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Comment by toolz | Hacker News Reader

You'll just create a self fulfilling prophecy with that mindset. Why would the rich be prosocial if they're treated as antisocial regardless. They might as well behave nefariously and reap those rewards if people are going to treat them as an increased liability.

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Which is exactly what they did, and is how we ended up here.

Yes the game is afoot. Everyone is hedging. I’ve lived in the city for 12 years now and even in that short time I’ve watched it change. The value of these company’s stonks have sky rocketed and that translates in to people on the ground and buildings in the air, in my city as well as others. We know what Amazon did to the Seattle real-estate markets and the culture. Well they (FAANG) did it to NYC too. There were other biggggg problems before but this feels like people are upset, maybe as you point out at the wrong target.

A ridiculous amount of the apartments go unoccupied because they are someone’s pietaterre or just an investment asset. That to me is insulting and am a little bitter that they benefit, cause rent prices to sky rocket and yet don’t even live here and barely visit.

I have watched the culture; food, art and music scene die here as the rich buy convert and transform everything in to their playground; Hudson Yard, and Avenue of the worlds school where tuition for kindergarten is $60,000. The restaurants are worse yet more pretentious and more expensive than ever. Many business store fronts go unoccupied, because the asking price is too high yet the landlords never drop the rent, because they don’t have to. The building is an investment asset. So premium storefront goes unused and papered over for years and in some cases, decades.

The rich maybe aren’t the problem but they seem to be causing a lot of problems...

Edit: to be clear, I live in one of the neighborhoods that is actively being “gentrified” after it was already gentrified in the 90s so I have a front row view to all this development.

> Why would the rich be prosocial if they're treated as antisocial regardless. They might as well behave nefariously and reap those rewards if people are going to treat them as an increased liability.

Because you should do the right thing, even if no one is watching. Even if there's no reward - or even if you lose a reward! That's the basic demand of being a moral human being, so I think it's pretty easy to say "the rich" should be prosocial regardless of how they're regarded.

They won't be seen as anti-social regardless. If they were no longer rich then they would be very differently. Beyond a certain point being rich is itself antisocial die to the societal cost of wealth disparity.

This. The problem is actually the fault of the poor who don’t see how wonderful the rich are. If the plebs were more fulsome with their praise, the pennies would rain down upon them from in high.

"the rich" are not a single entity, nor are "the poor" - there's a wide spectrum of individuals that would do well to be treated as such in each category.

Oh, sorry, I just figured since you can use broad generalizations about the rich and poor, I could too.

faults are attributable to individuals, trends are attributable to groups

One of the problems is that the law doesn't treat them as individuals. Not really. The rich can afford expensive lawyers while the poor are often forced to plead guilty or settle to avoid bankrupting their family. Arguably, this means that among the rich you see a higher proportion of people who have broken the law and were able to "get out of it".

Some would argue that "the rich" are antisocial by definition due to the way accrual of money is often premised on minimizing "labor costs". But even setting that aside, there's plenty of antisocial behavior among the rich and prominent - ranging from Epstein's child sex trafficking to Bezos' union busting. It's not like this view of the rich is wholly fabricated.

In the Epstein case, specifically, it's also important to note how many other rich people associated with him. You may call that unfair guilt by association, but it's certainly not good optics.

If they are inherently nefarious (which I did NOT say) to the point where the only way they'll behave socially is if they're bribed to do so, then they ARE an increased liability.

I don't think that's proven. It may well be that the rich are no different from anybody else (in this case, wealth tax seems the moral choice as the people are no better or worse and you're just taxing the money pile, which is not deserved through increased merit IF the rich are no different)

It may be (theoretically) that the rich are inherently better, smarter, wiser and more moral people than everybody else. This seems testable. Assuming it without evidence seems not a good idea.

If they ain't better, they absolutely are an increased liability. This would imply that people can in some way gain from bad behavior, or otherwise increase their wealth through antisocial means.

I think the possibility of that being true is already proven. We just don't know if it's true for every single rich person.

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