Hacker News Reader

Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

Fun list, but it is pretty impossible to compare riches across history. Augustus personally owned Egypt, the breadbasket of the Mediterranean at that time. How to you even assign a dollar amount on that? How do you compare the purchasing power over time, when some valuables like gold or salt have become much more abundant, and other things like slaves cannot legally be traded anymore?

View on HN

Even the ownership is a very relative term. Once I meet a homeless man who owned the whole universe, but the liquidity if this asset was nearly 0 as his ownership wasn't recognized by anyone.

Then you've got people like Joshua Norton who fall somewhere in between:

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

And, of course, when some things we now take for granted wouldn't simply not have been available to even the richest of people. Say, air travel.

Air travel is a luxury compared to the availability of antibiotics, and not getting plague.

Plague like epidemics are coming back due to the anti-vax movement. Fully preventable too.

Off topic much?

No. Parent talking about how they didn't have plagues. Just a note that we're moving back in that direction.

Nobody has ever been vaccinated against plague in developed countries (where the antivax are an issue) and plague hasn't been eradicated through vaccination but prophylaxis. So the gp is both off topic and factually wrong.

Plague-like epidemics.

Please: plague epidemics were massive outbreaks that lasted a somewhat short amount of time. No diseases of this kind had ever been prevented by vaccination (you just don't have time to develop/distribute a vaccine, think Ebola last time).

Vaccines aren't made for epidemics: they are for _endemic_ diseases, and especially the ones which target children. Vaccines are good for things like polio, smallpox and Measles. But plague, Cholera, SARS, etc. are delt with emergency measures: quarantine, not vaccines.

The problem (and there is indeed a problem) with antivaxs, is child mortality, not «plague-like epidemics».

Antibiotics I believe would best be valued as "magic/miracle" in the distant past.

Comparing riches across history is precisely what Branko Mlianovic did: The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality

Really clever stuff: looking at the amount of labor one could buy, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047T869M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Maybe a good KPI is:

What’s the share of people living that work for you?

That ignores the productivity of these people. Generally speaking the BBC list seems to be quite silly because of this fact.

Productivity could be treated as constant, every 10 yrs or so? Maybe even 100 yrs in earlier times

Was Crassus not the wealthiest Roman ever?

depending on how you count, likely yes: as far as private property accrued trough commerce he would.

the issue is figure of power in history accumulated wealth based on their domains, so while their treasure was a separate entity from their national treasure, the lines get progressively blurred as the political structure gets more totalitarian and the difference between state and dominion vanishes.

And Truman didn't have a penny to his name though headed the US at the top of its might and unleashed more firepower on its ennemies than any army in history. It doesn't mean much.

Wasn’t Truman the reason that US presidents received a pension after leaving office?

That was Grant. Grant finished his memoirs on his deathbed so that his widow would be provided for by money from their sale. He was also a damn good writer and Mark Twain published it which didn't hurt.

While Grant was financially troubled, the pension wasn't passed until Truman was destitute in 1958.

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

This brings up a question: does Trump own the American Treasury? I see the PM of my country at Starbucks sometimes and he looks like any other office drone but he makes billion euro decisions every day.

> does Trump own the American Treasury?

Depends on what you mean by "own". I would use "able to decide how it is used". So I would say that Mark Zuckerberg "owns" Facebook because he has a controlling interest (although he does not own 100% of the stock). I would say that Donald Trump does not "own" the US Treasury because our form of government contains checks and balances.

Still not applicable to Trump because the U.S. Congress has power of the purse, not the President.

Not true, the president can declare an 'emergency' and circumvent Congress.

Referring to no specific case in particular: that is not a circumvention but an application of the authority that Congress delegated to the President in the National Emergencies Act.

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

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/circumvent

> does Trump own the American Treasury

No, Congress controls that, and they're elected by the American people, who ultimately own it.

Here's a more interesting example: https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en-gb/resources/faqs/

> The Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch 'in right of The Crown', that is, it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by virtue of their accession to the throne. But it is not the private property of the monarch - it cannot be sold by the monarch, nor do revenues from it belong to the monarch.

> No, Congress controls that, and they're elected by the American people, who ultimately own it.

Trump is also elected by the American people, though, right?

Trick question: he's elected by the Electoral College. Which is why he's president despite recieving fewer votes than the other candidate, because it's not a direct election but a delegate system.

For those haven't heard, there are plans underway to change that, too. Check out the National Popular Vote movement:

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

They're more than halfway there. I'm all in favor of the movement, and am holding out hope we'll see it click into place in the next decade or so.

FWIW, I am happily planning to expend my 3500 magic internet points promoting unions, worker's rights, and democracy in the strongly antidemocratic USA. In fact, I am looking forward to it.

You can't use HN primarily for political and ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The reason is that it destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what this site exists for.

We've warned you about this numerous times already. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep doing this we're going to have to.

I sincerely wish the site admins were as fastidious at minimizing ideology when it's pro-capitalist, but I also understand that this site functions largely as a promotional vehicle for a venture capital fund; it's never wise to bite the hand that feeds one.

Those are cheap and easy shots to take, with no burden of proof. But you actually don't know how hard we work for those things not to be true. Nor does it change the rules or the request that you abide by them.

So is the winner of American Idol, that doesn't mean he/she own the treasure either.

States elect the president. The people vote on the electors who represent their state in the electoral college.

No?

I mean, there are countries where the President personally controls the Treasury, and you can usually spot them by the enourmous statutes and portraits of the Leader.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com