Mark Twain’s Get-Rich-Quick Schemes | Hacker News Reader

Mark Twain’s Get-Rich-Quick Schemes

theparisreview.org

199 pointssamclemens82 comments

So it says $450k then is equivalent to about $11M now, a multiple of about 24. So scaling up.. the coal miner's daily pay was about $36 in today's money and monthly rent about $144. A 3 bed NYC apartment, on the other hand, was about $1920 in today's money. Seems the gap between poor and the 'typical' rich has come down a lot, even if it doesn't feel like it.

  Seems the gap between poor and 'typical' rich has come down a lot

How do you figure? Back then you could rent a 3bed in NYC for $2000 (in todays dollars). That actual cost for a 3bed in NYC is probably closer to 4k or 5k, as I think a 2bed will usually run you about 3.5k p/m.

So basically the only thing that can be gleaned is that property prices have gone up across the board, unlinked to inflation.

EDIT: the actual cost for a 2 bed is apparently more like $4.1k in NYC. So a 3bed is probably around $5-6k [1].

[1] http://www.nyhabitat.com/new-york-price.html

I'm currently in a 4bd in the 2700 range

Sounds like rent control

Not sure, depends on neighborhood but definitely findable.

My point is that rent control doesn’t reflect inflation.

you can get pretty far away from the crazy prices and still be in NYC, with all the privilege of paying a municipal income tax.

Not sure how your anecdote is relevant to averages.

The article isn't making a claim about averages. It's saying you could rent - possible the average was higher.

Average is irrelevant anyway, since that includes extremely expensive apartments nobody needs.

  extremely expensive apartments nobody needs

Apartments nobody needs but that some people can afford. Which to me says the gap has become wider, not smaller.

I think at some point in this conversation everyone started to talk about different things.

Not to mention that most 2 bed apartments in NYC in that kind of price range are actually a 1 bedroom that's been converted. I've even seen one bedrooms made into 3 bedrooms plenty of times.

Not to mention the quality of life of the poor now, vs even the 1980s, let alone 1880s, has significantly improved. The poor didn't have smartphones, flat screen TVs, and broadband internet plus quality/variety of food.

In the rush to close a largely abstract gap (as it is by nature entirely relative to some previous, also unique, point in history) I worry we risk losing touch with the practical day-to-day gains/costs. Especially as the controls often end up pushing down on the work class rather than the intended targets at the top. Such as shifting operations and taxable revenue overseas.

Not to mention how individual morality is always pinned to it when it's often the side effect of much higher level systems (the rise of globalism [1], regulatory-heavy states vs tax shelters dynamic [2], growth of the financial industry [3], etc, etc). Then "fixing" becomes a vindictive pursuit rather than for the benefit of everyone.

Quality of life of the general population should be the primary measure in this conversation. Merely focusing on a single metric, such as closing some gap between two relative ends of a spectrum, could very easily lead to bad policy making that does little to help those on the other end.

[1] https://news2-images.vice.com//uploads/2016/11/chart-41.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/R6SWilB.png

[3] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/financial_servic...

Are iphones, TVs, and internet the measure of "quality of life" we want to settle on?

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

— Andy Warhol

> Not to mention the quality of life of the poor now, vs even the 1980s, let alone 1880s, has significantly improved. The poor didn't have smartphones, flat screen TVs, and broadband internet plus quality/variety of food

It's not about gadgets (because technology advancements made them cheaper over time), the difference between poverty and wealthy is about salary and opportunities.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041758

> Being poor is always being under constant stress and worry. A worry those who are not poor will never understand.

Quality of food?

Poor areas are often surrounded by convenience stores and gas marts as their "grocer options". Not to mention, the increase in salt, sugar, and preseratives (as well as decrease in soil quality!) going into food products.

A lot of former addicts often reminensce about their addiction days. Exposure to such a large maximum of happiness recalibrates life so that everything becomes dull. Even if quality of increase in absolute terms, if the relative difference increases then the net effect is feeling poorer.

In today's networked world perhaps this is the reason a lot of people feel dumb or not wealthy, it's just too easy to compare. For most people, society is the calibrating factor as most people do not have the luxury of having enough abundance to go through sufficient mid life crisis' to formulate a personal model of quality and individual agency.

Life primarily is about A reason to live once you escape the survival scripts.

Inflation is a funny beast. The measure of inflation is relative to a weighted index, the composition of which and weights thereof constantly changing over time. In fact, the relative price movements require changing weights, just like how index funds have to change stock allocations based on price movements. At any point in time, prices for some things are moving downwards and prices for other things are moving upward, making it entirely possible to game the overall number by deliberately changing weights. It is the literal definition of a moving baseline.

Compared to 2-3 years ago, many inflation measures can look or feel accurate, but go more than 30 and they are downright deceptive, and impossible to glean any meaningful insight. Even items that sound the same ("Houses") can be monstruously different (No indoor plumbing, no electricity, slavery for maintenance, etc.). How can you really compare today to Mark Twain's day when the shared subset of actually comparable items between our inflation index and his index likely contains no more than apples and tomatoes?

But then and now people had a salary and paid for a roof over their heads. Which is what the GP is comparing.

I like the nuance you add but I don't think it applies well to the GP's comment.

Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century goes into this.

Wealth inequality was much greater in the 19th century in the old world and the new world, but we are getting back to that point.

Lovely article. Best piece imho:

>And Twain wasn’t born “around the year 1835,” but during it—a strategic decision of the utmost significance, suggesting an alert and eager business mind operating even in utero.

The following line (in the next paragraph) is good too :

"Unfortunately, Twain was not so astute in his choice of parents."

I expected discussion of his investment in a typesetting machine. They have one in the Mark Twain museum in Hartford. Its a big machine:

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

"The Paige Compositor typesetting machine that drove the family to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing them to leave their Hartford home."

http://www.marktwainhouse.org/museum/our_collection.php

Seriously, how could they not mention this? The headline really has nothing to do with the article...

From TFA:

Excerpted from How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain by Alan Pell Crawford. Copyright © (2017) by Alan Pell Crawford. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Nice article, but what do the title and text have to do with each other?

Spending ~30+ years learning to write and sell books doesn't look like a Get-Rich-Quick scheme to me. His father also bought land so that his future generations could become rich. That's not quick either.

I had the same thought. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t expect it to turn into stories of crazy business ventures.

It seems even The Paris Review is not immune from clickbait headlines.

We can change the title but someone needs to suggest a better one, as I can't think of one.

A good title is accurate and neutral (which doesn't necessarily mean boring) and ideally uses representative language from the article.

Regarding the point about his good fortune of being born in 1835, I wonder what the date is for new tech billionaire CEOs. The article made me wonder if we are in our own little gilded age now.

Mark Zuckerberg: 1984

Larry Page: 1973

Sergey Brin: 1973

Elon Musk: 1971

Michael Dell: 1965

Jeff Bezos: 1964

Jack Ma: 1964

Masayoshi Son: 1957

Steven Ballmer: 1956

Bill Gates: 1955

Steve Jobs: 1955

Paul Allen: 1953

Larry Ellison: 1944

The median of this list (which I compiled with no particular methodology or criteria) is 1964. The mean is 1962.

1993. I know because that's the year I was born in! Lol

Most people take the better part of their lives to get rich. Thus if you only examine people who are alive you will naturally only find people who are quite old.

Maybe you're already aware of this but being in a gilded age would not be a good thing. The gilded age described a society where serious problems were masked by a thin veneer of gold.

maybe OP meant the greek Golden Age, rather than Twain's Gilded Age.

I've never read the book, but am aware it is a satire. Given your description, I think my word choice turned out to be apropos. Though perhaps "thin veneer of gold" should be modernized to "tacky stucco facade" or "parallax hero background."

Have you looked at photos of anything owned by Trump lately.

This is part of Malcolm Gladwell's thesis in Outliers, are you sure this is your idea?

Sadly, this Gilded Age won't end with the government breaking up all the tech giants, only continuously enabling them.

Mark Twain's financial struggles and goals were never framed or discussed in my American school education. Wonder what the children of our poorest families would aspire to given the truth of business? God forbid they try to emulate Mark Twain's path.

There seems to be an error: "The family’s annual food bill was $80 a month." For a person earning $1.50 per day, that would have been a whopping monthly food bill.

Historically, the price of food was much higher than it is now. Thank our farmers for operating more efficient year after year.

https://mjperry.blogspot.nl/2010/07/as-share-of-income-ameri...

You are right that modern technology has figured out how to turn energy into soil (way oversimplified!), and that probably 80% of the nitrogen in the bodies of any of us reading this came from the Haber process.

However, it still sounds bizarre that about 90% of their expenses was food.

"Annual" and "a month" are mutually exclusive, so (at least) one in that sentence must be in error.

Might be like the modern SaaS - advertised as a monthly price but you need to pay for the entire year to get that price.

It isn't totally off-base. Even today, the poorest consumers in middle-income countries spend 70-80% of their income on food.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/interactives/how-do-people-in-...

In the UK I'd be suprised if like us most of the income of other poorer people didn't go to landlords/banks through rent/mortgage payment?

It may appear for those in state housing that food is their greatest outlay but that would only be if accommodation provided by welfare wasn't classed as "income".

In Twain's position, and time, would food have certainly been the greatest outlay?

However, it still sounds bizarre that about 90% of their expenses was food.

For two adults and five children? If you're working class, it'll cost a good chunk even today (barring state subsidies).

$1.50 per day is about $45 per month, $80 per month would be 175% of income, so I'd hope that there was a second income earner in the family.

I think the error is the 'per month' part. $80 per year matches pretty well with a daily wage of $1.50, and a monthly housing cost of $6. It would work out to over 20% of their annual budget being allocated to food, which while higher than today, historically seems to match.

> However, it still sounds bizarre that about 90% of their expenses was food.

What do you think being poor is?

As someone who grew up incredibly impoverished it's not bizarre to me. Sounds a bit high, but not terribly so. Rent and food together frequently were more than 100% of my mom's income. We relied heavily on food charity.

Efficiently collecting subsidy.

Nonsense. Here in NL our farmers could operate much more efficiently if it wasn’t for subsidies and the regulations that come with it. It’s not free money, it’s mostly a bandaid for wounds inflicted by the government. How would you feel if the government decided you can’t use your computer anymore and have to back to programming with punchcards? Farmers have to live with rules like this every day.

The whole sentence is illogical as 'annual' implies 'per year'.

I think it means average cost per month.

Basically what they say is that yearly spend was $960, and then present it as per-month-cost, but I can imagine food prices varied quite a bit with the seasons back then, so that true spend at any given month could be quite a bit different from this average.

Then why not say "The family’s food bill was $80 a month."

I would have thought food prices were less seasonally dependent than they are now, on the grounds that out-of-season food simply didn't exist (outside of preserves that were made during a seasonal glut).

An avocado in a British supermarket costs about 90p right now. In season, you can normally get at least three of them for that money. Similar price changes occur for soft fruit etc.

100 years ago (even 50 years ago), your diet, rather than your food budget, would have been the thing that changed with the seasons to match availability.

Someting is off with the food prices. Multiplying the other amounts by 100 yields reasonable comparisons to todays prices:

$485 - mens suit

$8000 - NYC rent

$150/day - working person salary

$600 - rural rent

$35/lb butter

$40/dozen eggs

Edit: Obviously misread the comment I replied to.

You need to buy your butter and eggs elsewhere if you think these are reasonable comparisons to today's prices.

> > Someting is off with the food prices.

That caught my eye too. I'd wager it was closer to $8/month based on the other figures provided.

I know back in the late 70s/early 80s my grandmother talked about buying a sack of flour, bags of beans, tubs of butter, and similar staple foods for pennies each, and that would have been the 1930s.

the article says 80 a year

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

Nice introduction, but I admit I was a bit disappointed to not get even one "get-rich-quick scheme".

Right. Clemens put large sums into a typesetting machine project, but it was a dud.[1] One of the prototype machines still exists.

[1] http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi50.htm

Link doesn't seem correct, but I would guess that a typesetting machine project wouldn't be categorized as a get-rich-quick scheme. This sounds more like a (risky?) business venture.

"to not get even one "get-rich-quick scheme"."

It's stressed in the article that the most important thing to get rich is to be born around 1835, so you could start with this.

No for a couple of reasons. First, the connotation to "get-rich-quick" is that it's a foolish endeavor that usually results in loss. So I was expecting to see some amusing failures. Secondly, being born at the right time isn't "quick", unless you are perhaps speaking of the conception effort involved.

It's an excerpt from a book, as it says at the bottom and I imagine there's also some expectation the reader is generally aware Mark Twain was involved in many unsuccessful business ventures throughout his life. The excerpt provides a bit of context.

Yes, I get that it's an excerpt. But the title misrepresents (in a slightly click-baity way) the article content. That's all I was pointing out.

The title is absolutely click-bait.

„and for settlers trying to persuade Indians to abandon tribal lands that these newcomers wished to inhabit.„

Ah - they persuaded them. What a lovely euphemism.

That's... the joke.

You have taken it out of context, where it was ironically written about the most common uses of revolvers, so it was clearly a joke (the whole article was written in humorous manner, for those who didn't read).

Am I the only one getting fake amazon popups on that page?

I don’t see any.

I get a fake iOS security warning. Quick rich scheme indeed.

There's an add-injection infection going around today. A lot of sites are getting this.

Definitely got something, I thought I was on an adult website for a sec.

is it just me or is the font really hard to read?

It's on the harder side, I also have to say so.

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