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Comment by georgeburdell | Hacker News Reader

He’s the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right? I know a few people who were helped by his book. What is your issue?

His book is largely a work of fiction that happens to have some, frankly rather simple and not that insightful stuff in there.

Good advice can be and is often simple, so that's not really a criticism. My problem is that he then ran with that as a platform to 'Always Be Right' when actually he's not really very qualified or experienced above some real basics.

He's a charlatan cruising on a few good phrases.

His ideas do not scale, so while they may help an individual here and there, they are not helpful for society on the whole. Just my opinion.

Yeah. I understand that for some people, personal wealth is their primary goal, but for me I’d prefer a modest life where those in my community are also able to achieve something similar. I’d rather be a worker in a healthy cooperative than a land owner extracting rents from hard working people earning minimum wage. So books about how to be a land owner seem to me to undermine the society I’d like to see.

He has other books too

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Want_You_to_Be_Rich

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_Touch_(book)

It's a resume that speaks for itself.

"Rich Dad, Poor Dad" good parts can be summarized in one sentence: "Start saving money and invest what you save". The rest of it is just bullshit.

I think it is more, "rich people buy assets and poor people buy liabilities."

Almost every successful real estate person I have contact with thinks very highly of RDPD. If you listen to real estate podcasts, almost everyone recommends RDPD. I agree it is light on many details, but many people seem to get a great deal out of that book.

I learnt two things from that book: passive income is awesome, and spending money on status is rubbish. Those two things seem trivially obvious, however coming from a background of being an employee, I didn’t “know” them.

I credit that book with helping me become financially independent - now living on passive income from a business started 16 years ago.

If you learn one valuable thing from a book, that makes a book valuable, I think.

I don’t swallow some of his modern pondering such as this one on the economy, but neither do I dismiss his opinions just because he wrote a “simple” book. I find his outlook interesting, and I generally agree that something is turning to shit. I don’t think that means avoid all equities, but it does mean selecting equities that don’t crash if the world economy burns.

There is some good material in that book, and it is written in a manner that appeals to a wide audience, so the book does some good, but generally, Kiyosaki is a salesman (of himself as a genius) above all else, and often gives hot takes that will draw attention but have minimal real value behind them.

This claim is typical of a Kiyosaki take: it is extreme, it seems plausible, it draws attention, and it has no real basis in research or reality. I'm not saying the economy won't crash (it might or might not), but Kiyosaki doesn't have specific data backing his thesis.

That book is the perfect stupid people's detector

I'd love to be half as stupid as the majority of landlords I know in my local landlord association who speak highly of RDPD.

do you really want to live as a crappy small landlord collecting rent from strugling young couples? bravo.

It's the American dream. Always has been.

Moral aspersions aside, dumb they aint.

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