This is how I feel reading Oppenheimer’s biography. He came from an affluent family and apparently never had to worry about paying the bills, being free to fully dedicate himself to the things that interested him. The guy was a genius, no doubt about that… I just feel that we would have a lot more geniuses out there if we didn’t have to work so much in order to enjoy so little.
There are definitely people out there capable of major contributions to human culture and knowledge toiling in a sweat shop or picking fruit.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- Stephen Jay Gould
That’s some Girl Next Door shit. He just want to get Samnang to the US so he can cure cancer
Well Einstein had to work in a patent office.
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I’m not jealous of rich people’s possessions or lifestyle. I’m worried about the power they wield over other people’s lives. Their power to affect the laws that get passed, their power to close down stores and factories and lay off all the workers, their power to kick people out of their homes.
The closer I get to my retirement the more I realize how much of my life has been wasted at my job. It’s sad really.
I hear you there. Time is all we really have and it’s an extremely limited quantity.
I’m envious of the rich because they’ll never know the struggle of having to choose between gas in the car to get to work, or paying your bills so the heat stays on.
It’s the security that I want. If I could quit my job tomorrow and all my bills would be convered and all my debts (and their related payments) suspended, and I was given enough to put food on the table… Then I’d be a lot happier. I’d know that I’ll never have to submit to some dickhead boss trying to push me around so I can be underpaid and go home late to my cold house because I don’t make enough to keep it warm.
The future is stupid.
That was most of the past, too
It was really only like 30-40 years when things were good economically for the average person. Every couple hundred years we get little blips like that for certain geographic areas.
It’s not so bad in Europe. Getting worse, but we have strong unions, so it takes longer.
There was like 7,000 years of grinding poverty in Europe
I went from homeless to 6 figures and security is exactly what drove me so hard. It’s such a relief to just keep my bills and mortgage on autopay and never even think about it. I still feel like an imposter when I go to the grocery store and don’t have to keep track of how much every item costs to ensure I have enough to cover it.
I’m not rich by most definitions but getting to a point of real stability makes life so much easier. Granted I still worry all the time that I’ll be fired and I have backup plans upon backup plans in case shit hits the fan.
I mean fair but I’m also definitely jealous of the things they have
Like what, Baldur’s Gate III? I can buy that myself.
I’m not jealous of anyone, good on you. What I do have a problem with is when the rich refuse to pay their fair share of taxes. Not only do they don’t want to pay a fair share, while using our society, they use that money they saved cheesing the system to subvert politicans and our system to pay even less and squeeze people even more.
All that said I also think billionaires shouldn’t be a a thing. Past 1000 million dollars you should be taxed at 99%.
Not just that but I don’t think massive amounts of wealth concentrated into a small number of hands is good for a democracy.
While I agree with your message on taxation, I don’t think any billionaires actually earn a billion dollars that could be taxed like that.
Our media fawns over their wealth which is assets, their business value and the like, not actual income that could be taxed. I definitely agree with a wealth tax though, but I don’t know if that operates in the same way as a progressive income tax works, as in “after x amount you owe y% and then z% after another total dollar amount.”
Wealth tax. No one needs more money. You’ve won capitalism. Now you can compete in a high score of who gives back most to society, and pretend it’s actually you that is doing the good deed.
I kinda like the general idea, but I think you’d just end up with corporate fat-cats that personally hold close the limit, and then have a couple of hundred ‘friends’ who hold the rest and live in fear of themselves and their families getting disappeared if they touch the wealth without directions from said fat-cats.
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What does that fix though? Government is a little more funded, so what? If thieves were rampant, the solution isn’t taxing the thieves.
Billionaires leech off of the working class and we should just tax them? No, we need to address the underlying mechanisms that allow them to do that. If someone actually did $1 billion worth of labor, they deserve the billion, and probably a prize for being the first
It would not fix our problems, but it may help discredit the austerity narrative promulgated by the ruling class, and also erode some of its power to repress more meaningful change.
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X/Twitter post by user lauren🌙 @lanaskittens reading: I’m not jealous of rich people bc of the things they have, I’m jealous of rich people because they get to pursue their passions in life without having to work a gruelling 40+ hours a week job literally just to get by
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Some well off people work way more than 40 hours per week to be wealthy. Not all of them are living the dream (so to speak) - they also can be stuck.
What the super rich people get is time. They have people to take care of all the crap the rest of us deal with - shopping, fixing the car, booking holidays, cooking, cleaning…
Yeah… I’d rather be wealthy than not.
what if their passion is working and it’s more than 40 hours
is workaholism a passion or an addiction, a way to distract yourself from having to experience the painful realities of looking at yourself in the mirror with vulnerability and honesty?
This is it. Although the selfmade millionaires are few and not many they are complete workaholics. The ones who inherited wealth are the ones screwing around and spending their money.
At a certain point these individuals aren’t really contributing much. They’re keeping themselves busy with unnecessary meetings, networking activities, etc. It’s easy to get to an 80 hour work week if you include an afternoon playing golf.
If upper management takes a month off work at a steady company, not a lot of things slow down.
In Dutch there’s this joke: “netwerken is net werken.” Roughly translates to “networking is almost like working.”
I’d rather rich people spend their time spending all their money, then at least they’re benefiting the economy which has SOME minor gains to everyday people. It’s the ones who horde it that are the worst.
The ones who spend their time giving away their money are the only good rich people.
I’d rather rich people spend their time spending all their money, then at least they’re benefiting the economy which has SOME minor gains to everyday people. It’s the ones who horde it that are the worst.
…No? “The economy” isn’t dollars and numbers in bank accounts. It’s steel and grains and fuel, and how that gets distributed amongst people. Money sitting idle is money that’s at least not actively causing harm; Money spent on products and services with actual value means hoarding basic necessities (E.G. buying up all the housing).
Rich people slanting the economy towards spending its finite labour and material resources on building mansions and yachts means that there will be less available, and it will cost more, to grow cops and build housing or provide services and do all the other things we actually need.
Or, to put it another way, I think:
MoneySupply × VelocityOfMoney = PriceLevel × ProducedValueIf “rich people spend their time spending all their money”, then your living costs skyrocket because of inflationary effects— Because now everyone’s working in the megayacht shipyards that the rich people spent their money on, instead of growing crops or fixing roads.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
The ones who spend their time giving away their money are the only good rich people.
Yeah, no. Handing out scraps to salvage your reputation after stealing the entire pie is not what a good person does.
“The economy” isn’t dollars and numbers in bank accounts. It’s steel and grains and fuel, and how that gets distributed amongst people.
“How that gets distributed amongst people” is dollars and numbers in bank accounts. That’s how economics works. Money is just a bunch of IOUs.
Money spent on products and services with actual value means hoarding basic necessities (E.G. buying up all the housing).
The 1600s called, they want their economic theories back.
Hoarding only occurs when there are constraints in supply. Housing is regulated to such a degree that it’s very difficult to build new houses. Therefore supply goes down, demand stays steady, prices go up.
In a functioning industry, more demand creates more profit incentive which causes businesses to produce more, bringing prices into equilibrium.
If “rich people spend their time spending all their money”, then your living costs skyrocket because of inflationary effects
Inflation should also affect wages.
The recent inflation we’ve seen has been a result of price gouging by businesses. Businesses use “inflation” as a justification for raising prices but not wages. It’s not real, it’s just massive collusion.
The role of government is to prevent that. And to prevent inefficient or undesirable allocation of labor and money, by taxing and subsidizing and fining and regulating. So the rich want everyone working on yachts and no one working on roads? Government taxes yachts until it’s too expensive to maintain them, and government subsidizes road contractors who offer generous payment terms.
The government is not a dictator, they are a referee.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
Absolutely not. You clearly know what the velocity of money is so how could you possibly think that? Maybe you just heard the term somewhere.
Money that is removed from the economic cycle is money that is not being used to support it. The faster the cycle goes (the greater the velocity of money) the more good it does. If $20 is circulated only once in a year and only purchased one $20 meal, it only stimulates one meal’s worth of demand and only pays 1 meal’s worth of wages. If it’s circulated twice…
Your problem is you’re starting from the position that money is bad, and you’re finding arguments to support that. That’s not how the economy works. Not to mention the whole “there’s only a limited pie of goods” view caused incredible suffering in the 1600s and 1700s when European nations decided they wanted to grab the biggest slice they could.
Your problem is you’re starting from the position that money is bad, and you’re finding arguments to support that.
Actually, I’m starting from the position that there are basic physical constraints on productive capacity no matter what, and while a well-functioning economy might utilize that more efficiently, no amount of dollars changing hands is going to break the laws of physics and just magic a more efficient powerplant or a larger workforce or more arable land into existence (without competing with and detracting from anywhere else).
In a functioning industry, more demand creates more profit incentive which causes businesses to produce more, bringing prices into equilibrium.
Duh. But that’s not relevant to this discussion.
“A functioning industry” is a subset of “the economy”. You seem to ultimately be implying some kind of infinite or free growth, which is sorta fine for modelling just one industry, but resources are very finite on the whole, and increased demand for shared resources by one specific industry, by mathematical definition, leaves less available for everything else.
That is why and how it is possible for businesses in a specific industry to produce more to meet demand, and bring prices (mostly) into equilibrium. (Though note “equilibrium” has nothing to do with affordability, or fairness, as you seem to possibly be implying it does.) It is also why trying to apply this logic to the entire economy as a whole doesn’t really fit.
The recent inflation we’ve seen has been a result of price gouging by businesses. Businesses use “inflation” as a justification for raising prices but not wages. It’s not real, it’s just massive collusion.
I’m aware of this. I also don’t see how it’s significant for the hypotheticals/topic at hand.
The role of government is to prevent that. And to prevent inefficient or undesirable allocation of labor and money, by taxing and subsidizing and fining and regulating. So the rich want everyone working on yachts and no one working on roads? Government taxes yachts until it’s too expensive to maintain them, and government subsidizes road contractors who offer generous payment terms.
I think you’re moving the goalposts. The discussion you started was about which spending habits for “rich people” would be the least societally damaging, by “benefiting the economy”. If you’re going to just say “government intervention” to limit the harm, then we may as well just say “wealth tax” and be done with it.
Also, economies with high wealth inequality tend to have ineffective or corrupt regulators already. So suggesting regulations could be used to limit the harm of what you were advocating for in examples of wealth inequality… Seems discombobulated, on multiple levels.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
Absolutely not. You clearly know what the velocity of money is so how could you possibly think that? Maybe you just heard the term somewhere.
Dude. The
MVinMV=PQis multiplication. it’s literally commutative. You’re actually right that I’m not fully as well-versed in economic theory as I could be, but assuming that basic algebra works the same in economics as it does anywhere else in the universe, reducing the velocity of money is literally, by mathematical definition, indistinguishable from reducing the supply of money.If $20 is circulated only once in a year and only purchased one $20 meal, it only stimulates one meal’s worth of demand and only pays 1 meal’s worth of wages. If it’s circulated twice…
If it’s circulated twice, then it still pays for only one meal, which now costs $40 instead of $20— Because it turns out you only had enough people planting crops to make one meal in total.
(If it were circulated twice in the food sector but not in other industries, then you might be able to buy one and a half meals for like $30 per, by retooling more of the economy for food production, at the cost of reducing supply and probably increasing cost in other industries— But if it’s uniformly circulated twice in every sector, as is closer to what you’re suggesting, then there’s no profit incentive to retool anyway, so literally all you’re doing is creating inflation.)
Qremains effectively constant, becauseQis bound by the productive capacity of the economy, as limited by basic physics (barring external factors like demographic and technological change), so onlyM,V, andPcan really change in the short term.Money that is removed from the economic cycle is money that is not being used to support it. The faster the cycle goes (the greater the velocity of money) the more good it does.
Saying “support it” and “faster the cycle” is entirely allegorical and metaphorical in this context, and doesn’t even pretend to have any rigorously formulated or defined meaning. So I can’t really respond to it directly. But the anecdote you followed it with is unsubstantiated and apparently basically nonsensical, and the personal insinuation you made right before it seems to fly in the face of the basic algebra it’s referring to.
Again: Money isn’t real. Steel and wheat and turbines are real. You can’t just magic’ up “more good” by making more money spin around in a circle; All that will accomplish is to make each unit of money worth less, because it still has to map to the same amount of goods and services in physical reality.
Not to mention the whole “there’s only a limited pie of goods” view caused incredible suffering in the 1600s and 1700s when European nations decided they wanted to grab the biggest slice they could.
Productive Capacity ≠ Imperialism!!!
Trying to equate the two is just bizarre…
I started writing a response because your tone sounded like you knew what you were talking about,
But really, what you’re asserting would probably require breaking a couple laws of thermodynamics, and also seems to be directly contradictory to the basic mathematical formulation and economic description of what you’re talking about.
…Ah, fuck it.
The 1600s called, they want their economic theories back.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
Absolutely not. You clearly know what the velocity of money is so how could you possibly think that? Maybe you just heard the term somewhere.
Fifth Grade called. They want you to redo the bit on multiplication, so you won’t try to claim
(nM)V ≠ M(nV).Though I will caveat that as modern national economies aren’t closed systems either, rich people in those nations “spending all their money” may well actually help their countries as a whole too, just in less of the “benefiting the economy” way you were suggesting and instead in more of the “incredible suffering” way that you ironically tried to condemn.
no amount of dollars changing hands is going to break the laws of physics and just magic a more efficient powerplant or a larger workforce or more arable land into existence
Bruh
Literally all of the things that you claimed are impossible are being done, and they’re being done because people are investing in them.
but resources are very finite on the whole
No they’re not. Only in a few highly specific areas are we even close to possibly ever running out of required materials, and when that gets close to happening, money (ie profit incentive) will spur innovation to alternatives.
that’s not relevant
I also don’t see how it’s significant
I think you’re moving the goalposts.
Dude, I’m directly responding to what you’re saying. I’m not bringing up any new issues here.
And you seem to be COMPLETELY misunderstanding what we’re talking about.
The discussion you started was about which spending habits for “rich people” would be the least societally damaging, by “benefiting the economy”.
No, I simply said that spending money was less harmful than hoarding money. Best of all would be giving that money away (or having it taken via taxes). I specifically said that.
If it’s circulated twice, then it still pays for only one meal, which now costs $40 instead of $20— Because it turns out you only had enough people planting crops to make one meal in total.
(If it were circulated twice in the food sector but not in other industries, then you might be able to buy one and a half meals for like $30 per, by retooling more of the economy for food production, at the cost of reducing supply and probably increasing cost in other industries— But if it’s uniformly circulated twice in every sector, as is closer to what you’re suggesting, then there’s no profit incentive to retool anyway, so literally all you’re doing is creating inflation.)
That’s so stunningly wrong I’m not even sure how to begin to address it. You’re still stuck on this idea of a single limited pie of resources, where you have to pull from one sector to get benefits in another. That’s not how the economy works, and I don’t know how long I can keep telling you that.
Q remains effectively constant, because Q is bound by the productive capacity of the economy, as limited by basic physics (barring external factors like demographic and technological change), so only M, V, and P can really change in the short term.
See, you almost got it…you touched on it, but then didn’t stop to consider. You just dismissed the central facet of modern economics as an “external factor”.
Investment prompts technological change. That is the entire point. Greater velocity of money, more investment, more technology, more efficiency, better quality of life.
Every Economics 101 textbook starts with a similar example.
In Florida, the climate is good for growing oranges.
In Kansas, the climate is good for growing corn.
In Washington state, the climate is good for growing apples.
Now what if Florida wants apples? Well they can barter with Washington. But what if Washington doesn’t want oranges? Well maybe they can do a 3 way trade with Kansas. But what if Washington doesn’t want corn either? Enter money, a fungible IOU that Washington can exchange for cars, water, labor, anything. Everyone gets that.
But the secondary point of that analogy is this: the climate in Florida is not great for growing apples. If Florida tried to grow their own apples, they would have fewer apples AND fewer oranges. If Florida focuses solely on growing oranges, and Washington focuses solely on growing apples, we end up with more apples AND more oranges. This demonstrates that money (and investment) facilitates specialization and technological advancement. Thus, yes, infinitely producing more goods and better quality. It’s an upward spiral.
Without money, Florida would try to grow apples, and Washington would try to grow oranges, and everyone’s life would suck just a little more.
Expand that waaaaaaaaay out to the modern day. We have highly specialized facilities for producing car steering wheels that are the best dang car steering wheels that the world has ever seen. They produce them in the most efficient manner that the world has ever seen. Why? Money. Investment. You have a phone in your pocket that is more powerful than a computer that took up a whole room in the 1970s. Money. Investment. The average lifespan (covid excepted) has been steadily trending up for decades. Money. Investment.
Spending money is a good thing.
what you’re asserting would probably require breaking a couple laws of thermodynamics
That’s…not how physics works either. I don’t know if I have the energy for THAT conversation though.
But you have to imagine that the rich people giving away money only got rich by not paying their dues. So if they actually paid their workers well and every little tax they were owed, they wouldn’t be rich enough to give away money.
I’m referring to the ones who inherited or otherwise stumbled into wealth, which is most of them.
Nobody’s “selfmade”. That’s a myth perpetuated by Forbes, WSJ and the like to decrease resentment towards the people whose boots they lick for a living.
In reality, no matter how hard you work, you need the help of others to be successful and to be downright RICH, you need a whole lot of luck too.
it’s less about working harder, and more about seeing opportunities and being able to take the risk to go after them.
Nope. If someone with a net worth of $100m or more takes a gamble and loses, the company goes under and people lose their jobs while the rich guy gets a loan or a tax write-off.
“Seeing opportunities” for huge possible gains for yourself with all significant risks being to people much less fortunate than you and taking it isn’t a virtue, it’s self-centered greed.
the key to my statement is “being able to take the risk”. poor folks can’t take the same risks that the wealthy folks can take.
And what my statement was meant to convey is the fact that the ventures you so laud are all reward and no risk for the rich and all risk and no reward for the poor.
If it had been a game of crabs, the rich would be rolling 4 loaded dice, picking which two count after throwing. The poor would have one dice at most, the most beneficial numbers missing at all times.
There’s like 8 billion people, statistically there will be a few honest to god self made millionaires.
They’re just so rare that it’s not worth considering as a real possibility for the average person.
I wouldn’t call it impossible, just statistically insignificant.
Edit: self made billionaires. Stupid inflation.
statistically there will be a few honest to god self made nillionaires
That’s not how statistics work. There being a lot of people doesn’t change reality to make the impossible possible.
You literally CAN’T become a billionaire without a SHITLOAD of help from and exploitation of others and that’s the case whether the world population is 30 or 30 trillion.
I wouldn’t call it impossible, just statistically insignificant.
Again, not how ANYTHING works.
Imagine being this confident and so, so wrong
About something so minor too
As is made abundantly clear in my reply to your other comment, it is you that is confidently wrong and it’s an important issue.
You can’t just say that’s not how something works and have it be true wtf kind of ridiculous world do you live in
That literally is how statistics work.
It is impossible for gravity to not function.
It is not impossible for a self made billionaire to exist.
Monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare
Here’s how it works: people work in exchange for much less than the value they produce.
That surplus value is turned into profit for the company, exorbitant salaries for executives and stock market value. Those are the sources of income that makes a billionaire.
No matter how and where a billionaire started, that is how they became a billionaire: value produced by other people becoming wealth for one person. And a shitload of hoarding, of course.
Statistics document reality, they don’t change how it works.
Ooof. God I hope you’re not old enough to vote cause you have no idea how anything works. You’re parroting things you’ve read but applying them to a whole different concept, with the fervor of ignorance.
Did someone quote a few lines about surplus value at you, and now you think you have the whole world figured out?
You don’t understand what selfmade means. It means they did not inherited a fortune500 company at the age of 25. Selfmade means they started from a situation where they had a degree and a simple common job and made into a billionaire. Obvioisly no single person can create and manage a 20000 person company on its own, no one ever said it is like that.
I understand just fine. What I’m saying is that using that word implies that they have earned all their wealth and are more deserving than others who didn’t have the same help and luck. More deserving than others with the same background who have worked just as hard with less help and/or luck along the way.
Whether or not that’s the intention, that’s the implication and thus why using the word at all skews the conversation.
Literally semantics and who gives a shit. Erm ackshually, type beat. Obviously money flows, no one just generates money on their own without the creation of value by the governing body, or can provide goods/services without the goods/services needed to even start their own trade. No one legitimately believes selfmade means you did literally everything yourself, everywhere. It’s just people who earned a wealthy life without inheritance.
They spawned in GodMode
I don’t have to work 40h a week to get by…
I work a lot more, but for my own leisure…
I live in France.
I feel that
“If you aren’t rich (right now), its because your parents did not worked enough.”
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They’re not the people the post is talking about. It’s the trust fund babies who just get everything for free, are given super well paying jobs because of their parents, and just never have to struggle.
Not their fault, just sucks to be on the other end of it
You know that’s only 10 people right?
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You’re moving the goalpost.
I just see two classes. The working class and the owner class. People who own entire large businesses without having to work at them or manage them? That’s rich. The owners.
Anybody who has to work to live is by definition working class, though some working class people get paid very well and can lead decadent lives. I might be caught saying they are well-off, doing well, are rewarded generously for their work, can afford more freedoms than most. They aren’t rich though. Their continued labor makes their life possible.
