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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not faulting the selfish position, simply pointing out the game is rigged for everyone except outliers (like yourself or the ultra wealthy). These are just facts, not feelings, when you review the data about who has sufficient cashflow for inflows into investments during accumulation phases as well as their current and potential future investment exposure to these asset classes.

Congrats on the luck (no snark, honestly). But let us not extrapolate luck and personal anecdotes to solutions for systems. "In God We Trust, all others must bring data", working backwards from first principles, etc.

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The fact that the wealthiest 10% own 90% of stocks does not mean the game is rigged. (I mean, that's sort of like saying the game is rigged because the rich people have all the money.) Anyone can purchase stocks and the SEC works hard to make sure that all market actors have access to the same information. Stocks are one of the least rigged games! Long success in stocks does require some knowledge about picking a company and some discipline, but so do lots of things.

Unless maybe "the game" is meaning a broader economic "game", which is (apparently) rigged because some people are (way) richer than others? You'd expect something like 80/20 just from a Pareto distribution, which if I understood the paper correctly, generally occurs whenever people have free choice. I guess one could required "not rigged" to provide equal outcomes, but since people have unequal ability, equal outcomes seems "rigged" to me, just in the other direction, of pulling down the highly skilled.

They aren't facts. The number of millionaires in the U.S. has exploded. Many are benefiting from the markets. It's not luck.

The fact that many would rather spend than save does not change that these opportunities are for everyone. The best selling car in America is the F-150 which is quite expensive...

> They aren't facts. The number of millionaires in the U.S. has exploded. Many are benefiting from the markets. It's not luck.

Are you sure it's not luck?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized")

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-... | Ref: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ("Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure")

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i... ("Analysis: If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it")

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-you-realize-how-much-... ("When you realize how much luck goes into investing, you might change your methods")

Millionaire is a fairly trivial threshold these days. Social security is now paying some people 54k/year inflation adjusted which would take well over 1 million to safely generate.

A couple living on social security + 2 million in assets may be financially secure but they are still middle class.

> The best selling car in America is the F-150

To be fair, F-150 and other pickup truck sales figures are buoyed by fleet purchases. The better figure to cite may be that the average new car transaction is now north of $48k; ten years ago, it was around $30k, and this rise has beaten general inflation.

Do you have any stats that show that pickup truck sales are bolstered more by fleet purchases than other categories such as sedans and economy cars, both of which are also purchased widely for various fleets?

I did a bit of research, and this is what I found:

This article says about 20% of vehicles sales are to fleets. It says vans are the most popular fleet vehicles. It syas "light trucks" (which includes vans) outpace cars in fleet registrations at 22.5% vs 17.3%. https://www.autoserviceworld.com/fleet-registrations-continu...

Based on that data, I see strong evidence that the F150 is not boosted over other types of vehicles. I certainly found nothing to support the idea that it is, and if it is, it does not seem to be a strongly dominant consideration.

Do you think all prima facie economic problems can be resolved down to problems generally of individual responsibility/spending choices like this? Or just this one? Does the prosperity of some always assert the culpability of the rest with regards to their own poverty? Is the measure of person always relative like this?

What does it mean to you to live in world with other people in general? Are we all fundamentally competitors like this? Winners and losers in a game of skill (and definitely not of chance)? Does the existence of losers reinforce the necessity or merit of the game, of the structure in question? Or are we trying to make everyone winners, trying to teach them to get it together enough to not buy all their flashy cars and such?

No I don't, but I do think in an ideal world it would. Not everyone wants to build wealth nor should they be compelled to. A society that gives people the options to do what they want (in the sense of building wealth vs spending it) would be ideal in my opinion.

> But let us not extrapolate luck and personal anecdotes to solutions for systems

We can certainly extrapolate if we look at the last 13-14 years.

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