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Comment by olcor | Hacker News Reader

Living off interest and investments seems to be a recent phenomenon (FIRE). My grandmother ensured that all her well-off children never sat on their laurels and depended solely on passive income even though it could be considerable.

The goal was to keep the mind fresh and running, and to be a productive member of society even if you didn’t exactly need to work. If you had more, you could give back more, but stopping work was always heavily discouraged.

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What do you mean by recent? There's been a whole society of rentiers living solely off investment income in most countries for at least the last 300 years, if not several thousand years. It's extremely well documented, especially in Britain and France since the early 1800's (see Thomas Piketty's work on wealth distribution). The more capital one owns, in general, more income is earned from capital rather than wages. This ratio increases sharply when you look at the top 1% and 0.1% of owners.

> What do you mean by recent?

I think the recent phenomenon is that many folks with moderate levels of income and initial capital have become convinced that they can attain financial freedom. Pickety's research does not support that, in fact, it supports the opposite conclusion: the only way to get wealthy, is to start wealthy.

That's an ironic claim on this platform. If you make $200k/year (normal high tech comp, probably not far from the average person here), save $100k/year and average 6.5% returns over 10 years, you have $1.4M.

You can then on average draw down $63k/year assuming 2% inflation to retain your purchasing power until the end of time. That's very comfortable if you're just willing to not live in the bay area or NYC.

Yet another example of HN bubble thinking that the “normal high tech comp” is anywhere close to $200K a year.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...

I'm drawing a line between "software developer" and "high tech"

By high tech I ideally mean a company building novel and innovative software using new ideas and techniques, but implicitly I pretty much mean FAANG/well resourced startup in a tech hub.

And of course it reflects the "HN bubble", that's literally what I was referencing.

HN ranks in the top 1000 most popular sites in the US. How many of those visitors do you think are building “new and innovative” software?

How many of those who are building software at all do you think are not just building yet another software as a service CRUD app where the founder thinks they need “rockstar ninja” employees who can do leetCode in their sleep?

It's like that quote attributed to Steinbeck - "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Temporarily embarrassed millionaire American here. I can't make universal health care and UBI happen. The next best thing is to acquire wealth so I can some day avoid the drudgery of working life. Maybe.

Works fine if you have a safety net. Doesn’t if you can’t work for whatever reason. Plenty of people in their 50s who have been out of work for months or a year and can’t get a job because no one will hire them.

So you hustle to hopefully crate your own safety net (passive income).

Agreed; I'm not talking about people who don't have a safety net. I'm talking about folk wisdom discouraging people who already have a rather substantial one where they definitely do not need to work. The idea is that sloth is addictive, and often sends the wrong message to the children.

I mean, most early retirees don't aspire to live a life of sloth...

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