Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids | Hacker News Reader

Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

bloomberg.com

229 pointsxenophon168 comments

Further down in the article, some interesting points about the motivations behind philanthropy.

"philanthropy is about more than just social responsibility—it’s about social stability."

So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued.

I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity.

If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued.

One could say the same about salaried employees - give them enough to stay. Too little - they revolt or leave, too much - they save the money and still leave after they've saved enough

Nobody in their right mind saves with current interest rates and cheap credit combined with consumerism keeps enough people in hock across the income spectrum

More like sparse array.

People in their right mind are able to not fall prey to consumerism and hock.

That's not an element specific to China. Wealth inequality is fairly well accepted to be a threat to social stability and the economy. People tend to see such inequality is unfair and at some point they are going to discover their revolutionary side.

It's therefore not merely in the interest of rich people to be philanthropists, it's also in the interest of governments to achieve a certain balance. I think the latter is a far bigger reason for philanthropy. It's hard to argue for taking money away from people who are already engaged in philanthropy.

That is also mirrored in the article. The government isn't entirely happy with this rich second generation, philanthropy helps with that.

That is exactly the control mechanism that was used by a number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, to prevent the Arab Spring revolutions from happening within their borders. They handed out billions of cash to the populace.

"...the Saudi state began spending $130 billion to pump up civil servant salaries (paying two extra months’ salaries)"

"In Kuwait, at around the same time, the state increased civil servant salaries by 115 percent at a cost of more than $1 billion, and at an additional cost of $5 billion, gave a cash handout of Kuwaiti Dinar (KD) 1000 to its citizens and promised free distribution of foodstuffs for fourteen months"

http://www18.georgetown.edu/data/people/mk556/publication-61...

What will become of the already unstable Middle East when oil begins its inevitable (likely slow) decline as a dominant power source?

My guess? Not much.

Seems like they would find some other investments to make in the meantime.

Look at the state of the Middle East between the rise of sea-borne trade that withered the old overland Silk Road trade routes and the current petro-states.

Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.

And it looks (at least in Saudi Arabia's case) that they were trying to diversify towards renewables in a vast way [0], although my google search also turned up more recent articles indicating they're pushing that back [1]. The thing about the Saudi Arabian royal family is that they're all guaranteed allowances and the family grows at a near exponential rate since they all have multiple wives. I couldn't find any good sources on numbers but in a book about Saudi Arabia by former CIA operative Robert Baer "Sleeping with the Devil: How the US Sold it's Soul for Saudi Crude" [3] [4] I believe he estimated the current number to be about 60,000 (Wikipedia estimates 15,000 so I may be remembering that wrong [5]), aka an unsustainable population growth in royal family members.

[0] - http://www.arabnews.com/news/458342 [1] - http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/01/saudi-arabi... [3] - http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/... [4] - (heartily recommended, although because most of these things are classified, truly it is his word. In his other book about Iran, his conclusion was to bring Iran to the playing table and recognize them as a regional and world power, so it doesn't seem to follow a strictly American narrative, and in my opinion, gives him a bit of credence. Others may beg to differ, I'm not sure.) [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

Renewables are great, but I'm not sure they would be able to support an entire economy. One of the few great things about fossil fuels and specifically oil is that it is a power source that can be stored in a dense and stable form. Renewables can't really be stored in this manner and therefore can't easily be exported beyond reasonably short distances. Saudi Arabia therefore can't rely on selling renewable energy to the USA, China, and the EU to support their economy like they do with oil.

Oil can be synthesized; to the extent it has desirable traits as an energy transport medium, that doesn't mean it has to be the root energy source.

I was thinking more become a key developer of solar panels and export the panels themselves (or wind turbine blades, geothermal pipes, etc (off the cuff examples, I don't know if they have use or desire for blades or pipes)).

I believe he wrote a long Atlantic article based on the book - 'The Fall of the House of Saud'

The Fall of the House of Saud

The Atlantic. May 2003 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/05/the-fall...

"A former CIA operative argues, in an article drawn form his new book, Sleeping With the Devil, that today's Saudi Arabia can't last much longer—and the social and economic fallout of its demise could be calamitous.

Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil.

The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount.

In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated—that, in short, the country needs a radical "purification."

Alternatively, the royals will just loot the sovereign wealth fund and flee the country.

Sovereign wealth funds in third-world countries don't tend to last long. Nauru would still be one if the richest countries on Earth except that the sovereign wealth fund somehow found its way into the pockets of the people tasked with looking after the sovereign wealth fund.

I also thought of Nauru. Seems the island center is chewed-up former phosphate mines and the islanders have nothing to show for it. Australia briefly (?) tried to relocate some unwanted refugees there. Not much to say for the place anymore.

They may actually emerge as a leader in green energy & architecture. Masdar City looks like an interesting project to follow.

If anything, they'll get richer, as oil is not exactly an elastic good. As supply dries up, demand won't, so price will have to compensate, and barring some form of extra-market intervention, it will probably mean a higher margin for the suppliers.

Probably what already happened to Egypt and Syria when their oil production dropped.

Relevant recent quote from someone at the UN:

> "Unfortunately only when the poor enter the halls of the rich, do the rich notice that the poor exist."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/27/us-un-assembly-ref...

Inequality is a problem for the rich, too, and not just because the poor will eventually revolt on them and take their stuff by force or murder them violently, but also because when most money is concentrated in the hands of only a few, the "economy" becomes weaker and less dynamic, as people can't afford to buy all sorts of stuff anymore (from the rich people's companies). The lesson here is not to postpone solving the inequality problem until the poor are already at their doors or causing riots in the streets.

>I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity.

This is a bit more pessimistic view but what about the raise in minimum wage for fast food workers (in NY) to $15 an hour? I daresay those employees are less likely to participate in Occupy Wall Street protests now, not that the balance of power in this country has actually changed any.

All $15 an hour does it raise them to the new subsistence level. The aware of them still want major changes.

"All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

As true today as it was in 1776. If people can eak out a living, the majority will be satisfied.

Pretty sure that is the motivation behind many government support programs. keep the people at the bottom placated enough to support you. The trouble is you create a dependent class because the number of people willing to live in such a way is higher than most would expect

If they are at all studied in classic literature and world history, it should at least be at the back of their mind, because it's been a known effect since at least the Romans. Where do you think the phrase "bread and circuses" comes from?

The impression I get from American philanthropists is that, for many of them, it's another way to show off their wealth. It might not directly benefit them, but neither does buying diamonds or gold jewelry. With philanthropy you get big galas, get buildings named after you, demonstrate how wealthy you are to your peers, etc.

This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory in evolutionary biology.

Any nice book offering an overview of evolutionary biology applied to our society that you'd recommend?

Not quite a book, but you might find the materials for this MIT course on Game Theory and Social Behavior insightful: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-11-insights-from-gam...

"We will apply insights from game theory to explain human social behavior, focusing on novel applications which have heretofore been the realm of psychologists and philosophers—for example, why people speak indirectly, in what sense beauty is socially constructed, and where our moral intuitions come from—and eschewing traditional economic applications such as industrial organization or auctions."

I learned about signalling theory in this course, among other insights into why society acts the way it does.

Thanks. I occasionally follow news from complexity theory and there are many exciting findings. But there are so many hidden gems I could not find out till I learn some key words to make my search meaningful to the search engines.

On Human Nature by Edward Wilson is supposed to be a classic on this subject (the mix of biology, evolution and sociology).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Human_Nature

Rap music.

For what its worth, a billionaire once told me the following quote: There are two types of people that give money to charity - those that want to, and those that have to

(the context of the conversation was the idea of charity as atonement for sins)

I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity:

“[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…”

Wow, need to read more of him.

That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves).

For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun).

It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。

>those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students

That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst?

Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?

What long term value? The system is already gone.

If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.

I don't understand your question. The long term value I'm talking about is that of the system being gone, so it being gone is a realization of that value, not a point that the value isn't there.

That's like saying "What is the value in winning the lottery if I already have all the lottery money in the bank."

>If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.

Or alternatively, it could convince people that slavery is not that bad. (Which is exactly the point he was making.) And now we're just betting on which is more likely: that nice slave owners will teach us that the evils of slavery can be hidden, or that they'll convince us slavery is not bad.

But those are the same thing. The way you hide the evil of slavery is by convincing people that it is deserved and just. You say "We don't need to pay our employees more, because they are not Titans of Industry like us, they are Welfare Leeches." His point was that you can fix it faster if it is obviously evil, and that is better than living for centuries in a society that doesn't value you.

Why should we care about a future sociologist's or historian's opinion about what was "worst"?

It seems like the determination of worst would need to be made by someone who actually experienced these things, not someone who never experienced them or even saw them.

We are those future sociologists and historians. Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?

The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later. It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this stuff than we are.

Of course, if you actually believe things can't improve, then by all means: maximize your own happiness.

>Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?

Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have.

I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable.

Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse.

Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.

I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them.

The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group.

The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual.

How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice.

I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.

Do you think you would be the same you if you had been born into slavery?

I don't think that's a useful hypothetical. If I were born into slavery, I would be a different person, and I can't tell you what that person would think.

Yes, that was my point. You had written as if that were not the case.

I was telling you what I actually do think, not what someone else might think. That is, knowing what I know now, I would say what I said. If you are asking me if I would agree with that while not knowing what I know now, then obviously I can't say, because I would know things that I don't currently know.

Regardless, I can't make decisions using information I don't have, so the question is pointless.

I do not consciously support slavery. I just find some objection to the apparent false dichotomy that beating slaves is a sound path to their freedom.

If (and it's a very big if), the only way to end slavery is to have slaves be beaten, then you might have a good point. However, I can think of no way to verify that, nor can I think of any evidence in support of that premise that can withstand even most most basic scrutiny.

>How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people?

How do you know he didn't?

> How do you know he didn't?

In particular, Mein Kampf comes pretty close.

Would you allow yourself to be beaten if it meant your children could be free? Or would you rather let your children be slaves and neither of you be beaten?

This isn't just about slavery: it could apply to any war-like situation. But if you aren't being beaten as a slave, how are you resisting slavery? Your owner just lets you get away with not doing what you're told?

Because I really don't see how not resisting is supposed to end slavery, and I don't see how avoiding beatings is any kind of resistance.

Surely there are other ways to resist slavery than being beaten?

If there were some highly effective and rapid communication system, for example, the slaves could possibly organize and GTFO before their owners had any way to stop them. Yes, there's the chance that it could turn bloody, but I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully (as far as one can imagine such a hypothetical).

Even if such a thing were possible, it seems highly unlikely that a bunch of slaves could pull it off successfully. How's a slave going to gain access to a high-speed communication network in a way that doesn't immediately prompt retribution?

Slaves are either compliant or tortured for not being compliant. That's why slavery is so brutal; if your owner doesn't beat you, he'll either kill you or sell you to someone who will. There's really no other option for dealing with a slave who refuses to obey. (And I don't see how a compliant slave can help end slavery.)

> I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully

How? People who legally own slaves aren't going to just let their slaves walk away anymore than any company now is going to let their employees walk away with all their profits.

> he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian.

Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that.

But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter to society's values. I'm not sure to what degree he believed all of the things he said.

But in the quote in question, his position essentially is "do evil so that good may come". That's a pretty dubious sense of morality.

His point isn't "do evil so that good may come", but rather "it is better (for us) for those who do evil to do it openly so we can unite against it, rather than for it to be done with subtlety so that we remain unable to combat it."

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (the source of the quote, if anyone's curious) gave me the distinct impression that Wilde enjoyed bugging the shit out of people. Who would have guessed?

That's not quite true. I feel like you missed the whole point. The audience is their contemporaries. "Good" slave owners gave an excuse to their contemporaries to allow slavery to exist. If other people only saw "bad" slabs owners his argument is slavery would've ended sooner️.

I think it's obvious from the context that he means "worst" from a macro perspective. I don't really see why it bugs you so much -- the fact that any given person likely prefer a "kind" slaveowner, or prefer that the rich be charitable seems to go without saying.

>"whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value"

This sounds like the US medical industry. We can only save you, if you work another few years of your life to pay down this debt.

This puts me in mind of Slavoj Zizek on charity.

http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-en...

I think you meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

weird, i wonder how that happened. thank you.

That's a silly notion.

If all slave owners treated their slaves really well, provide them with decent housing, gourmet food, education, social activities and entertainment, vacations, and etc, with the condition that they have to work, then there is probably not going to be a rebellion, and we'd still have slavery today.

Oh wait, did I just describe the condition what most of us live in?

In the end, rebellions happen when people don't have basic security. If in a future society, where the 1% people countrols 99% of the wealth, but even the poorest people get all the food, shelter, entertainment etc they need, I don't think there is going to be a rebellion like we see in history books.

Vonnegut disagrees in Player Piano. It's an interesting read for programmers, since he got the details of automation wildly wrong, but "the story is true".

If all the 99% actually had the comforts you imagine, they wouldn't be so mad at the 1%

Oscar Wilde was completely out of touch with the realities of the impoverished. He was a Kardashian with literary talent.

I would argue that the third motive is one that does not generate as much American philanthropy as it should. Events like the French Revolution usually seem more imminent in hindsight than they did at the time.

"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued."

I sometimes wonder if this is one of the motivations behind the guaranteed minimum income movement.

"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich."

Very much so. China is a communist country. Here's the China Communist Party's current policy statement.[1]

"The basic line of the CPC at this stage is to unite the people of all ethnic groups to, with economic construction at the core, adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles, adhere to reform and opening-up, and in a spirit of self-reliance and hard struggle, to build China into a prosperous, democratic and civilized modern socialist country. The Four Cardinal Principles -- adhering to the socialist road, adhering to the people's democratic dictatorship, adhering to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and adhering to the leadership of the Communist Party of China -- have been established by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China as the basis to maintain the nation."

Well within living memory, China's government was sentencing rich people to death for crimes against the state. That's one reason many rich people in China try to get money out of the country and get out themselves. There might be a policy change, and they could be sent to labor camps in the western provinces. It's happened before, and might happen again.

[1] http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/45981.htm

The (slightly cynical) argument could be made that the concessions made by capital to labor in the United States in the early 20th century were to prevent revolts (of the sort that happened in Europe and elsewhere) and especially to reduce the chance a Communist Revolution taking hold. I note that that era was marked by significant industrialist philanthropy as well.

Well it sounds like they have the same problems other rich kids have. Mainly that it's hard to get away from from your parents' influence, and anything you achieve is credited to the family. Also there's a wariness about new people, and a feeling of being disconnected from ordinary society.

I know a couple of heirs, and they've handled it differently. One kid works in the family office, investing the family fortune. He takes the view that his life belongs to the family, and he's just a temporary caretaker, whose duty is to keep things good for the next generation.

Another has avoided the family business, and doesn't use the family name (everyone who read Forbes would recognise him). He works a job that he didn't need connections to get, and seems happy with it now. When we were in school, it took a while to come to terms with the fact that he didn't have to work, ever.

What school is that?

Not terribly important, but it was a place where immigrant kids could mingle with the kids of diplomats, corporate folks, and the wealthy.

Like mentionend in the article: "Relay is therefore planning to start a program fostering ties between fuerdai and children from the countryside."?

Probably also absurdly spoiled, never had to have an actual 9-5 job

Also accustomed to being rude and being pampered all around the place

It depends, but a large number of rich kids are completely aware of the saying, "Riches to rags in three generations." If the money isn't coming in anymore, acting like spoiled assholes will gut a fortune as quickly as the family can spend it. There are a lot of lower-middle class families who were rich 100 (or even 50) years ago.

It corrects itself. Most "old money" is perpetuated because education and strong values are passed down from generation to generation. When that stops, so does the money. After all, if Junior is spoiled as shit and needs Daddy's influence to get him a job, he'll do just fine... but what about Junior's kids?

No, I never saw any rudeness from either of these fellows. And they never showed up with a bunch of servants, even though they could hire a whole army of them.

The one guy is doing an ordinary 9-5 job. Other guy is managing his family fortune, so yes that's not a normal job.

What an exemplary reply. When we ask people to remain civil and substantive even when someone else has been provocative, this is what we mean. Thanks for making HN better!

I am glad your experiences did not match mine

TBH, if you can accept a lower standard of living, few people really need to work that much - at least in developed nations.

Most people work for social pride and connection to the community. Which is a good reason.

I just wish we could remake how to generate this social pride. Buying a nice car or nice house shouldn't be a reason to feel proud. Teaching, doing or learning something new and useful for your community - should be.

most people i know do need to work if they dont want to sleep in the streets. i program others wait tables or clean out the garbage. you think somebody does that for 'pride'? it does not matter if the country is developed or not you still have to work because real estate is expensive even if food is not. if you dont well congrats but then you (and your buddies) are one of these second generation dandies.

even if food is not.

Good food is not cheap. In NYC, we pay 8$ for a decent sized watermelon - almost all fruits are expensive, and most vegetables too. Only shitty food like chips, soda, candy, fast food etc are cheap.

Watermelon is good food? As far as I know, it's not particularly rich nutritionally, it's mostly expensive sugary water.

I beg to differ: https://www.google.com/search?q=watermelon+nutrition

1 serving contains 31 daily percent vitamin A and 37 daily percent vitamin C, as well as a good amount of iron, vitamin B-6 and magnesium.

You can get a month supply of these vitamins for $3 by buying a bottle of Flintstones. Protein and healthy fat is where to be concerned about the cost of nutrients.

Watermelons are out of season dude. They're only cheap in the summer. Its fall, so citrus (ie: oranges, tangerines) and apples are now cheap.

Carrots, Celery, Potatoes, Oats (Oatmeal), Breakfast Cereal, Cereal Cereal, Onions, Kidney Beans, Green Beans, Milk make a good baseline for a cheap and nutritious meals year round.

You grab Broccoli in the Winter, Pineapples and Lettuce in the Spring, Cherries and Watermelons in the Summer, and Apples in the fall. Farms literally can't make Watermelons in the fall or winter, so you're importing those Watermelons from the southern hemisphere. Of course it's expensive.

But in the summer, Watermelons are made locally and are probably $2 or $3 a pop.

------------------------------

If you don't know what's in season, here's a little trick. Look at the coupons at your local grocery store. Everything that is on sale is what is in-season.

A sampling of my store is $5 for 5lbs of tangerines and $0.88/lb for Gala Apples. Clearly, these are the fruits in season and what I'll be eating.

Eventually, as winter sets in... the prices of oranges and apples will increase while Broccoli and Winter Squash will become cheap.

Being in NYC probably inflates the prices overall too.

Not much compared to my area, which is also one of the highest cost of living spots in the US.

In fact, the primary difference is that $8 per fast food meal in NYC. The Milk, Eggs, Bread, Apples, and Potatoes are hit and miss (some cheaper where I live, some cheaper in NYC)

At least according to this: www.expatistan.com/

Produce from any of the Chinatowns(Manhattan, Flushing, 8th ave) is pretty reasonable.

You could program 5 hours a month remotely and make more than a university graduate working full-time in Vietnam.

So yeah, the vast, vast majority of U.S. programmers are ultimately doing it out of reasons other than survival, whether they realize it or not.

What stops said Vietnamese for working the same 5 hours a month remotely?

Nothing, if they spoke English and had programming skills.

But that's not a small if.

And not just english, but they have to communicate well, be on the right time zone, and understand the culture as well. It's a very very rare find.

Mostly, that it's not worth your bosses' time to micromanage you if they are going to extract merely 5 hrs/month worth of labor out of you.

But nothing prevents you from working 50 hrs/week for one decade and then retire early, move to Vietnam, and live from your savings.

I say 5h/month but you can always do a freelance contract full-time for a month and then chill for four months and repeat.

The point stands, if you're an American programmer and think you have to work full-time to literally just survive you're wrong.

Oh, I dunno. I have friends who live on old boats tied to mooring buoys - free of charge! They fish for a lot of their meals. They do just fine. They work a little bit around the docks, but not that much. I know other folks who live in nice, clean trailer parks. They work a little bit more, but again, not that much. If you're willing to accept a lower standard of living, there are lots of options. I remember this article about a guy living in his van. Why not? All you need is a low crime area and a place to sleep. Didn't some guy at Google live in an RV at the parking lot?

When I was 19, I was paying around 50 bux a month in a shared accommodations situation. I did bartending/odd jobs about once a week and just bummed around the rest of the time.

When I was 20, I did a part time waiter gig. I ate all my meals for free! Boy, I ate well. I had my own apartment though. It was utterly unnecessary, of course, but I didn't know better.

Honestly, if you look around, these people exist. They are on the fringe but they do just fine. We generally call them 'bums', but you know, that's just envy talking.

That's horse shit. I work because if I don't I have nothing.

I bought a nice house because I like living in a nice house, not for pride.

I have a nice car because I enjoy riding in a nice car and was tired of the stress and panic created by having to get my car running by Monday every other weekend.

When you're poor, even in developed nations, that poverty is an axe blade hanging by a thread just over your head.

No, that's simply not true. And thanks to Obamacare, not even true in the US anymore. One caveat of course, is this assumes you don't have dependents. That's obviously a completely different problem.

I'm glad you like your standard of living btw. Completely unnecessary of course, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

It is tempting for me to turn this into a personal attack. To decry your ignorance or delusion but because of the nobler intentions of this forum I am not going to do that.

I could extract examples from my personal life of how poverty severely impacted my quality of life. But really I think the best thing I can link you to is the research. There are excellent studies that show how a single bout of homelessness causes a person's chances of imprisonment, joblessness and social disenfranchisement to skyrocket.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+homelessness...

Obamacare is not a social safety-net, it was a minor healthcare reform.

In a sense it is possible when you're very young (i.e. early 20's or so). I was able to slide by at that age with minimal employment, for months at a time, followed by a few months here and there of retail / delivery work. Of course, I ate shitty food, had no access to medical/dental care (possible when you're 20 years old, not 40), lived with multiple roommates in rather cramped conditions, and lived very frugally - little going out, no girlfriends, kids, etc. We were not forced to buy health insurance, and most of us just gambled.

Once you're older, all it takes in the US is one trip to the ER, a traffic accident, bad roommate, etc. to screw your life up big time. Once in a hole, it is very difficult to climb out here without serious money. The US does have some social safety net, but it doesn't really apply for a single male (with skills) that is simply choosing not to work much.

Nowadays, with rents and other costs having doubled or tripled in most areas in the last 15 years, I'm not sure I could pull it off as a 23 year old in 2015 like I was able in the late 90's

Yeah, but a bad trip to the ER can screw up your life even if you have money. Everyone dies, unfortunately, and interventionist medical methods don't seem to help that much. What does help, though, is living a clean and healthy lifestyle.

I agree, living without money is certainly more challenging. Growing up without it and not getting well educated makes it much much harder. But again, I know people (no children, no dependents) who do just fine. They just realized at some point that they can survive without the trappings of wealth. I envy them greatly.

Having kids and generally rising US prices for housing, energy, childcare, school and health care certainly make it feel like I need to work. Certainly didn't feel as important before having a family. Kind of ironic as you have to work more to provide for for them materially at a time when your family most needs your presence.

I for one would like to see us pay teacher in the US a lot more so they can do something good for the community and their family at the same time.

I'd love to be able to agree, but in the US at least, it seems like it's all or nothing. There is little possibility of trading in half my salary for a 20-25 hours work week. Instead, it's 50+ hours or nothing.

Employers want complete control over your every waking hour, it seems. Even the ones screaming that they can't find skilled workers won't even consider allowing a consulting type relationship.

Buying a nice house or a nice car isn't a reason to feel proud, at least for me. It's a way to signal to the opposite sex that I'm a potential worthy mate. These things tend to matter once you're a little older ;)

I visited China in 1982, when the capitalist revolution was just getting started. Such wealth did not exist, but there was a deep, simmering anger among the people over Communist corruption and general unfairness and inequity. I witnessed it personally.

Now that there's a bit more prosperity and availability of material goods, but still no freedom and still a simmering resentment of government corruption, this fuerdai generation of spoiled children have put themselves out there with brash behavior and big targets painted on their foreheads.

An economic slowdown and a loss of jobs to cheaper locales in South Asia and to manufacturing technologies like 3D printing could be the catalyst to large scale social unrest. It's a worrisome situation.

Large scale social unrest is just what the communists fear the most. To me, that's not worrisome - it's hopeful. Just opining, and I understand that the collateral costs would be worrisome for everyone in the short term.

> collateral costs

Read "human lives".

I understand and share your sentiment regarding the fact that a chance towards a (seemingly) more liberal form of government is good. But I'd be hesitant to call the costs of unrest at such a scale merely worrisome. The only thing I hope for is that change will come slowly, if it comes at all.

> The only thing I hope for is that change will come slowly, if it comes at all.

That's worse than a bloody revolution. If change comes so slowly that you don't get to experience it in your lifetime you might as well have died anyways.

Only if living conditions today are so bad you might as well be dead.

Which is why I speculate revolutions might become rare, as progress has improved everyone's lot, even the lowest classes. Few people live in a wood-fired dirt-floor log cabin or wash their clothes in a tub by the river these days.

There's a vast spectrum between bloody revolution and glacial change. You only need to go across the strait to see an example of quick but bloodless regime change. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Taiwan was an authoritarian one-party state under martial law. But from the late 70s on, the Taiwanese government steadily introduced reforms until it head its first direct presidential election in 1996. Today, Taiwan is a multi-party democracy with a stable economy. Certainly, it has its fair share of problems (there's been a lot of corruption scandals), but it's definitely come a long way.

The collateral cost from civil wars, revolution movements, or other massive uprisings in China is immense. Like absolutely staggering. The "collateral costs" have previously been in the >1,000,000 death range, and this has happened multiple times in the last few centuries.

E.g. taiping rebellion (>10 million), Dungan revolt, Du Wenxiu, etc...

The most recent large one only killed like 8 million people though, so we've got that going for us I guess.

You probably don't know what you are wishing for.

Just scroll through this list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic...

4 out of the 10 most deadliest human conflicts in human history happened in China. I have a suspicion that the Chinese leadership is acutely aware of this, and their world-view has been moulded by this (favouring stability over everything else including justice, freedom or human rights). When things go wrong there, they tend to go wrong in a big way.

edit: To get some idea of the scale, The An Lushan Rebellion that occurred in the 7th century wiped out 15% of the world population at the time.

The An Lushan rebellion probably did not wipe out 15% of the world's population. This number comes from comparing before and after census numbers, which is hard because (a) the census was vastly disrupted by the war, and (b) the size of the empire was decreased by the war, so former provinces weren't counted in the later censuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion#Death_toll

The most worrisome timing is when the system runs out of fuel. It would be a disaster for people living on the land. Fightings on the land are usually very brutal and violent. If there is any true hope, it will emerge after the messy chaos. But I'm afraid after the chaos it would be just the start of the same old story.

An underlying motif of the article seems to be that the fuerdai not only do not want to work hard but also that they only deserve the best jobs. One example:

"It’s no surprise that most fuerdai, after summering in Bali and wintering in the Alps, reading philosophy at Oxford and getting MBAs from Stanford, are reluctant to take over the family toothpaste cap factory."

However, at least some of the parents fortunes came from precisely working hard at menial work (e.g. owning and operating a toothpaste cap factory). For those that didn't build companies, while luck may have played a role, I suspect the parents who found their way into the upper levels of government or political jobs also had some degree of working hard or being smarter than others.

"the son of Wang Jianlin, a real estate mogul and the richest man in China"

Or taken risks - because unless you inherit or are granted land there is no other way to make the vast fortunes from real estate than leveraging and risk. Bankrupt or rich, it could have gone either way.

I think you are underestimating the amount of graft and corruption that may have been involved in a lot of these fortunes. From knowing folks who have opened factories and businesses in China, there is a staggering amount of market manipulation by various government functionaries who pick and choose who gets to win and lose.

Sure, in many instances, corruption may have played a role too, but corruption requires work too - something the article implies is beneath the fuerdai.

Being a master of "马屁精" or ass-kisser as a somewhat direct translation is the only skill they need besides being born in the inner circle or having special relationship with the circle. I'd admit being a master in a field is a challenging task. Better systems encourage more masters contributing to humanity, while others encourage masters contributing to themselves.

One level of abstraction up is another motif that can be observed in almost every facet of life - regression to the mean.

Extremely hardworking, gritty, lucky parents -> fuerdai who never felt cared for, feel no sense of purpose, and want to extend their childhood.

Funny to think that China was reforged under communist ideals only 50 years ago, and that the hatred of the poor rural folk for the wealthy, corrupt royals and warlords was strong enough to unite allow the country to expel the Japanese, the British, and the KMT.

It's my view that the standard of living for the poor and lower classes has improved enough that there would not be enough hatred to fuel a revolution. Disgust and indignation, maybe, but it seems like a quaint notion that a leader could unite peasants and farmworkers, outfit them with weapons and train well enough to fight against the PLA and its allies.

Anyone from China/living in China travel to any rural areas and have any insights they're willing to share?

a. Only 50 years ago? The Japanese surrender was 70 years ago, and the civil war between the PLA and the KMT was all over but the shouting 65 years ago. b. The British? The corrupt royals? The royalty was gone except from the puppet state in Manchuria well before that. c. The expulsion of the Japanese had a good deal to do with the Japanese losing a war to certain Western powers, not to mention, in at the end, the USSR. d. It is not at all clear to me (I am no historian) that the revolution per se would have sufficed without the losses suffered from 1938-1945.

You're right - for some reason I thought we were still in the year 2000. The main brunt of the revolution occurred 70-80 years ago from 1930-1945.

I also agree that the huge macroeconomic instability of WWII was helpful in allowing the communist party to organize a successful campaign as the KMT had to deal with multiple enemies on multiple fronts, and the communists were also receiving aid from the US to fight the Japanese post Pearl Harbor.

I think we would need to see another period of large-scale war in order to see any kind of revolution in China.

It really only takes a single spark and semi-charismatic leadership to start a revolution if there is widespread hostility to the ruling party. The Taiping nearly overthrew the Qing dynasty, and they were led by a deranged religious fanatic who had a breakdown after failing repeatedly to get into civil service and claimed to be the second coming of Jesus. This came at a time when the expansion and prosperity of the Qianlong emperor was well in the rear-view, and population pressures, corruption, monetary shifts (the massive influx of Spanish silver in exchange for tea, silk, china, etc, was replaced by opium, which threw off the rates of exchange between gold, silver and cash) and other factors were resulting in a real decline in standard of living.

Today, any rebellion would probably need to involve a dissatisfied faction of the PLA, because China is so disarmed - the Communists arose at a time when the supply of firearms within China was probably at it its all-time high, between the decades of warlord control, the war with Japan, and military aid arriving from all sides in WW2. And quite frankly, the KMT armies were not particularly professional or formidable adversaries, compared even with the rank-and-file of the PLA today.

A rebellion can take more peaceful forms. In the United States, we have the opportunity to change the government entirely every six years (House, President, and Senate).

China's single-party system is, of course, different on the surface, but competing factions within the party provide the opportunity for change.

Today's Chinese Communist Party's policies are substantially different from those of Mao. History won't end, even if outright violence is tempered.

Look what happened when one upset street vendor in Tunisia self imolated (hint: the beginning of the entire Arab Spring). Mohamed Bouazizi might not have realized it, but his actions, even if fatal to himself, changed the entire course of history in the middle east.

With the advent of consumerism, high-tech mass surveillance, and control of mass communication channels I think China has reached what political scientists refer to as "the end of history". Meaning that society will stay stable and no revolutions will be possible. At least for a few hundred years.

Agree. What's interesting is the number of comments around here expecting the sky to fall.

At least my grandparents-in-law, who are retired and live at a farm, don't seem to particularly care. They have a comfortable amount of wealth nowadays and are living decently.

I had trouble understanding this title, and I realized it's because I speak Chinese. "Yuan" doesn't sound anything like one. it's more like "you" + "an"

Even in English it's a serious stretch. I just checked my /usr/share/dict/words for everything starting with "y" and nothing else that uses a Y for a W sound is leaping out at me.

> I just checked my /usr/share/dict/words for everything starting with "y"

If they ever find a way of converting nerd cred into dollars, you'll be in a very good position.

I've known that for about 25 years.

I was told in China it was pronounced "wahn", so the title makes sense to me.

Eh, thats simply wrong though. Maybe it'd sound like that with a thick accent/someone who doesn't speaks putonghua well...

Either that or you're thinking of 万 / wan / 10,000

It's more like yü-an actually (similar to how "u" is pronounced in French): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zh-yu%C3%A1n.ogg

Just in case you wonder how to pronounce the Chinese word 'fuerdai', it sounds like 'foo-earl-die', which literally means 'rich second generation'

Uhhh... I think Foo Arr Die is a more accurate pronunciation, no?

No, it has 'er' instead of 'ar' sound. In fact, 'err' is a better word than 'earl'

In Standard Mandarin pronunciation, er is definitely pronounced like "arr". If you don't believe me, listen to the pronunciation given by Google Translate.

https://translate.google.com/#zh-CN/en/%E4%BA%8C

There might be some regional accents which pronounce it more like "err", but "arr" is the standard pronunciation.

I agree the google translate link above pronounces this character very close to 'Arr', however do note the Pinyin (Chinese phonetic system), 'Er' starts with 'E'.

Just for the sake of discussion, here is character that starts with 'A'. See if you feel the difference.

https://translate.google.com/#zh-CN/en/%E5%95%8A

You two probably speak with different accents. In Beijing accent, Foo Arr Die sounds pretty accurate. Arr like a pirate would say it.

This reminds me a bit of Born Rich, the documentary by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o46HH-TfNY

It seems to me that, while wealthy, these fuerdai kids are uncomfortable bordering on neurotic. They're mainly notable because of their connection to their parents, and anything that they do accomplish is suspect because they never know if they got (hired|admitted|published|married) because someone was trying to curry favor with their folks. Attempts to branch out, to find wealth and power on their own, are not usually successful, especially when compared to their parents[0]. Their whole identity seems to be formed around "being wealthy", yet that wealth is based on things that they have little control over.

Thus the concern that at some point the money's going to stop flowing, whether because their parents fall out of favor with the government, or because a popular uprising takes place. They talk about emigrating to the US[1], or how philanthropy is really just a way of ensuring social stability.

In contrast, first generation rich people[2] seem to talk as if business were interesting (if not downright fun), and only discuss emigrating as some sort of inside joke whenever Obama wins an election.

---

0. Although maybe that's because they're starting fashion lines, concierge agencies, or magazines, while their parents run toothpaste conglomerates or shoe manufacturers. Missing opportunities because they're not sufficiently exciting, and then rushing off to compete in already crowded (but sexy!) businesses seems to be universal.

1. I thought that Britain was supposed to be the top destination for fleeing oligarchs and their scions? Is there like a Yelp for billionaires? Maybe Berezovsky left a bad review?

2. Jim Clark from that Michael Lewis book springs to mind, or any character meant to represent capitalism from Ayn Rand.

"You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard."

I wonder how they can allow themselves to be rich if they don't work?

That's a bit out of context. The full quote radically changes the meaning:

"There are two groups of poor people. One is, you don’t work hard. You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard. Second is, you work hard but can’t succeed. I think we should help the second group of people."

Which is still ridiculous because the Chinese are the hardest working people I've ever seen. I would assume she and her friends are by far the least hard working demographic in China. It's a just world fallacy if anything.

A sixth of the world's population lives in China. Not every one is hard working.

By hard working Chinese people, are you talking about immigrant Chinese workers or Chinese people in China? You could easily make the argument that migrant workers are historically a hard working demographic, but I don't think the same could be argued for the world's most populous country.

It's a selection bias, because the lazy and stupid ones don't qualify for economic immigration, and there is no easy way to illegally cross the pacific ocean.

I liked her next line:

There’s a saying, jiu ji bu jiu pin—‘We’ll help you if you have an emergency, but we cannot help you if you’re poor.’

Which is something I think about every time there's a global appeal after an earthquake or tidal wave, yet that contrasts with general indifference or outright hostility to helping with general poverty.

Just need to figure out how to pronounce that phrase correctly so I can drop it into conversation.

Insurance vs charity

Sounds something like "geeyo gee, boo geeyo peen"

More direct translation is "help emergency, not help poor"

I had some trouble finding the characters for that, so in case anyone else is curious -

救急不救贫。

My non-expert analysis, emergency is the characters jiu4ji2. The character jiu4 is save, ji2 is urgent, so save+urgent = emergency. The character bu4 is no, negative, not. The next two characters are jiu4 (save, from before) and pin2 (poor). These don't combine as a single word and are read separately.

With all that in mind, I read it as "It's save+urgent, not save poor". Interesting play on words.

"A survey conducted in 2013 found that 64 percent of Chinese high-net-worth individuals had emigrated or wanted to emigrate overseas" that's a pretty impressive figure (even if an outdated one).

Cool headline, but given the population of China, we're probably talking children of the 0.001%

Wasn't "The 1%" really "The 0.001%" in the US already?

Pretty much. The bottom of the 1% is the elite of people who still actually work for a living, such as lawyers, dentists, and doctors.

And software engineers. :)

1% in terms of income, or in terms of wealth?

A low-to-mid 6 figures household income? Definitely possible. 8 million net worth? You're gonna have to be a rather.. senior software engineer.

Or picked the right startup to work for.

I've heard numbers for the top 1% in wealth for Americans being more like $14M. At any rate, most doctors and lawyers I know get there by saving their 1% incomes, which software engineers can also do (although I think it's easier for a lawyer/doctor to get north of $300K than it is for a software engineer, excluding stock)

And speaking of stock... you can get lucky that way, although you still need to save / diversify!

This is why wealth is a better measure than income in terms of inequality.

It'd also help if people's first homes to own weren't counted, too. You'd see a real disparity.

Yu must be the new alias for milli

"The top 1% of Chinese families hold an average of $1.6 million in assets ... an annual income of $91,639 puts you in the top 1% in China"

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/09/23/what-percent-a...

Sounds like a Brave New World kind of hell

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