Personally, I grew up thinking my grandfather was a great businessman but eventually realized he inherited everything from my grandmother's family.
Don't sell your grandpa so short. I'm sure it took at least some genius to charm your grandma.
All a janitor does is keep a few offices clean. A task generally done by janitors because the people working in those offices implicitly consider cleaning to not be worth their time.
So ... yeah?
I for one would not have a day job and most of my sidehustle market without investors.
For particularly shameful evidence that wealth in the U.S. is not being adequately spread around, see this article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
Are they? Most of the tech industry would stop existing without wealthy people investing in VC funds which in turn invest in the services we use all day.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of every industry would up and vanish without investors.
The wealthy used to hoard their wealth and not spread it around. You know what that was called? Feudalism and/or mercantilism, depending on which part of the system you look at. It has largely been agreed that this was a bad system because people generally do not enjoy being peasants.
Yes, some of it would have been used to fuel Jill's lifestyle and that is useful for everyone who profits from that. But the more of Jack's wealth that Jill uses, the more society benefits from Jack's wealth.
My point is, money hiding under the mattress benefits no-one. As much as you and I both resent Jill for having access to the kind of wealth that we do not, her most biggest possible contribution to society is in fact to decide to spread that wealth.
Heaven forbid she decide to get a real job and keep the wealth stashed away. Then she's contributing no more than the rest of us even though she could.
It is being argued that she is doing something. She is spreading here wealth around.
My counter argument is that she is not infact spreading it around, her investment firm is. She adds no value. Her money does.
Nowhere in the thread does it appear the idea that money should not be circulated.
And yet in the current system, without Jill's collaboration, Sam would have nothing to play with. Ftfy. This indicates a flaw in the system, if someone who isn't a productive member of society in any sense holds the nuts and reaps the lion's share of the profits.
By contrast, and investor's job could be done by an algorithm.
People don't and shouldn't get paid based on some nebulous "how valuable their job is to society". That ignores supply and demand. The fact is we have more people that WANT to work as janitors than their are actual janitorial jobs, and so the wage gets driven. Whereas there are tons of people that need investors and can't find them (as anyone who gets even a modest windfall will quickly find out.)
Or in other words, remove a random janitor from the world and the job will quickly be filled and life will go on. Remove a random investor and entire businesses will disappear/not be founded and the world will be noticeably worse off.
Isn't supply-and-demand nebulous ? It's humans who place values on goods and services, not some law of nature, and they do so according to the weather of their emotions.
Society wouldn't disintegrate without sanitary workers. It would get grosser, with people forced to do their own plumbing and dump their own trash. And even if all sanitary workers united and went on permanent strike, they could be quickly replaced within a few months. As I said, there's no shortage of people able and willing to do that job.
If investors all quit we'd be fucked. Maybe not overnight, but eventually. No new investments. No new businesses. No new jobs. The economy stops growing. People can't buy cars or homes because there is no one to lend them money. Businesses can't get loans to invest in new more efficient processes, or new factories, or whatever. And no one can just come in and replace them, because it requires a lot of money and risk tolerance among other things.
>Isn't supply-and-demand nebulous ? It's humans who place values on goods and services, not some law of nature
Not some law of nature, but economics. The prices of things are not arbitrary, they are set based on how strongly people value that thing divided by the supply. If you have a huge supply of people who can do a job, then the wage isn't going to be very high.
And this is a good thing. It creates incentives for people to take the jobs that are most demanded. There is a big demand for programmers and a short supply. If a sanitary worker can switch to programming, the economy would be a bit more efficient. At the moment we need slightly more programmers and slightly fewer sanitary workers. If everyone did this it would eventually equalize and they would pay the same.
Second thought is in relation to economics. Economics is not some hard science where there can truly be said to be any kind of actual laws discovered. Supply and demand pricing isn't even a firm reality as marketing can vastly dictate market results. We really and truly are in the infancy of understanding economics as it ties so heavily into human psychology and unpredictable events.
Supply and demand are concepts we invented to help us better understand how markets work. They are purely descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive).
They are quite effective at describing important aspects of market dynamics, which is why they are used so much.
Of course, they are far from capturing all of the complexities of human commerce, but they are still incredibly useful.
To change the law of supply and demand would require changing human nature itself, and human nature as it relates to the supply of goods and services, has been constant for all of recorded history.
I once read that if Trump had invested his entire inheritance in an index fund, he would be much richer today.