s flipped at 90/10.
While all this is interesting, and has opened my eyes a little in this area… I would still stand by the latter half my original statement. The wealth is created elsewhere before taxes even come into the picture. The local taxes can hit a point of being very low impact long before someone hits the 1% or is considered wealthy, and that isn’t turning anyone into a billionaire.
I think that there are a few things that are needed for lots people to become wealthy (of course, the ability to exact physical violence on others can enable a few to become very very wealthy as well).
1) Property rights that are equally enforced. That you have important friends shouldn't give you the ability to take my business.
2) Liquidity. There needs to be mechanisms that enable investment.
3) Civil infrastructure & some sort of safety net. People who are frightened of what awaits their children, or them in their old age, or of sickness, are reluctant to invest. They will be happy to work themselves half to death, but even if they have enough money, they will be very very risk averse.
Is this what you think, or are there other mechanisms that you have in your mind?
I suppose this naiveté is a by product of swallowing the media's constant garbage about the reason Jeff Bezos (et al...) has a yacht is purely down to avoiding tax.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/one-day-the-...
Almost every visible accessory or piece of functional equipment has luxury models that may be only slightly functionally better (sometimes not even better, sometimes actually worse) but also charge massive margins.
Not so much with phones, tablets, or laptops. It’s as if the world has collectively decided that you simply can’t beat Apple, which astoundingly in the meantime completely ignores the luxury market. Even if you charged $50K+ per unit—I’m sure Samsung and every other maker would love to charge exorbitant prices for end-game devices—you’ll make a fool of yourself: iPhone will objectively be more premium, work smoother, have all the high-end apps, etc. There’s no choice but to tighten your belt and thin your margins to stay competitive.
I’m not sure how this (undoubtedly impressive) achievement makes me feel. Maybe it’s the feeling of finally being able to afford one, or the ability to say “it’s a cute expensive toy, but it’s objectively worse for X and Y reasons”, but there is something about the Leicas and Ducatis of the world.
It was exactly the "expensive watch" model; priced absurdly high on the Veblen good theory. It didn't work.
The market might get revived when the tech improvement flattens flattens. like they did for cars.
That's quite enough actually.
you can even buy people to make more money for you, so you don't have to do it yourself, either through your "family office" investment firm, or through venture capital. You don't have to do anything but ask for what you want and there it is.
The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.
We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards status goods which help no one since they are zero sum.
We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.